John Amos Comenius
Jan Amos Komenský · 1592–1670
Comenius was born on 28 March 1592 in Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He became a minister and later a bishop of the Unity of the Brethren, the Protestant church of the Czech lands.
The religious wars cost him his home and his writings in 1621. In 1627 he led the Brethren into exile, and he spent the rest of his life abroad: in Leszno in Poland, in England, where he advised on public schooling in 1641–42, in Sweden, and at Sárospatak in Hungary from 1650 to 1654. Fire destroyed his house, manuscripts and press at Leszno in 1656, and he settled in Amsterdam, where he died on 15 November 1670.
His school books made him famous across Europe. Janua linguarum reserata (1631) taught Latin through the facts of the real world and was translated into many languages. The Great Didactic, finished around 1631 and printed in 1657, argued for schooling for every child, girls and the poor included, taught first in the mother tongue, in graded steps from the simple to the complex, with understanding before memorizing.
Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), The Visible World in Pictures, was among the first illustrated schoolbooks and was used for more than a century. It gives this campus its motto: the visible world, opened for every child.
He is often called the father of modern education.
Both portraits are illustrations made for this campus (SI-made) after seventeenth-century engravings of Comenius; they are not historical likenesses.