The contribution of Jan Amos Comenius educator for first childhood

Abstract

Educator Jan Amos Comenius was one of the important thinkers who helped to modify this childhood image by giving him a dedicated look. Opposing the educational practices present in his time, but following the methodical thought of modern science, proposed a didactic that had as its central objective to form the good Christian, to have true faith in God, to practice virtuous actions and to prepare for another life, extending this goal to all: the poor, the rich, the disabled and women. This work reconstructs the characteristics of the early Comic look for early childhood, in an attempt to observe the changes in his thinking about this stage of life in three of his works. As an example of these modifica-tions, we point here the division of early childhood into four stages in the Didna Magna, and six stages in the Pampaedia, written about twenty years later. As the first is the most widely circulated text in Brazil among researchers in the History of Education and Didac-tics, this "spring phase" for Comenius tends to be understood without the necessary deep-ening coming from the analysis of the changes of the author's thought throughout the life. The dialogue between these two texts is confronted with a third, intermediate work, which was recently translated into Portuguese (2011), the School of Childhood. Noting the im-portant differences between the ages, Comenius made original proposals for the pedagogi-cal approach, emphasizing the need for attention to children between zero and six years, much greater than that can give a teacher with a large group of children. In addition, he showed that each age in this period requires specific care that the family must provide to adequately prepare children before sending them to school. To analyze the three works mentioned above, this work starts from a methodological inspiration in the work of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg (1989, 2001, 2006).