Excerpts from Pioneers In Understanding Children

Written by Edith E. Nowack Originally published in “The Moravian” on Saturday, September 30, 1950

“One of the by-products of the great religious revival of the eighteenth century… was a new interest in children.

The generally accepted theory up to this time had been that children were ‘miniature adults.’ But now many of the leaders began to see that children needed specific education to prepare them for adult life, and especially training in the knowledge and love of God. Religious work, they saw, should begin in a child’s earliest years. If it was important to save the soul of a man, how much more important it was to save the soul of a child, who would one day be a man!”

“The great forerunner of this movement to improve children’s education was John Amos Comenius. To him, the ultimate end of man is to find eternal happiness with God. All of life, therefore, must be built with this one goal in mind. Christianity is concerned with the whole life, not with just part of it, he believed; and the educational theories and reforms which he introduced stemmed from his desire to see the highest ideals of religious teaching put into practice.

To Comenius the Scriptures were the beginning and end of all learning; his one aim was to know God aright. He longed to see little children trained naturally in the ways of truth. Children are not antagonistic to the truth, Comenius felt; they are actually friends of truth and should be treated as such.

Alive to the needs of children and understanding them as no one had before, Comenius sought to make learning a pleasure. Children, he felt, are quite willing to learn if they are taught in the right way. And so he formulated a method of teaching children which began with the mother and continued with the infant school (kindergarten, as we call it).”

“Zinzendorf is known to students of church history as the founder, generous patron and bishop of the reorganized Moravian Church. To those interested in the religious education of children, however, he is known because his ‘insight into child life and his understanding of the fact, if not the laws, of spiritual growth… are among the most remarkable factors of his busy and useful life.’

And they are more remarkable when one remembers that his work belonged to an age which knew nothing of the scientific theory of learning and development and which had none of the modern interest in child study. Spangenberg mentions that the training of children was a major consideration of Zinzendorf’s from the very first.”

Article researched by Andrew David.