Comenius (1592 – 1670) is the first prominent didactician in Europe. Going back to him may be of help for the bold undertaking of our network as it is mirrored in this symposium. We intend to bring cohesion to the didactic field in a way that respects plurality and is enriched by diversity. The reasons why it may be of help to go back to Comenius are manifold: (1) The European unification process can be linked, in the didactical field, to Comenius’ concept of general education. He defines it as “universal culture” of lifelong learning and schooling. (2) Comenius assumes that the world we live in is an “artificial world”. Only under this condition can man attempt to improve his living situation and to understand learning (formation) as transformation. (3) With his construct that all men and women have to learn everything in a thorough way, omnes omnia omnino , and this all through life (Didactica magna 1657 / 1957; Pampaedia 1960), Comenius has become a trendsetter over the centuries (see e.g. Klafki 1985/1991, 61 ff.). I will sketch Comenius’ didactics and develop a lesson planning scheme which can then be used for a comparison to contemporary didactical schemes. I will do this with respect to Gérard Sensevy’s Joint Action Theory in Didactics (Sensevy 2011), Lothar Klingberg’s dialectical didactics (Klingberg 1987) and “Bildungsgangdidactics”, i.e. didactics focusing on learner development and educational experience (Schenk 2004). (5) Parallel to these four approaches, Klingberg’s dialectics may be of help to cope with a central antinomy in Comenius’ didactics. Comenius defines teaching in analogy to book printing (Didactica magna, Chapt. 32), and at the same time, he identifies emancipation as central objective of education. This antinomy becomes acceptable in a dialectical framing. It is both correct that the teacher leads the class and that the students practice self-regulation. I will try to apply Comenius’ and Klingberg’s didactics to the instructional research from France, Sweden and Germany as it will be presented in the symposium. Methodological problems will be discussed. We do not know in which sense we can learn from history, and we do not know to which extent we may isolate specific elements of the educational practice in the European countries in order to implrmrnz them in other countries, in comparative didactics.

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