PESTALOZZI, JOHANN HEINRICH. – Educationalist and one of the pioneers of modern education, born in Zurich on 12 January 1746 to a family originally from Chiavenna, which had embraced the “Reformation” and emigrated to Switzerland in the sixteenth century; died on 17 February 1827 at Neuhof.
I. LIFE
At first he was drawn to the vocation of “pastor”; but, having foundered at his first sermon and, moreover, being all fired by social reforms through reading Rousseau’s Émile and The Social Contract, he joined the “Helvetic Society of Patriots,” revolutionary in character and humanitarian in purpose. After the society was dissolved by the authorities and a more deliberate conception of social renewal had taken shape in him, he moved with his wife, his faithful collaborator, to Neuhof (1769), bought a farm there, and opened a school for poor and abandoned children, where they were to learn not only to read, write, and perform the most elementary calculations, but also agricultural work, household crafts, and cotton spinning (1774). When financial disasters forced the school to close (1779), P. entered a period of retirement, during which he wrote Abendstunde eines Einsiedlers (1780), a series of 180 aphorisms in which the fundamental theme of his entire life frequently recurs: to extend instruction and education to everyone, including the poorest and most wretched; to derive their model from family education; and to aim at making each person happy within its sphere and in every respect. Indeed, from the family he derived his conception of religion itself: “God, father of humanity, man, son of the divinity; here is the pure substance of faith... The feeling of a father, the feeling of a son; this blessing of the home, O man, is the consequence of your faith.” These fundamental ideas received a clearer development in the domestic novel Lienhart und Gertrud (4 vols., 1781–87; newly reworked [2 vols., 1790–92]), which made him famous and esteemed and brought him patrons, as well as extensive and distinguished acquaintances, including princes and sovereigns. In it P. seeks to show how a wayward village can be regenerated by the united and converging efforts of a good “pastor,” an able magistrate, an earnest teacher, and above all by the work of Gertrude, an exemplary wife, a perfect mother, and the soul of every undertaking. Particularly in Book III, P. sets out what amounts to a manual of social pedagogy on the theme that the child must be educated rather than instructed, and prepared for economic life rather than stuffed with vocabulary and grammatical constructions. To give greater prominence to his pedagogical aims, P. added the popular work Das Volksbuch Christoph und Else (1781), in which a married couple, reading Lienhart und Gertrud, comment on its various chapters, bringing out their high educational value; and, prompted by the outbreak of the French Revolution, the speculative work Nachforschungen über den Gang der Natur in der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechtes (1797), a rather obscure and arid book, at times contradictory because of its author’s limited speculative and philosophical mentality. In it humanity’s transition from the innocent state of nature to the legalistic state of society is outlined, and emphasis is placed on the human nature’s need to perfect itself, so as not to be obstructed and corrupted by external influences, by developing natural religion within itself and entrusting itself to the moral feeling that naturally springs from II. The book Figuren zu meinem ABC-Buch (1797) aims to expound these theories in a series of concise fables.In 1798 P. returned, but better equipped, to his mission as a teacher and agreed to open a school for orphans at Stanz, where he could demonstrate “through his experiment that public education must imitate domestic education.” And P. lived domestically among his eighty pupils, like an attentive and loving father among his children. But after eight months the new Austro-Russian invasion turned the orphanage into a military hospital, and the school was closed. P. opened another school in the castle of Burgdorf; it was not to be merely a boarding school, however, but also a teacher-training school, in which the best pupils would practise teaching under the master’s guidance and in the light of his principles. There he was able to gather the first insights into his teaching method and to work out his methodological doctrine fully, which he sought to express in Die Methode (1800), Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt (1801), ABC der Anschauung (1803), and Buch der Mutter (1803). Although the school won applause and aroused admiration, it had to close after three years because of discord among the teachers. P. then agreed to cooperate with E. Fellenberg at the school that the latter had opened at Münchenbuchsee, and brought with him many of his pupils from Burgdorf; but the characters of the two directors were not suited to mutual understanding. P. therefore withdrew and agreed to open a new school at Yverdun (Iferten), in the castle offered to him by the Regency (1805). For two decades Yverdun became Europe’s finest and most highly regarded educational institution; Pestalozzian methods and the new principles were applied there in full, with marvelous developments and results that spread its fame: able teachers, various types of school, from elementary schools to those of a university character, a family spirit, and the bond of love. Among those who took on the appearance of celebrated figures were F. Fichte, J. F. Herbart, Fr. Fröbel, and G. Capponi; the Prussian government sent a group of young men there to study, while other governments appointed special commissions to go there and learn the new teaching method.
