two holidays for today

[threeplusfire]

HUNGARY: BUDAPEST SPRING FESTIVAL

The city of Budapest will be bustling today with arts and cultural
events during its annual Spring Festival. It's the city's major arts
festival of the year, and it brings artists and audience members both
from within Hungary and from other countries. For the last ten days
of March, Budapest hosts over 1,000 events in more than 100 venues.
Opera, theater, ballet, poetry, folk music and art, and other events
can be enjoyed along the banks of the Danube.

The official Website of the annual festival.

Take a visual tour of Budapest.
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CZECH REPUBLIC: TEACHER'S DAY

Teachers will be celebrated today throughout the Czech Republic.
This day marks the birth of Jan Amos Komensky, a Moravian education
reformer, said to have been the first person to write an illustrated
textbook for children. (His Visible World of Pictures was published
in 1658 to help teach Latin words.) On this day, children bring
flowers and gifts to their teachers.

The illustrated book was only one of Komensky's revolutionary ideas for teaching.

Komensky is also known by the name John Amos Comenius. He is
sometimes called the Father of Modern Education.

Comments

Comenius

[ansat.livejournal.com]

Interestingly enough, I was reading about this fellow recently. Lubich mentioned him:

The realization that we are all children of the same Father was the inspiration underlying the key idea of Comenius, that great forerunner of modern educational theory: we must "teach everything to everyone."

...

Comenius says "Teach everything to everyone." But in order to do this, one must use -- as he himself said -- the educational norm: do things step by step.

The footnote says:

John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) was born in Moravia in the present-day Czech Republic. He was the first to attempt an organic, systematic presentation of Pedagogy as a science.

Guess that's another one of those synchronicity things...

Re: Comenius

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

So random it's unbelievable. The dorm I'm staying in at Charles University is named after Komenius.