Teachers

MOST of the evidence points to the fact that in the seventeenth century the conditions of teaching were unsatisfactory. In his book for children (the Orbis Pictus) Comenius gives a picture of the typical classroom in these words : ‘The master sitteth in a chair. Some of the boys stand and rehearse things committed to memory. Some talk together . . . and are chastised with a ferula and rod’. ¹ The scene is not a disorderly one but the instruments of punishment are shown prominently and the method of teaching through learning by heart and reciting individually must always have put a heavy strain on the powers of concentration of those supposed to be learning. Other illustrations of classrooms from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century give a much worse impression of overcrowded conditions, utter boredom and invariable violence. ² Martin Luther was voicing the opinion of most enlightened men when he attacked teachers as ‘tyrants and jailers who made schools nothing but so many dungeons and hells’ ³ and Comenius adds his testimony that the pupils ‘must have skins of tin to endure the process of education’. ⁴