Nevertheless, the seeds of discord gradually undermined the institution’s existence, and Yverdun too was closed (1815). P. then withdrew to a solitary life at Neuhof and resumed writing, both to clarify his thought ever more fully and to defend himself against the accusations and slanders of his opponents. Thus we have two further works that constitute a kind of autobiography: Schwanengesang (1826) and Meine Lebensschicksale (1826).
II. FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS
Pestalozzian work and doctrine are highly complex in their development, unsystematic, and not always clear; nevertheless, they are rich in valuable insights. The P. in fact sought to discover the constant directives of human psychic nature, in order to “psychologize” instruction and education, replacing traditional artificial pedantry with other rules founded on the psychology of the learner. The foundation, therefore, of the whole pedagogical art is human nature, endowed with three kinds of powers: moral, intellectual, and physical, or, as the P. expresses it, heart, spirit, and art. These three powers are present in man from the beginning, in the state of seeds or dispositions, which the educator must therefore help to develop and advance in perfect harmony. Moral education is carried out by various means: a) the formation of moral sentiment through love, trust, gratitude, and obedience toward one’s mother, teacher, and God; b) moral exercises or practices, because example is the best stimulus for helping one to understand the good; c) the formation of moral ideas, taking advantage of the various environmental circumstances and events that unfold before the pupil’s eyes. Intellectual education must be founded on these principles: a) intuition, placing the child before things, taking as the point of departure those with which he is most familiar and accustoming him to observe and grasp immediate impressions; b) the trilogy of name, form, and number, because, in coming to know an object, the intellect asks itself: how many objects are before me? (number); how do they appear? (form); what are they called? (word or name); hence the practical intuitive rules for learning arithmetic, geometry, drawing, handwriting, and the formation and varied combination of words. Physical education, or art (and the P. also includes the industrial element within it), has the purpose of making the child and the adult capable of externally expressing the products of their own intelligence and putting the impulses of the heart into practice; capable, in short, of super fare: hence recreation, gymnastics, swimming, and manual work, which also gives the children of the people the means to choose a useful, profitable occupation suited to their own inclinations. As for religious education (and this is the weakest point of the Pestalozzian system), the P. does indeed proclaim religion and faith to be the foundations of education; but this is a vague deism: God is, for him, universal love, manifested in the rising sun, the murmur of the bird, and so forth. He speaks of Jesus Christ as redeemer and mediator, but considers him merely a man, the best of men, and remains outside Revelation and Christian dogmas; indeed, at Yverdun he even abolished prayers. His disciples therefore divided into two schools: one rationalist (headed by F. A. W. Diesterweg), the other Christian, which adopted the master’s methods without adopting his religious ideas (e.g., B. Overberg).The P.’s principal and indisputable merit is, first of all, his complete and absolute dedication to childhood and the enthusiastic ardor, beyond every adversity and failure, with which he devoted himself to the school. He aspired to nothing other than being a schoolteacher and lived for nothing other than the school, sowing in the field of pedagogy seeds and ideas that, later better studied and systematized, for example, by Herbart and Fröbel, formed the modern school movement. He also advocated the popularization of the school, emphasizing its human and national value, especially with regard to the poorer classes, and developing suitable schemes for organizing elementary popular education and vocational education. Indeed, Pestalozzian institutions served as models for all the states of Europe and produced ranks of exceptionally efficient teachers. Moreover, he insisted on demonstrating that the school could be an effective means of social and spiritual renewal only when it knew how to continue the work of the family, which is the first educator, cultivating the fruits of the maternal presence, namely love, understanding, trust, and benevolence. Some of his writings, moreover, contributed effectively to transforming pedagogy into a science. It remains only to observe that the P. had an exaggerated esteem for the method (which gave rise to a veritable host of “method hunters”), believing that he had found the only one suited to the psychological mechanism of man, and therefore effective in itself, whatever the particular personality of the learner and the educator might be. Hence a mechanism that, in Yverdun itself, marked the beginning of decline.