Part 25

“In natural history they were very quick in corroborating what I taught them by their own personal observations on plants and animals. I am quite sure that, by continuing in this way, I should soon have been able not only to give them such a general acquaintance with the subject as would have been useful in any vocation, but also to put them in a position to carry on their education themselves by means of their daily observations and experiences; and I should have been able to do all this without going outside the very restricted sphere to which they were confined by the actual circumstances of their lives. I hold it to be extremely important that men should be encouraged to learn by themselves and allowed to develop freely. It is in this way alone that the diversity of individual talent is produced and made evident.

“I always made the children learn perfectly even the least important things, and I never allowed them to lose ground; a word once learnt, for instance, was never to be forgotten, and a letter once well written never to be written badly again. I was very patient with all who were weak or slow, but very severe with those who did anything less well than they had done it before.

“The number and inequality of my children rendered my task easier. Just as in a family the eldest and cleverest child readily shows what he knows to his younger brothers and sisters, and feels proud and happy to be able to take his mother’s place for a moment, so my children were delighted when they knew something that they could teach others. A sentiment of honour awoke in them, and they learned twice as well by making the younger ones repeat their words. In this way I soon had helpers and collaborators amongst the children themselves. When I was teaching them to spell difficult words by heart, I used to allow any child who succeeded in saying one properly to teach it to the others. These child-helpers, whom I had formed from the very outset, and who had followed my method step by step, were certainly much more useful to me than any regular schoolmasters could have been.

“I myself learned with the children. Our whole system was so simple and so natural that I should have had difficulty in finding a master who would not have thought it undignified to learn and teach as I was doing....

“You will hardly believe that it was the Capuchin friars and the nuns of the convent that showed the greatest sympathy with my work. Few people, except Truttman, took any active interest in it. Those from whom I had hoped most were too deeply engrossed with their high political affairs to think of our little institution as having the least degree of importance.

“Such were my dreams; but at the very moment that I seemed to be on the point of realizing them, I had to leave Stanz.”

§ 50. Heroic efforts rise above the measurement of time. As Byron has said, “A thought is capable of years,” and it seldom happens that the nobleness of any human action depends on the time it lasts. Pestalozzi’s five months’ experiment at Stanz proved one of the most memorable events in the history of education. He was now completely satisfied that he saw his way to giving children a right education and “thus raising the beggar out of the dung-hill”; and seeing the right course he was urged by his love of the people into taking it. But how was he to set to work? His notions of school instruction differed entirely from those of the teaching profession; and even in the revolutionary age they had some reason for looking askance at this revolutionist. “He had everything against him,” we read, “thick, indistinct speech, bad writing, ignorance of drawing, scorn of grammatical learning. He had studied various branches of natural history, but without any particular attention either to classification or terminology. He was conversant with the ordinary operations in arithmetic, but he would have had difficulty in getting through a really long sum in multiplication or division; and he probably had never tried to work out a problem in geometry. For years this dreamer had read no books. But instead of the usual knowledge that any young man of ordinary talent can acquire in a year or two, he understood thoroughly what most masters were entirely ignorant of—the mind of man and the laws of its development, human affections and the art of arousing and ennobling them. He seemed to have almost an intuitive insight into the development of human nature, and was never tired of contemplating it.” (C. Monnard in R.’s Guimps, p. 174.)[157]

§ 51. This man wished to be a schoolmaster, but who would venture to entrust him with a school? No one seemed willing to do this; and he would have been at a loss where to turn had he not had influential friends at Burgdorf, a town not far from Bern. These got for him permission to teach, not indeed the children of burgesses but the children of non-burgesses, seventy-three of whom used to assemble under a shoemaker in his house in the suburbs. With this arrangement, however, the shoemaker and the parents of the children were by no means satisfied. “If the burgesses like the new method,” they said very reasonably, “let them try it on their own children.” Their grumbling was heard, and permission to teach was withdrawn from Pestalozzi.

