Education Should Begin Early

Although death be far off and a long life be assured, the formation of character should nonetheless begin early, because life must be spent not in learning but in acting. We should therefore be prepared for the actions of life as soon as possible, since we may be compelled to desist from action before we have learned our lesson properly….

It is the nature of everything that comes into being, that while tender it is easily bent and formed, but that, when it has grown hard, it is not easy to alter. Wax, when soft, can be easily fashioned and shaped; when hard it cracks readily. A young plant can be planted, transplanted, pruned, and bent this way or that. When it has become a tree these processes are impossible. New-laid eggs, when placed under a hen, grow warm quickly and produce chickens; when they are old they will not do so. If a rider wish to train a horse, a ploughman an ox, a huntsman a dog or a hawk, a bear-leader a bear for dancing, or an old woman a magpie, a raven, or a crow, to imitate the human voice, they must choose them for the purpose when quite young; otherwise their labor is wasted….

If a man is to become a good writer, painter, tailor, smith, cabinet-maker, or musician, he must apply himself to the art from his early youth, when the imagination is active and the fingers flexible: otherwise he will never produce anything. If piety is to take root in any man’s heart, it must be engrafted while he is still young; if we wish anyone to be virtuous, we must train him in early youth; if we wish him to make great progress in the pursuit of wisdom, we must direct his faculties toward it in infancy, when desire burns, when thought is swift, and when memory is tenacious. “An old man who has still to learn his lessons is a shameful and ridiculous object; training and preparation are for the young, action for the old” (Seneca, Epist. 36).

Jan Steen, The Happy Family, 1668, oil on canvas.

In order that humans may be fashioned to humanity, God has granted them the years of youth, which are unsuitable for everything but education. While the horse, the ox, the elephant, and other beasts, mere animated masses, come to maturity in a few years, the human alone scarcely does so in twenty or thirty. Now, if any imagine that this arises from chance or from some accidental cause or other, he surely betrays his folly. To all other things, forsooth, God has meted out their periods, while in the case of the human alone, the lord of all, he allows them to be fixed by chance! Or are we to suppose that nature finds it easier to complete the formation of humans by slow processes? Nature, who with no trouble can produce vaster bodies in a few months. We can only suppose, therefore, that the creator, of deliberate intent, interposed the delay of youth, in order that our period of training might be longer; and ordained that for some time we should take no part in the action of life, that, for the rest of our lives, and for eternity, we might be the more fitted to do so.

In humans, that alone is lasting which has been imbibed in early youth, as is clear from the same examples. A jar, even though broken, preserves the odor with which it was imbued when new. When a tree is young its branches spread out all round it, and remain in this position for hundreds of years, until it is cut down. Wool is so tenacious of the color with which it is first dyed, that it cannot be bleached. The wooden hoop of a wheel, which has been bent into a curve, will break into a thousand pieces rather than return to straightness. And similarly, in a person, first impressions cling so fast that nothing but a miracle can remove them. It is therefore most prudent that people be shaped to the standard of wisdom in early youth.

Finally, it is most dangerous if a person be not imbued with the cleanly precepts of life from the very cradle. For, when the external senses begin to fulfil their functions, the mind cannot remain at rest, and, if not engaged with what is useful, it occupies itself with the vainest and even with harmful things (a process which is assisted by the evil examples of a corrupt age), while later on, if it wish to unlearn what it has acquired, it finds this impossible or very difficult; as we have already shown. Hence the world is full of enormities which neither the civil magistrates nor the ministers of the church are able to quell, since no serious attention is given to the source from which the evil flows.

If, then, paretns have the welfare of their own children at heart, and if that of the human race be dear to the civil and ecclesiastical guardians of human affairs, let them hasten to make provision for the timely planting, pruning, and watering of the plants of heaven, that these may be prudently formed to make prosperous advances in letters, virtue, and piety.

Source: The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius, trans. Maurice Walter Keatinge (Adam and Charles Black, 1896), 57–60.