John Amos Comenius

He, he's a tireless creator of worlds.

He's someone who is, uh, fast becoming, um, a, a, a close friend, and he, he's a beautiful man.

Uh, and I, I believe that he has something world-shattering to say.

So then we have, uh, Dr. Zach Stein, who works very closely with Mark, um, as a student of Mark.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you.

Yes, I, I was thinking about the reluctance of your friend to accept the idea of some urgency.

Um, and then you talked about death, which of course is the, the thing that frames our existence and, and tells us that we, we don't have forever to engage in the way we now can with what is.

His chief reliance was on education and improved methods of husbandry, but he resembled Horace Greeley in his hospitality to any project for the public welfare.

One of Hartlib's chief hopes for the regeneration of England, if not of the whole world, rested on the teachings of the educational reformer Comenius, a bishop of the Moravian Brethren.

In sixteen thirty-seven, Comenius, having shown himself rather reluctant to put his most cherished plans before the public, his zealous disciple precipitated matters, and on his own responsibility and unknown to Comenius, issued from his library at Oxford, Preludes to the Endeavors of Comenius.

Besides Hartlib's preface, it contained a treatise by the great educator on a seminary of Christian pansophy, a method of imparting an encyclopedic knowledge of the sciences and arts.

The two friends were followers of the Baconian philosophy.

They were influenced, as many others of the time, by the New Atlantis, which went through ten editions between sixteen twenty-seven and sixteen seventy, and which outlined a plan for an endowed college with thirty-six fellows divided into groups, what would be called today a university of research endowed by the state.

It is not surprising to find Comenius, who in his student days had been under the influence of Alsted, author of an encyclopedia on Baconian lines, speaking in 1638 on the need of a collegiate society for carrying on the educational work that he himself had at heart.

In 1641, Hartlib published a work of fiction in the manner of New Atlantis and dedicated it to the Long Parliament.

I was principal of a girls school in Maynooth for many, many years.

And we had some Italian teachers and some Austrian teachers who came to visit us as part of what was Comenius program then.

And all of the Italian teachers had second jobs.

They were in a teaching profession that was not highly valued in Italy.