Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/461



1. is no one, I imagine, who, after a careful examination of the question, will not perceive how blessed would be the condition of Christian kingdoms and states if they were supplied with schools of the kind that we desire. We must therefore see what is necessary in order that these speculations may not remain speculations, but may be realised in some definite form. Not without reason does John Cæcilius Frey express his surprise and indignation that throughout so many centuries no one has ventured to reform the barbarous customs of our schools and universities.

2. For more than a hundred years much complaint has been made of the unmethodical way in which schools areconducted, but it is only within the last thirty that any serious attempt has been made to find a remedy for this state of things. And with what result? Schools remain exactly as they were. If any scholar, either privately or in school, embarked on a course of study, he found himself a butt for the mockery of the ignorant or the malevolence of the ill-disposed, or finally, being unable to obtain any assistance, found his endeavour too laborious, and gave it up. Thus all efforts have hitherto been in vain.

3. We must therefore seek and find some way by which, with God’s assistance, motive power may be supplied to