In Parenting School, Comenius compares children with great enthusiasm to "the seeds of God" and "priceless treasures" more precious than gold, silver and jewels, and warns those who bully and regret their children to respect them as they respect God. Comenius also compared children to a mirror, from which people can see modesty, courtesy, kindness, harmony and other Christian qualities. In Comenius' view of children, although he still shows the bondage of religious thought, it is essentially different from the view of children in the Middle Ages. It expresses Comenius' eager desire to give the realization of the new social ideal in the future to a new generation.
Another starting point of Comenius' pre-school education thought is his profound understanding of the importance of early education. Starting from the principle that his education follows nature, he compares children to a bud, a piece of wood or an animal. Anyone who sows seeds in childhood will reap such fruits in old age. To this end, Comenius called on parents to take responsibility for their children's education. Man is more noble than other animals. He can't just pay attention to the maintenance of the body and the decoration of the appearance like an animal, but should pay more attention to the human soul. We should nourish it with education and care for their hearts. Give them comprehensive training including piety, virtue, knowledge and sports, and train them into loyal and intelligent people who can manage their own affairs.
According to Comenius, every family is a mother-child school, and the child's mother is the most important teacher. For the first time, he put forward the important task of preschool education from the perspective of the continuity and stage of universal education and children's psychological development. Parenting school is the first basic stage of his unified school system. Comenius also considers the task of preschool education from the perspective of children's psychological development. He believes that children's development can be divided into four stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence and adolescence. Each period is six years, and each development stage has its own special educational tasks. At the same time, they are also related. Looking at preschool education from the above point of view, he regards laying the foundation for children's physical, moral and intellectual development as the main task of the first stage of education.
In sports, Comenius quoted a writer's advice that "a healthy spirit resides in a healthy body", reminding parents that the most important thing to pay attention to first is to keep their children healthy. Children's health problems should be paid attention to from the fetal period. Comenius particularly emphasized the influence of pregnant women's psychological state on the fetus. If pregnant women do not pay attention to control their emotions and are often in a state of sudden fear, excessive anger or resentment, sadness and other bad emotions, they will give birth to timid, emotional and depressed babies. Seriously, it can even cause stillbirth or extremely weak children. Comenius pays special attention to the importance of exercise and entertainment for children's physical and mental development. Don't let children get used to medication, but let them live a regular life and keep a happy spirit. He quoted several maxims: "A happy mood is half healthy", "Spiritual happiness is the source of human life", and parents should never let their children be unhappy.
Comenius attaches great importance to the moral education of preschool children, because children are not born as calves or Lu, but as rational people. He stressed that it is necessary to lay a foundation for the good character of each of them in the early years of their childhood. People who have not been managed in adulthood will have no virtue in their old age. In the content of moral education, Comenius emphasized that children should learn the basic knowledge about virtue, including temperance, neatness, courtesy, respect for elders, honesty, no harm to others, no jealousy, natural and graceful, and love of labor. Among the above qualities, Comenius pays special attention to the cultivation of good qualities such as thrift. He believes that moderation and frugality are the basis of health and life, as well as all other moral qualities.
Regarding the educational content of preschool children, the most distinctive part of Comenius' educational thought is that he put forward a comprehensive and detailed intellectual education outline for children under six years old for the first time in the history of western preschool education thoughts. This syllabus includes subjects such as nature, optics, astronomy, geography, chronology, history, housework, politics, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, music and language. He emphasized that "the seeds of all knowledge that a person should have in his life journey should be planted on children." Comenius believes that through this kind of enlightenment education, children can lay the most preliminary foundation of various scientific knowledge.
In terms of teaching methods, Comenius starts from his materialistic sense theory, and especially emphasizes that in the process of teaching children initial knowledge, he always relies on children's own personal observation. For example, study optics, observe the moon, color, sky, trees, flowers and plants, look in the mirror and so on. In Comenius' teaching method for children, he also noticed that from near to far, from easy to difficult, and he emphasized step by step.
