Part 26

§ 64. Of the state of things in the early days of the Institute we have a very lively account written for his own children by Professor Vuillemin, who entered it in 1805 as a child of eight, and was in it for two years. From this I extract the following portrait of Pestalozzi: “Imagine, my children, a very ugly man with rough bristling hair, his face scarred with small-pox and covered with freckles, an untidy beard, no neck-tie, his breeches not properly buttoned and coming down to his stockings, which in their turn descended on to his great thick shoes; fancy him panting and jerking as he walked; then his eyes which at one time opened wide to send a flash of lightning, at another were half closed as if engaged on what was going on within; his features now expressing a profound sadness and now again the most peaceful happiness; his speech either slow or hurried, either soft and melodious or bursting forth like thunder; imagine the man and you have him whom we used to call our Father Pestalozzi. Such as I have sketched him for you we loved him; we all loved him, for he loved us all; we loved him so warmly that when some time passed without our seeing him, we were quite troubled about it, and when he again appeared we could not take our eyes off him” (Guimps, 315).

§ 65. At this time he was no less loved by his assistants, who put up with any quarters that could be found for them, and received no salary. We read that the money paid by the scholars was kept in the room of “the head of the family”; every master could get the key, and when they required clothes they took from these funds just the sum requisite. This system, or want of system, went on for some time without abuse. As Vuillemin says, it was like a return to the early days of the Christian Church.

§ 66. We have seen that the first Emperor Napoleon “could not be bothered about questions of A, B, C.” His was the pride that goes before a fall. On the other hand the Prussian Government which he brought to the dust in the battle of Jena (1806) had the wisdom to perceive that children will become men, and that the nature of the instruction they receive will in a great measure determine what kind of men they turn out. How was Prussia again to raise its head? Its rulers decided that it was by the education of the people. “We have lost in territory,” said the king; “our power and our credit abroad have fallen; but we must and will go to work to gain in power and in credit at home. It is for this reason that I desire above everything that the greatest attention be paid to the education of the people” (Guimps, 319). About the same time the Queen (Louisa) wrote in her private diary, “I am reading _Leonard and Gertrude_, and I delight in being transported into the Swiss village. If I could do as I liked I should take a carriage and start for Switzerland to see Pestalozzi; I should warmly shake him by the hand, and my eyes filled with tears would speak my gratitude.... With what goodness, with what zeal, he labours for the welfare of his fellow-creatures! Yes, in the name of humanity, I thank him with my whole heart.”

So in the day of humiliation Prussia seriously went to work at the education of the people, and this she did on the lines pointed out by Pestalozzi. To him they were directed by their philosopher Fichte, who in his _Addresses to the German Nation_ (delivered at Berlin 1807-8) declared that education was the only means of raising a nation, and that all sound reform of public instruction must be based on the principles of Pestalozzi.

To bring these principles to bear on popular education, the Prussian Government sent seventeen young men for a three years’ course to Pestalozzi’s Institute, “where,” as the Minister said in a letter to Pestalozzi, “they will be prepared not only in mind and judgment, but also in heart, for the noble vocation which they are to follow, and will be filled with a sense of the holiness of their task, and with new zeal for the work to which you have devoted your life.”

§ 67. Among the eminent men who were drawn to Yverdun were some who afterwards did great things in education, as _e.g._, Karl Ritter, Karl von Raumer the historian of education, the philosopher Herbart, and a man who was destined to have more influence than anyone, except perhaps Pestalozzi himself—I mean Friedrich Froebel. Ritter’s testimony is especially striking. “I have seen,” says he, “more than the Paradise of Switzerland, for I have seen Pestalozzi, and recognised how great his heart is, and how great his genius; never have I been so filled with a sense of the sacredness of my vocation and the dignity of human nature as in the days I spent with this noble man.... Pestalozzi knew less geography than a child in one of our primary schools, yet it was from him that I gained my chief knowledge of this science; for it was in listening to him that I first conceived the idea of the natural method. It was he who opened the way to me, and I take pleasure in attributing whatever value my work may have entirely to him.”

§ 68. At this time we read glowing accounts of the healthy and happy life of the children; and throughout Pestalozzi never lost a single pupil by illness. With a body of very able assistants, instruction was carried on for ten hours out of the twenty-four; but in these hours there was reckoned the time spent in drill, gymnastics, hand-work, and singing. The monotony of school-life was also broken by frequent “festivals.”

§ 69. And yet the Institute had taken into it the seeds of its own ruin. There were several causes of failure, though these were not visible till the house was divided against itself.

