| Swiss educational reformer, who advocated education
of the poor and emphasized teaching methods designed to strengthen
the student's own abilities. Pestalozzi's method became widely
accepted, and most of his principles have been absorbed into
modern elementary education.
Pestalozzi's pedagogical doctrines stressed that instructions
should proceed from the familiar to the new, incorporate
the performance of concrete arts and the experience of actual
emotional responses, and be paced to follow the gradual
unfolding of the child's development. His ideas flow from
the same stream of thought that includes Johann Friedrich
Herbart, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and more recently
Jean Piaget and advocates of the language experience approach
such as R.V. Allen.
Pestalozzi's curriculum, which was modelled after Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's plan in Émile, emphasized group rather
than individual recitation and focussed on such participatory
activities as drawing, writing, singing, physical exercise,
model making, collecting, map making, and field trips. Among
his ideas, considered radically innovative at the time,
were making allowances for individual differences, grouping
students by ability rather than age, and encouraging formal
teacher training as part of a scientific approach to education.
Pestalozzi was influenced by the political conditions of
his country and by the educational ideas of Rousseau; as
a young man he abandoned the study of theology to go “back
to Nature.” In 1769 he took up agriculture on neglected
land near the River Aare—the Neuhof. When this enterprise
collapsed in 1774, he took poor children into his house,
having them work by spinning and weaving and learn simultaneously
to become self-supporting. This project also failed materially,
although Pestalozzi had gained valuable experience. He also
took an active interest in Swiss politics.
As practical realization of his ideas was denied him, he
turned to writing. Die Abendstunde eines Linsiedlers (1780;
“The Evening Hour of a Hermit”) outlines his fundamental
theory that education must be “according to nature”
and that security in the home is the foundation of man's
happiness. His novel Lienhard und Gertrud (1781–87;
Leonard and Gertrude, 1801), written for “the people,”
was a literary success as the first realistic representation
of rural life in German. It describes how an ideal woman
exposes corrupt practices and, by her well-ordered homelife,
sets a model for the village school and the larger community.
The important role of the mother in early education is a
recurrent theme in Pestalozzi's writings.
For 30 years Pestalozzi lived in isolation on his Neuhof
estate, writing profusely on educational, political, and
economic topics, indicating ways of improving the lot of
the poor. His proposals were ignored by his own countrymen,
and he became increasingly despondent. He would have accepted
the post of educational adviser anywhere in Europe had it
been forthcoming. His main philosophical treatise, Meine
Nachforschungen über den Gang der Natur in der Entwicklung
des Menschengeschlechts (1797; “My Inquiries into the
Course of Nature in the Development of Mankind”), reflects
his personal disappointment but expresses his firm belief
in the resources of human nature and his conviction that
people are responsible for their moral and intellectual
state. Thus, Pestalozzi was convinced, education should
develop the individual's faculties to think for himself.
Pestalozzi's chance to act came after the French Revolution,
when he was more than 50 years old. The French-imposed Helvetic
Republic in Switzerland invited him to organize higher education,
but he preferred to begin at the beginning. He collected
scores of destitute war orphans and cared for them almost
single-handedly, attempting to create a family atmosphere
and to restore their moral qualities. These few exhausting
months in Stans (1799) were, according to Pestalozzi's own
account, the happiest days of his life.
From 1800 to 1804 he directed an educational establishment
in Burgdorf and from 1805 until 1825 a boarding school at
Yverdon, near Neuchâtel. Both schools relied for funds
on fee-paying pupils, though some poor children were taken
in, and these institutes served as experimental bases for
proving his method in its three branches—intellectual,
moral, and physical, the latter including vocational and
civic training. They also were to finance his life's “dream,”
an industrial (i.e., poor) school. The Yverdon Institute
became world famous, drawing pupils from all over Europe
as well as many foreign visitors. Some visiting educators—e.g.,
Friedrich Froebel, J.F. Herbart, and Carl Ritter—were
so impressed that they stayed on to study the method and
later introduced it into their own teaching.
While dedicated assistants carried on the teaching, Pestalozzi
remained the institute's heart and soul and continued to
work out his method. Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt (1801;
How Gertrude Teaches Her Children) contains the main principles
of intellectual education: that the child's innate faculties
should be evolved and that he should learn how to think,
proceeding gradually from observation to comprehension to
the formation of clear ideas. Although the teaching method
is treated in greater detail, Pestalozzi considered moral
education preeminent.
The family spirit prevailing at Yverdon was shattered in
later years by a progressively severe dispute among the
teachers for first place by Pestalozzi's side. The longed-for
poor school, established by means of the proceeds from publication
of his collected works, existed for only two years. To Pestalozzi's
great distress, the Yverdon Institute lost its fame and
its pupils. His efforts at reconciliation were in vain.
With a few pupils he retreated to Neuhof in 1825, sad but
convinced that his ideas would prevail in the end. His Schwanengesang
(1826; “Swan Song”) culminated in the maxim “Life
itself educates.”
Pestalozzi was an impressive personality, highly esteemed
by his contemporaries. His concept of education embraced
politics, economics, and philosophy, and the influence of
his “method” was immense.
Additional Reading
Kate Silber, Pestalozzi: The Man and His Work, 4th ed. (1976),
containing a select bibliography of texts and literature,
is the major comprehensive account of Pestalozzi's life
and personality and interpretation of his writings; a more
modest but extremely useful study is Robert B. Downe's Heinrich
Pestalozzi, Father of Modern Pedagogy (1975). An analysis
of Pestalozzi's educational ideas and methods is presented
in Michael Heafford, Pestalozzi: His Thought and Its Relevance
Today (1967); and Gerald Lee Gutek, Pestalozzi and Education
(1968).
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