Pestalozzi

pes-ta-lot'see, Johann Heinrich, an educational reformer. He was born January 12, 1746, in Zurich, the intellectual center of German Switzerland. His father was a skilled optician; his grandfather a village parson; his mother, the daughter of a small landholder near by. His father died ere Pestalozzi was five, leaving him to the care of a gentle, refined, indecisive mother, and a capable domestic aunt attached to the family.

Pestalozzi was a shy, awkward, sensitive little fellow, the butt of his unfeeling schoolmates. At intermission he preferred to hide behind the huge earthenware stove, rather than run his chances out among the other children. He came up through the public school and entered the University of Zurich with a view to study theology. This subject he abandoned for law and law for agriculture.

During his university course he belonged to an association of young men known as the Patriots. They busied themselves with redressing the grievances of the poor and the oppressed, a course so little to the liking of the authorities that Pestalozzi at one time was imprisoned for three days. The incident is of importance merely as indicating the drift of his mind. His health failing, he conceived the idea in 1768 of buying a piece of meadow land in the canton of Aargau and building a home and planting crops, with a view to showing the peasants how respectably and well an industrious and frugal man could live on a bit of land. He called his place Neuhof and here, much against the will of her parents, he brought home a wife, the daughter of a wealthy merchant of Zurich. His mind was full of the ideas of Rousseau's Emile, of which he was an assiduous reader.

As might be expected, he was too much of a dreamer and enthusiast to be much of a farmer. Actual work irked him. He preferred to plan reform. His farming never paid expenses. In 1775, with the help of the three cities of Zurich, Berne, and Basle, he put up buildings for the reception of destitute children. He soon had fifty inmates to whom he is said to have been both father and teacher. He taught them morals and manners, grounded them in reading, writing, and the Scriptures, and instructed them in field work, housework, and the cultivation of a garden. In five years' time, however, he was obliged to break up the establishment. The peasantry were unable to help him or needed the children to work; the wealthy were indifferent and, moreover, he had no natural thrift or skill in management.

He lingered with his family at Neuhof for eighteen years, traveling and writing. How he lived is hardly clear. In 1798 the canton of Unterwalden was laid waste by the French soldiery. Pestalozzi undertook to organize an orphan asylum in an old cloister at Stanz. He soon had seventy children in charge. Here he is said to have been father, mother, supervisor, teacher, servant, and maid. In the following year the authorities turned him and his school out of doors and converted the building into a hospital.

Passing over other experiences as a teacher, and efforts to retrieve the utter wretchedness and destitution of the peasant children, we come to Pestalozzi's last school. In 1805 the canton of Vaud gave him the use of an old castle at Yverdun. Here he settled for life. Those who could afford to pay paid tuition. Assistants were employed. Pestalozzi's writings made him known. The fame of his school spread abroad. Many celebrated visitors came to see. Young Froebel, then an instructor at Frankfurt, tramped across country to visit him. Herbart, the famous educator, came and wrote that he was so charmed with the earnestness and the spirit of concert reading that it impressed him like the music of a choir, and that he had to resist an impulse to put off the attitude of visitor and to join with the children in their happy work.

So far as the art of teaching is concerned Pestalozzi was crude. Nevertheless he contributed one fundamental idea. He insisted that children should not be allowed to memorize merely, but should be led, step by step, to understand. So far as pertains to the spirit of teaching, he was the kindly apostle of a new day in the German schoolroom. German teachers are still harsher than American teachers, but they owe much to the example and precept of Pestalozzi.

Between Neuhof and Yverdun he wrote two books, Leonard and Gertrude and How Gertrude Teaches Her Children. They are simple, sympathetic, educational classics. Bearing in mind the wretched, poverty-stricken villagers of the day, the barrenness of village life, and the harsh methods that prevailed, the reader can gain from these little volumes the ideas that made Pestalozzi famous.

In 1825 he left Yverdun to quarrelsome associates and, now a grayhaired man of seventy-nine, turned his back on his life work. "It seems to me," wrote he, "as though in retiring I were putting an end to my very life." None the less, he sought every opportunity to speak in public and in the classroom on the proper method of teaching young children. He died at Brugg, February 17, 1827. He was buried at Birr, the village on the border of which Neuhof stood. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth the authorities of the canton caused a memorial tablet to be affixed on the gable end of the schoolhouse of Birr. It bears these words, in German, of course:

Here rests Heinrich Pestalozzi, born in Zurich, the 17th of February, 1827. Savior of the Poor at Neuhof, at Stanz the Father of Orphans, at Burgdorf the Founder of the People's School, at Yverdun the Instructor of Mankind-Man, Christian, Citizen. All for others, nothing for himself. Peace be to his Ashes!