§ 70. First, Pestalozzi based the morality and discipline of the school on the relations of family life. He would be the “father” of all the children. At Burgdorf this relation seemed a reality, but it completely failed at Yverdun when the Institute became, from the number of the pupils and their differences in language, habits, and antecedents, a little world. The pupils still called him “Father Pestalozzi,” but he could no longer know them as a father should know his children. Thus the discipline of affection slowly disappeared, and there was no school discipline to take its place.

§ 71. Next, we can see that even at Burgdorf, and still more at Yverdun, Pestalozzi was attempting to do impossibilities. According to his system, the faculties of the child were to be developed in a natural unbroken order, and the first exercises were to give the child the power of surmounting later difficulties by its own exertions. But this education could not be started at any age, and yet children of every age and every country were received into the Institution. It was not likely that the fresh comers could be made to understand that they “knew nothing,” and must start over again on a totally different road. The teachers might take such pupils to the water of “sense-impressions,” but they could not inspire the inclination to drink, nor induce the lad to learn what he supposed himself to know already. (_Cfr. supra_ p. 64, § 4.)

§ 72. But there was a greater mischief at work than either of these. In his discourse to the members of the Institution on New Year’s Day, 1808, Pestalozzi surprised them all by his gloom. He had had a coffin brought in, and he stood beside it. “This work,” said he, “was founded by love, but love has disappeared from our midst.” This was only too true, and the discord was more deeply rooted than at first appeared. Among the brood of Pestalozzians there was a Catholic shepherd lad from Tyrol, Joseph Schmid by name, and he, in the end, proved a veritable cuckoo. As he shewed very marked ability in mathematics, he became one of the assistant masters; and a good deal of the fame of the Institution rested on the performances of his pupils. But his ideas differed totally from those of his colleagues, especially from those of Niederer, a clergyman with a turn for philosophy, who had become Pestalozzi’s chief exponent.

§ 73. After Pestalozzi’s gloomy speech, the masters, with the exception of Schmid, urged Pestalozzi to apply for a Government inquiry into the state of the Institution. This Pestalozzi did, and Commissioners were appointed, among them an educationist, Père Girard of Freiburg, by whom the Report was drawn up. The Report was not favourable. Père Girard was by no means inclined to sit at the feet of Pestalozzi, as he had principles of his own. Pestalozzi, he thought, laid far too much stress on mathematics, and he drew from him a statement that everything taught to a child should seem as certain as that two and two made four. “Then,” said Girard, “if I had thirty children I would not intrust you with one of them. You could not teach him that I was his father.” Thus the Report, though very friendly in tone, was by no means friendly in spirit. The Commissioners simply compared the performances of the scholars with what pupils of the same age could do in good schools of the ordinary type, and Père Girard stated, though not in the Report, that the Institution was inferior to the Cantonal School of Aargau. But the comparison of these incommensurables only shews that Girard was not capable of understanding what was going on at Yverdun. Indeed, he asserts “not only that the mother-tongue was neglected,” but also that the children, “though they had reached a high pitch of excellence in abstract mathematics, were inconceivably weak in all ordinary practical calculations.” This is absurd. In Pestalozzian teaching the abstract never went before ordinary practical calculations. The good Father evidently blunders, and takes “head-reckoning” for abstract, and pen or pencil arithmetic for practical work. Reckoning with slate or paper is no doubt “ordinary,” but a distinction has often to be drawn between what is ordinary and what is practical.

§ 74. Soon after this the disputes between Schmid and his colleagues waxed so fierce that Schmid was virtually driven away. In 1810 he left Yverdun, and declared the Institution “a disgrace to humanity.” Great was the disorder into which the Institution now fell from having over it only a genius with “an unrivalled incapacity to govern.” The days which “remind us of the early Church” were no more, and financial difficulties naturally followed them. For the next five years things went from bad to worse, and the masters were then driven to the desperate, and, as it proved, the fatal step of inviting the able and strong-willed Schmid back again. He came in 1815, he acquired entire control over Pestalozzi, and drove from him all his most faithful adherents, among them not only Niederer, who had invited the return of his rival, but even Kruesi and the faithful servant, Elizabeth Naef, now Mrs. Kruesi, the widow of Kruesi’s brother. Pestalozzi’s grandson married Schmid’s sister, and thus united with him by family ties, Schmid took entire possession of the old man and kept it till the end. His former colleagues seem to have been deceived in their estimate both of Schmid’s integrity and ability. He completed the ruin of the Institution, and he was finally expelled from Yverdun by the Magistrates.