§ 52. The check, however, was only temporary. His friends were wiser than the shoemaker, and they procured for him admission into the lowest class of the school for burghers’ children. In this class there were about 25 children, boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 8. Here he proved that he was vastly different from a mere dreamer. After teaching these children in his own way for eight months he received the first official recognition of the merits of his system. The Burgdorf School Commission after the usual examination, wrote a public letter to Pestalozzi, in which they said: “The surprising progress of your little scholars of various capacities shews plainly that every one is good for something, if the teacher knows how to get at his abilities and develop them according to the laws of psychology. By your method of teaching you have proved how to lay the groundwork of instruction in such a way that it may afterwards support what is built on it.... Between the ages of 5 and 8, a period in which according to the system of torture enforced hitherto, children have learnt to know their letters, to spell and read, your scholars have not only accomplished all this with a success as yet unknown, but the best of them have already distinguished themselves by their good writing, drawing, and calculating. In them all you have been able so to arouse and excite a liking for history, natural history, mensuration, geography, &c., that thus future teachers must find their task a far easier one if they only know how to make good use of the preparatory stage the children have gone through with you” (Morf, Pt. I, p. 223).

§ 53. In consequence of this report, Pestalozzi in June 1800 was made master of the second school of Burgdorf, a school numbering about 70 boys and girls from 10 to 16 years old. With them Pestalozzi did not get on so well. Ramsauer, a poor boy of 10 who afterwards helped Pestalozzi at Yverdun and became one of his best teachers, has left us his remembrances. Two things seemed clear to the child’s mind: 1st, that their teacher was very kind but very unhappy; 2nd, that the pupils did not learn anything and behaved very badly. Many schoolmasters have smiled in derision at this account of Pestalozzi’s actual teaching; but in reading it several things should be borne in mind. First Ramsauer as a child would have a keen eye and good memory for the master’s eccentricities; but how far the teaching succeeded he could not judge, for he did not know what it aimed at. Then again he saw that Pestalozzi’s zeal was for the whole school, not for individual scholars. But the child who knew of nothing beyond Burgdorf could not tell that Pestalozzi was thinking not so much of the children of Burgdorf as of the children of Europe. For Burgdorf—whether it was pleased to honour or to dismiss Pestalozzi—could not contain him. His aims extended beyond the town, beyond canton Bern, beyond Switzerland even; and he was consumed with zeal to bring about a radical change in elementary education throughout Europe. The truth which was burning within him he has himself expressed as follows:

“If we desire to aid the poor man, the very lowest among the people, this can be done in one way only, that is, _by changing his schools into true places of education, in which the moral, intellectual, and physical powers which God has put into our nature may be drawn out_, so that the man may be enabled to live a life such as a man should live, contented in himself and satisfying other people. Thus and only thus does the man, whom in God’s wide world nobody helps and nobody can help, learn to help himself.” “The public common school-coach throughout Europe must not simply be better horsed, but still more it must be _turned round and be brought on to an entirely new road_.” (Quoted by Morf, P. I, p. 211.)

§ 54. Pestalozzi was now working heart and soul at the engineering of this “new road.” His grand successes hitherto had been gained more by the heart than by the head; but the school course must draw out the faculties of the head as well as of the heart. Pestalozzi made all instruction start from what children observed for themselves. “I laid special stress,” he says, “on just what usually affected their senses. And as I dwelt much on elementary knowledge, I wanted to know when the child receives its first lesson, and I soon came to the conviction that the first hour of learning dates from birth. From the very moment that the child’s senses open to the impressions of nature, nature teaches it. Its new life is but the faculty, now come to maturity, of receiving impressions; it is the awakening of the germs now perfect which will go on using all their forces and energies to secure the development of their proper organisation; it is the awakening of the animal now complete which will and shall become a man. So the sole instruction given to the human being consists merely in the art of giving a helping hand to this natural tendency towards its proper development; and this art consists essentially in the means of putting the child’s impressions in connexion and harmony with the precise degree of development the child has reached. There must be then in the impressions to be given him by instruction, a regular gradation; and the beginning and the progress of his various knowledges must exactly correspond with the beginning and increase in his powers as they are developed. From this I soon saw that this gradation must be ascertained for all the branches of human knowledge, especially for those fundamental notions from which our thinking power takes its rise. On such principles and no others is it possible to construct real school books and books about teaching” (_Wie Gertrud_, &c., Letter I.).

§ 55. In endeavouring to put teaching, as he said, “on a psychological basis,” Pestalozzi compared it to a mechanism. On one occasion when expounding his views, he was interrupted by the exclamation, “Vous voulez mécaniser l’éducation!” Pestalozzi was weak in French, and he took these words to mean, “You wish to get at the mechanism of education.” He accordingly assented, and was in his turn misunderstood. Soon afterwards he endeavoured to express the new thing by a new word and said, “Ich will den menschlichen Unterricht psychologisieren; I wish to psychologise instruction,” and this he explains to mean that he sought to make instruction fall in with the eternal laws which govern the development of the human intellect (Morf, I, p. 227). But this was a task which no one man could accomplish, not even Pestalozzi. The eternal laws which govern the development of mind have not been completely ascertained even after investigations carried on during thousands of years; and Pestalozzi did not know what had been established by previous thinkers. He made a gigantic effort to find both the laws and their application, but if he had continued to stand alone he could have done but little. Happily he attracted to him some young and vigorous assistants, who caught his enthusiasm and worked in his spirit. They did much, but there was one thing the Master could not communicate—his genius.

