all these things onght to be allowed, nay, when opportunity serves, they ought to be shown them.
5. The fourth, fifth, and sixth years will and ought to be full of labors and architectural efforts; for too much sitting still or slowly walking about on the part of a child is not a good sign; to be always running or doing something is a sure sign of a sound body and vigorous intellect; therefore, whatever attracts their attention, that ought not to be denied, but rather be given them; that which is done should be properly done, and with a view to future usefulness.
6. Children in this maternal school ought also, in their fourth and fifth year, to be exercised in drawing and writing,[1] according as their inclination may be noticed or excited, supplying them with chalk (poorer persons may use a piece of charcoal), with which they may at their will make dots, lines, hooks, or round O’s, of which the method may be easily shown, either as an exercise or amusement. In this way they will accustom the hand to the use of the chalk, and to form letters, and they will understand what a dot is, and what a little line, which will afterwards greatly abridge the labors of the teacher.
7. In this stage dialectics (reasoning), beyond the natural, or such as is obtained in practice, cannot be introduced;[2]
- ↑ Richard Mulcaster said in his Positions (London, 1887), fifty years before: “As judgment by understanding is a rule to the minde to discerne what is honest, seemly and suitable in matters of the mind, so drawing with penne or pencile is an assured rule for the sense to judge by, of the proportion and seemliness of all aspectable thinges.”
- ↑ In this as in most other matters Comenius opposed the practice of the Jesuits and agreed with Plato “that whenever boys taste dialectic for the first time, they pervert it into an amusement, and always employ it for purposes of contradiction, and imitate in their own persons the artifices of those who study refutation,—delighting, like puppies, in pulling and tearing to pieces with logic any one who comes near them,”