§ 75. But while Pestalozzi seemed falling lower and lower to the eyes of the inhabitants of Yverdun, and so had little honour in his own country, his fame was spreading all over Europe. Of this Yverdun was to reap the benefit. In 1813-14, Austrian troops marched across Switzerland to invade France. In January, 1814, the Castle and other buildings in Yverdun were “requisitioned” for a military hospital, many of the Austrian soldiers being down with typhus fever. In a great fright the Municipality sent off two deputies to headquarters, then at Basel, to petition that this order might be withdrawn. As the order threatened the destruction of his Institution, Pestalozzi went with them, and it was entirely to him they owed their success. On their return they reported that “no military hospital would be established at Yverdun, and that M. Pestalozzi had been received with most extraordinary favour.”

§ 75. On this occasion Pestalozzi took the opportunity of preaching to the Emperor Alexander on the necessity of establishing good schools and of emancipating the serfs. The Emperor took the lecture in good part, and allowed the philanthropist to drive him into a corner and “button-hole” him.

§ 76. In 1815 Pestalozzi received a visit from an Englishman, or more accurately Scotsman—Dr. Bell, who, however, like most of our compatriots, could find nothing in Pestalozzi. Whatever we may think of Bell as an educationist, he was certainly a poor prophet. On leaving Yverdun he said, “In another twelve years mutual instruction will be adopted by the whole world and Pestalozzi’s method will be forgotten.”[159]

§ 77. In December, 1815, Pestalozzi was thrown more completely into the power of Schmid by losing the only companion from whom nothing but death could separate him—his wife. At the funeral Pestalozzi, standing by the coffin, and as if heard by her whose earthly remains were in it, ran over the disasters and trials they had passed through together, and the sacrifices she had made for him. “What in those days of affliction,” said he, “gave us strength to bear our troubles and recover hope?” and taking up a Bible he went on, “_This_ is the source whence you drew, whence we both drew courage, strength, and peace.”

§ 78. The “death agony of the Institution,” as Guimps calls it, lasted for some years, but in this gloomy period there are only two incidents I will mention. The first is the publication of Pestalozzi’s writings, for which Schmid and Pestalozzi sought subscriptions; and the appeal was so cordially answered that Pestalozzi received £2,000. This sum he wished to devote to the carrying out of a plan he had always cherished of an orphanage at Neuhof; but the money seems to have melted we do not know how.

§ 79. The other incident is that of Pestalozzi’s last success. In spite of Schmid he would open a school for twelve neglected children at Clindy, a hamlet near Yverdun. Here he produced results like those which had crowned his first efforts at Neuhof, Stanz, and Burgdorf. Old, absent-minded, and incapable as he seemed in ordinary affairs, he, as though by enchantment, gained the attention and the affection of the children, and bent them entirely to his will. In a few months the number of children had risen to thirty, and wonderful progress had been made. Clindy at once became celebrated. Pestalozzi was induced to admit some children whose friends paid for them, and Schmid then persuaded the old man to remove the school into the Castle.

§ 80. In 1824 the Institution, which had lasted for twenty years, was finally closed, and Pestalozzi went to spend his remaining days (nearly three years as it proved) at Neuhof, which was then in the hands of his grandson. The year before his death he visited an orphanage conducted on his principles by Zeller at Beuggen near Rheinfelden. The children sang a poem of Goethe’s quoted in _Leonard and Gertrude_, and had a crown of oak ready to put on the old man’s head; but this he declined. “I am not worthy of it,” said he, “keep it for innocence.”

§ 81. On 17th February, 1827, at the age of eighty-one, Pestalozzi fell asleep.

§ 82. “The reform needed,” said Pestalozzi, “is not that the school-coach should be better horsed, but that it should be turned right round and started on a new track.” This may seem a violent metaphor, but perhaps it is not more violent than the change that was (and in this country still is) necessary. Let us try to ascertain what is the right road according to Pestalozzi, and then see on what road the school-coach is now travelling.

§ 83. The grand change advocated by Pestalozzi was a change of _object_. The main object of the school should not be to _teach_ but to _develop_.

§ 84. This change of object naturally brings many changes with it. Measured by their capacity for acquiring school knowledge and skill young children may be considered, as one of H.M. Inspectors considered them, “the fag-end of the school.” But if the school exists not to teach but to develop, young children, instead of being the “fag-end,” become the most important part of all. In the development of all organisms more depends on the earlier than on the later stages; and there is no reason to doubt that this law holds in the case of human beings. On this account, from the days of Pestalozzi educational science has been greatly, I may say mainly, concerned with young children. For the dominating thought has been that the young human being is an undeveloped organism, and that in education that organism is developed. So the essence of Pestalozzianism lies not so much in its method as in its aim, not more in what it does than in what it endeavours to do.