Comenius also has many valuable opinions on preschool children's games, toys and homework. In the history of western preschool education thought, Comenius was the first educational thinker to demonstrate the above problems from the age characteristics of children. He believes that children are naturally active, and their blood is so strong that they are not allowed to stand still. Therefore, they should not be restricted, but should be stipulated that children often have something to do and keep doing things like ants. He even stipulated such a principle that "whatever children like to play, as long as it doesn't hurt them, they should be allowed to play and be satisfied, and they should not be stopped, because children's inactivity is more harmful to their body and mind than doing nothing." He believes that letting children move freely has three advantages: one is to exercise to improve their health, the other is to use and temper their thoughts, and the third is to practice limbs and facial features to become flexible.
As for the way of activities, Comenius thinks that games are the most suitable way for young children. Because when playing games, people's spirit is focused on something, which will often temper people's ability. In this way, children can be trained in an active life without any difficulty, because nature itself is encouraging them to do things. He called on parents to take active actions to help and guide their children to play games and play games with them. Just as one of the highest consuls in Athens, Tnetistodes (520-449 BC), rode reeds as a horse and son.
Comenius then made detailed and practical suggestions on toys. He thinks that real tools often bring danger to children, so it is necessary to find some toys instead of real tools, such as small iron knives, wood blade, hoes, cars, skateboards, treadmills, buildings and so on. Children can also build small houses with their favorite mud, sawdust, stones or stones, which shows a preliminary construction technology. From Comenius' thoughts about games and their toys, we can classify him as "labor preparation theory" about games. Because the forms and means of many games he described reflect the process and results of narrow labor. We can also see some "energy emission theory" factors, because Comenius emphasized that children need games because energetic children want to emit excess energy. Comenius also proposed to provide some small homework for children's eyes, ears and other senses, believing that these homework will be of great benefit to enhancing their physical and mental strength.
In the history of western preschool education, Comenius also compiled an educational guide "Parenting School" and a textbook "World Map" for preschool children for the first time. About this thought, Comenius made a special exposition in the twenty-eighth chapter of his world famous book "On Great Teaching". Comenius believes that in order to help parents and nannies educate their children effectively, a manual must be written for them, which should include several aspects: (1) the educational responsibilities of parents and nannies; (two) the syllabus of all subjects that children should study; (3) The teaching method mainly points out the most suitable teaching time and the best language and gestures to instill. Comenius' above thought is reflected in his Parenting Classic. Secondly, write a picture book for children and put it directly in their hands. Comenius has realized that in the pre-school stage, the main medium of education should be sensory perception, and vision is the most important kind of feeling, so the images of the most important things in various disciplines should be given to children. Picture arrangement, such as physics, optics, astronomy, geometry, etc. This book should draw mountains, valleys, trees, birds, fish, horses, cows, sheep and people of all ages and heights. In a word, the content in the picture book corresponds to the content of the pan-outline proposed in "Mother and Child School", which can be used as a whole. Comenius not only noticed the role of picture books in developing children's perception, but also attached importance to the development of children's language. He proposed that the names of the objects it represents should be written on the top of each painting, such as "house", "cow", "dog" and "tree". This kind of picture book has three purposes: (1) it can help things leave an impression in their minds; (2) children can form an idea that they can get happiness from books; (3) It can help them learn to read. All the above principles are embodied in Comenius' Illustrated World. After the book was published in 1658, it was quickly translated into European languages, popular for more than 200 years, and educated generations of children. Not only that, but his idea of compiling picture teaching materials according to the characteristics of preschool children also had a great influence. Piaget, Vygotsky and others have regarded the period of intuitive thinking dominated by self-centered language as a period of transition to logical thinking and a period of thinking in images. Therefore, for children, this kind of picture book is helpful to enrich vocabulary, expressive ability, activate thinking activities in images and then help to cultivate logical thinking ability. Nowadays, things that are popular among children in China, such as literacy cards and learning by looking at pictures, actually started with World Pictorial. The reason why the world map and its compilation principles have been concerned for a long time is precisely because it conforms to the characteristics of children's psychological development.