§ 56. Just at this time, before Pestalozzi found associates in his work, he drew up for a “Society of Friends of Education” an account of his method; and this begins with the words I have already quoted, “I want to psychologise education.” Basing all instruction on _Anschauung_ (which is nearly equivalent to the child’s own observation), he explains how this may be used for a series of exercises, and he takes as the general elements of culture the following: language, drawing, writing, arithmetic, and the art of measuring. In the education of the poor he would lay special stress on the importance of two things, then and since much neglected, viz., singing and the sense of the beautiful. The mother’s cradle song should begin a series leading up to hymns of praise to God. Education should develop in all a sense of the beauties of Nature. “Nature is full of lovely sights, yet Europe has done nothing either to awaken in the poor a sense for these beauties, or to arrange them in such a way as to produce a series of impressions capable of developing this sense.... If ever popular education should cease to be the barbarous absurdity it now is, and put itself into harmony with the real needs of our nature, this want will be supplied.” (R.’s Guimps, 186.)

§ 57. In the last year of the eighteenth century (1800) Pestalozzi was toiling away, constant to his purpose but not clearly seeing the road before him. In March, 1800, he wrote to Zschokke: “For thirty years my life has been a well-nigh hopeless struggle against the most frightful poverty.... For thirty years I have had to forego many of the barest necessaries of life, and have had to shun the society of my fellow-men from sheer lack of decent clothes. Many and many a time have I gone without a dinner and eaten in bitterness a dry crust of bread on the road at a time when even the poorest were seated round a table. All this I have suffered and am still suffering to-day, and with no other object than the realization of my plans for helping the poor” (R.’s Guimps, 189). It was clear that he could not help others till he himself got help; and he now did get just the help he wanted, an assistant who though a schoolmaster was, strange to say, perfectly ready to learn, and to throw himself into carrying out another man’s ideas. This was Hermann Kruesi, a man twenty-five years old, who from the age of 18 had been master of the village school at Gais in Appenzell. In consequence of the war between the French and Austrians, Appenzell was now reduced to a state of famine, and bands of children were sent off to other cantons to escape starvation. Fischer, a friend of Pestalozzi’s, and himself an educationist taught by Salzmann (_supra_ 289), wrote from Burgdorf to the pastor of Gais, offering to get thirty children taken in by the people of Burgdorf, and asking that they might be sent with some one who would look after them in the day-time and teach them. In answer to this invitation Kruesi, after a week’s march, entered Burgdorf with a troop of little ones. The children were drawn up in an open place, and benevolent people chose which they would adopt. Kruesi was taken into the Castle which the Government had made over partly to Fischer, partly to Pestalozzi. In it Kruesi opened a day-school. Fischer soon afterwards died; and Pestalozzi proposed to Kruesi, who had become entirely converted to his views, that they should unite and together carry on the school in the Castle. By a decree of 23rd July, 1800, the Executive Council granted to Pestalozzi the gratuitous use of as much of the Castle and garden as he needed, and thus was established Pestalozzi’s celebrated Institute at Burgdorf.

§ 58. Very soon Kruesi enlisted other helpers who had read _Leonard and Gertrude_, viz., Tobler and Buss, and this is his account of the party: “Our society thus consisted of four very different men ... the founder, whose chief reputation was that of a dreamy writer, incapable in practical life, and three young men, one [Tobler] a private tutor whose youth had been much neglected, who had begun to study late, and whose pedagogic efforts had never produced the results his character and talents seemed to promise; another [Buss], a bookbinder, who devoted his leisure to singing and drawing; and a third [Kruesi himself], a village schoolmaster who carried out the duties of his office as best he could without having been in any way prepared for them. Those who looked on this group of men, scarce one of them with a home of his own, naturally formed but a small opinion of their capabilities. And yet our work succeeded, and won the public confidence beyond the expectations of those who knew us, and even beyond our own” (R.’s Guimps, 304).