§ 85. And thus it was that Pestalozzi (in Raumer’s words) “compelled the scholastic world to revise the whole of their task, to reflect on the nature and destiny of man, and also on the proper way of leading him from his youth towards that destiny.” And it was his love of his fellow-creatures that raised him to this standpoint. He was moved by “the enthusiasm of humanity.” Consumed with grief for the degradation of the Swiss peasantry, he never lost faith in their true dignity as men, and in the possibility of raising them to a condition worthy of it. He cast about for the best means of thus raising them, and decided that it could be effected, not by any improvement in their outward circumstances, but by an education which should make them what their Creator intended them to be, and should give them the use and the consciousness of all their inborn faculties. “From my youth up,” he says, “I felt what a high and indispensable human duty it is to labour for the poor and miserable; ... that he may attain to a consciousness of his own dignity through his feeling of the universal powers and endowments which he possesses awakened within him; that he may not only learn to gabble over by rote the religious maxim that ‘man is created in the image of God, and is bound to live and die as a child of God,’ but may himself experience its truth by virtue of the Divine power within him, so that he may be raised, not only above the ploughing oxen, but also above the man in purple and silk who lives unworthily of his high destiny” (Quoted in Barnard, p. 13).

Again he says (and I quote at length on the point, as it is indeed the key to Pestalozzianism), “Why have I insisted so strongly on attention to early physical and intellectual education? Because I consider these as merely leading to a higher aim, to qualify the human being for the free and full use of all the faculties implanted by the Creator, and to direct all these faculties towards the perfection of the whole being of man, that he may be enabled to act in his peculiar station as an instrument of that All-wise and Almighty Power that has called him into life” (To Greaves, p. 160).

§ 86. Believing in this high aim of education, Pestalozzi required a proper early training for all alike. “Every human being,” said he, “has a claim to a judicious development of his faculties by those to whom the care of his infancy is confided” (_Ib._ p. 163).

§ 87. Pestalozzi therefore most earnestly addressed himself to mothers, to convince them of the power placed in their hands, and to teach them how to use it. “The mother is qualified, and qualified by the Creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child; ... and what is demanded of her is—a _thinking love_.... God has given to thy child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point remains undecided—how shall this heart, this head, these hands, be employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated? A question the answer to which involves a futurity of happiness or misery to a life so dear to thee.... It is recorded that God opened the heavens to the patriarch of old, and showed him a ladder leading thither. This ladder is let down to every descendant of Adam; it is offered to thy child. But he must be taught to climb it. And let him not attempt it by the cold calculations of the head, or the mere impulse of the heart; but let all these powers combine, and the noble enterprise will be crowned with success. These powers are already bestowed on him, but to thee it is given to assist in calling them forth” (To Greaves, p. 21). “Maternal love is the first agent in education.... Through it the child is led to love and trust his Creator and his Redeemer.”

§ 88. From the theory of development which lay at the root of Pestalozzi’s views of education, it followed that the imparting of knowledge and the training for special pursuits held only a subordinate position in his scheme. “Education, instead of merely considering what is to be imparted to children, ought to consider first what they may be said already to possess, if not as a developed, at least as an involved faculty capable of development. Or if, instead of speaking thus in the abstract, we will but recollect that it is to the great Author of life that man owes the possession, and is responsible for the use, of his innate faculties, education should not simply decide what is to be made of a child, but rather inquire what it was intended that he should become. What is his destiny as a created and responsible being? What are his faculties as a rational and moral being? What are the means for their perfection, and the end held out as the highest object of their efforts by the Almighty Father of all, both in creation and in the page of revelation?”

§ 89. Education, then, must consist “in _a continual benevolent superintendence_, with the object of calling forth all the faculties which Providence has implanted; and its province, thus enlarged, will yet be with less difficulty surveyed from one point of view, and will have more of a systematic and truly philosophical character, than an incoherent mass of ‘lessons’—arranged without unity of principle, and gone through without interest—which too often usurps its name.”

The educator’s task then is to superintend and promote the child’s development, morally, intellectually, and physically.

§ 90. “The essential principle of education is not teaching,” said Pestalozzi; “it is love” (R.’s G., 289). Again he says, “The child loves and believes before it thinks and acts” (_Ib._ 378). And in a very striking passage (_Ib._ 329), where he compares the development of the various powers of a human being to the development of a tree, he says, “These forces of the heart—faith and love—are in the formation of immortal man what the root is for the tree.” So, according to Pestalozzi, a child without faith and love can no more grow up to be what he should be than a tree can grow without a root. Apart from this vital truth there can be no such thing as Pestalozzianism.

“Ah yet when all is thought and said The heart still overrules the head.”