§ 59. With assistance from the Government there was added to the united schools of Pestalozzi and Kruesi a training class for teachers; and elementary teachers were sent to spend a month at Burgdorf and learn of Pestalozzi, as years afterwards they were sent to the same town to learn of Froebel. This Institute opened in January, 1801, and had nearly three years of complete success. In it was carried out Pestalozzi’s notion that there should be “no gulf between the home and the school.” On one occasion a parent visiting the establishment exclaimed, “Why, this is not a school but a family!” and Pestalozzi declared that this was the highest praise he could give it. The bond which united them all, both teachers and scholars, was love of “Father Pestalozzi.” Want of space kept the number of children below a hundred, and these enjoyed great freedom and worked away without rewards and almost without punishments. Both public reports and private speak very highly of the results. In June, 1802, the President of the Council of Public Education in Bern declares: “Pestalozzi has discovered the real and universal laws of all elementary teaching.” A visitor, Charles Victor von Bonstetten, writes: “The children know little, but what they know, they know well.... They are very happy and evidently take great pleasure in their lessons, which says a great deal for the method.... As it will be long before there is another Pestalozzi, I fear that the rich harvest his discovery seems to promise will be reserved for future ages.”

The success of the method was specially conspicuous in arithmetic. A Nürnberg merchant who came prejudiced against Pestalozzi was much impressed and has acknowledged: “I was amazed when I saw these children treating the most complicated calculations of fractions as the simplest thing in the world.”

§ 60. Up to this point Pestalozzi may be said to have gained by the disposition to “reform” or revolutionise everything, which had prevailed in Switzerland since 1798. But from the reaction which now set in he suffered more than he had gained. Switzerland sent deputies to Paris to discuss under the direction of the First Consul Bonaparte what should be their future form of Government. Among these deputies Pestalozzi was elected, and he set off thinking more of the future of the schools than of the future of the Government. At Paris he asked for an interview with Bonaparte, but destruction being in his opinion a much higher art than instruction, the First Consul said he could not be bothered about questions of A, B, C. He, however, deputed Monge to hear what Pestalozzi had to say, but the mathematician seems to have agreed with some English authorities that “there was nothing in Pestalozzi.”[158] On his return to Switzerland Pestalozzi was asked by Buss, “Did you see Bonaparte?” “No,” replied Pestalozzi, “I did not see Bonaparte and Bonaparte did not see me.” His presumption in thus putting himself on an equality with the great conqueror seems to have taken away the breath of his contemporaries: but “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” and before the close of the century Europe already thinks more in amount, and immeasurably more in respect, of Pestalozzi than of Bonaparte.

§ 61. As a result of the reaction the Government of United Switzerland ceased to exist, and the Cantons were restored. This destroyed Pestalozzi’s hopes of Government support, and even turned his Institute out of doors. The Castle of Burgdorf was at once demanded for the Prefect of the District; but Pestalozzi was offered an old convent at Münchenbuchsee near Bern, and thither he was forced to migrate.

§ 62. Close to Münchenbuchsee was Hofwyl where was the agricultural institution of Emmanuel Fellenberg. Fellenberg and Pestalozzi were old friends and correspondents, and as they had much regard for each other and Fellenberg was as great in administration as Pestalozzi in ideas, there seemed a chance of their benefiting by co-operation; but this could not be. The teachers desired that the administration should be put into the hands of Fellenberg, and this was done accordingly, “not without my consent,” says Pestalozzi, “but to my profound mortification.” He could not work with this “man of iron,” as he calls Fellenberg; so he left Münchenbuchsee and accepting one of several invitations he settled in the Castle of Yverdun near the lake of Neuchatel. Within a twelvemonth he was followed by his old assistants, who had found government by Fellenberg less to their taste than no-government by Pestalozzi.

§ 63. Thus arose the most celebrated Institute of which we read in the history of education. For some years its success seemed prodigious. Teachers came from all quarters, many of them sent by the Governments of the countries to which they belonged, that they might get initiated into the Pestalozzian system. Children too were sent from great distances, some of them being intrusted to Pestalozzi, some of them living with their own tutor in Yverdun and only attending the Institute during the day. The wave of enthusiasm for the new ideas seemed to carry everything before it; but there is nothing stable in a wave, and when the enthusiasm has subsided disappointment follows. This was the case at Yverdun, and Pestalozzi outlived his Institute. But the principles on which he worked and the spirit in which he worked could not pass away; and, at least in Germany, all elementary schoolmasters acknowledge how much they are indebted to his teaching.