(1746-1827)
[Illustration: Jean Henri Pestalozzi. [TN]]
Those of us who can look back forty years must well remember the fancy
that society took, on a sudden, to interrogate children. It is an odd
thing to recall now one of the strangest fashions of a period full of
wild fashions. After a long term of insular seclusion, through the war,
we welcomed all sorts of foreigners to our soil, and all manner of
foreign notions to our minds. The grand discovery of the benefit of
questioning children made great way in the country, and among some of
the best-hearted people in it. Wherever one went, among the educated
classes, one found the same thing going on. Children of all ages, but
especially the younger, were undergoing cross-examination from morning
till night. It was a terrible time for them. I have seen some fall into
a habit of tears when asked a question which they could not answer. I
have seen more fall into a habit of glib lying, under the teazing
constraint. I have seen tempers ruined for life by the constant
irritation, and most old people can probably say that they have seen
promising intellects frittered away; minds above the average at the
outset of life rendered incurably desultory, shallow, and conceited. If
there are readers of Wordsworth who are puzzled at this day about the
drift of his poem, called "Anecdote for Fathers, Showing how the
Practice of Lying May be Taught," let them remember that it was written
at a time when "the Pestalozzian system" was in vogue in England, and
throughout Europe; and then they will see what a good lesson it yields.
If, at this day, the image flits across our memories of some pale child,
with a fretful brow, red eyes, and a constant disposition to get out of
the room, or to hide behind the window curtains, when spoken to, we may
refer that image back to the days of the "Pestalozzian system," as it
was fashionably understood in this country.
It was a cruel injustice to Pestalozzi to render him responsible for all
this mischief. His mission was, not to craze children's brains and break
their hearts, but the very contrary. We, in fact, gave his name to a
mere reaction from a mistake of our own--to one kind of ignorance into
which we fell in our escape from another.
In our desire for popular education, early in the century, we had
supposed the thing to be done was to put certain facts into the
learner's mind--to lay them upon his memory, as it were. To quicken and
spread the process, we set children who had learned a thing one minute
to teach it to other children the next. This did not answer. We called
it "the Lancasterian system," and supposed the nation would be educated
in a trice. When we found, at the end of ten or twenty years, that boys
and girls left school after sitting nine years on the benches, unable to
do any good with book or pen, while they had lost their home-training in
the workshop, the field, or the dairy, we were ready for a reaction; and
to that reaction we most unjustly gave the name of "Pestalozzian
system."
The notion was that we had been all wrong in putting knowledge into
children's heads; and that the right way was to get ideas out of them.
Henceforth we were to develop faculties, and not impose knowledge. It
was a great day for us when the conception was formed, and began to
spread. Without it, education would never have advanced even as far as
it has. But we blundered over it sadly at first; and among our mistakes,
it was not the least that we christened our follies after Pestalozzi.
Every great step in social progress is taken in the name of some
representative man. It is the business of those who come after to
absolve those representatives from the disrepute of mistakes which were
none of theirs; and we may hope that Pestalozzi's memory has long been
clear from the charge of torturing on the rack of cross-examination the
generation of children whom he loved so well. What it was that he did
propose is best seen by looking at his life; for, if he was not a very
practical man in the sense of wisely conducted affairs, he was still
less of a theorist. He knew very well what he meant and what he wanted;
but he had no compact system to propose, grounded on any new theory of
the human faculties. The foremost man in the educational revolution of
modern times, he obeyed his instincts, and left it for incompetent
followers to make a scheme of doctrine out of what he said and did.
What were those instincts? And how did he use them?
We first see him as a very peculiar little boy, whose best friend was
his mother's maid, Barbara. His name is Italian, but he was a Swiss. His
ancestors had been citizens of Milan; but one of them, becoming
Protestant at the time of the Reformation, had to seek a Protestant
country to live in, and went to Zurich. The father of this little John
Henry was a physician. He died so early that he left a very bare
provision for his widow and their only son; and, aware of the prudence
that their circumstances would require, he recommended them, on his
death-bed, to the care of the trusty maid Barbara, who fully justified
the confidence. She carried them through with an appearance of
respectability on the smallest means, and nourished the pride of narrow
circumstances in the boy, in striving to avoid the opposite fault of
meanness. She told him that no Pestalozzi had ever eaten the bread of
dependence, and that his mother's self-denial raised him above the
degradation suffered by many another orphan in Zurich. These lessons and
Barbara's own character, account for much of the passionate advocacy of
the claims and the independence of the poor, and of the respect for
their virtue, which were the chief features of the whole life of the
man. From six years old, when his father died, he looked upon all
orphans with an interest compounded of fellow-feeling and of lofty pity
for their inferiority in independence. His great, but as yet
unconscious, desire was to help the whole class to independence.
It does not appear why he devoted himself, as he grew up, to the study
of languages. Probably he had no choice as to the course of his
training; but we find him, so early as the age of eighteen, leaving that
study and preparing himself with great zeal for the pulpit. His deeply
religious nature might well indicate this career; but he early failed in
it and gave it up. His first attempt to preach ended in mortification,
and it is not difficult to perceive why. His education must have been
defective, for, to the end of his long life, he spoke a jargon of German
or French, sometimes mixing the two; a kind of language which none but
his intimates could comprehend. His articulation was defective; his
countenance was so ugly as to be forbidding; and, during the latter part
of his life at least, his personal habits were worse than slovenly. The
failure in the pulpit is not wonderful; nor yet that in the law, which
he tried next. He turned again to his first pursuit, and published some
philological writings. While eager about a new method of teaching Latin,
he one day took up Rousseau's "Emile," and the book determined the whole
course of his life.
Insisting that the pursuit of learning was the most unnatural of human
occupations, he not only gave it up, but burned all his papers; not only
his notes, but manuscripts on Swiss law and Swiss history. He would live
henceforth as a son of the soil. He sold his small patrimony to buy a
bit of land to farm; married the daughter of a merchant of Zurich, and
began domestic life at two and twenty. His wife's connection gave him an
interest in a cotton manufactory; and he became well acquainted with two
classes of laborers at once. The discovery of their intellectual
degradation shocked him. Both the farm-laborers and the spinners were so
inferior to the poor of his imagination, that he was at once stimulated
and dismayed. He was thirty when he set about the sort of work which
made him the world's benefactor. He collected about fifty poor and
desolate children on his little estate, lived with them in a state of
hardship, taught them to work, and to think, and to read, and made
friends of them. In the absence of other assistants, he adopted the plan
of setting them to teach one another; a feature of his method which
recommended it where the Lancasterian system existed. Having no skill,
and no prudence in the management of affairs, he was soon ruined, and
the establishment was broken up.
This was the occasion of his giving us the book which made his name
famous all over Europe. To explain his views, and to get immediate means
of support, he wrote "Leonard and Gertrude," which might soon after be
seen on the tables of all benevolent and literary persons in all
countries. Its disclosure of continental peasant life was perhaps the
first charm to us; but it also changed the character of educational
effort in England as elsewhere. Perhaps this popularity gave the good
man honor in his own country.
After the Revolutionary War in Switzerland, the Canton of Unterwalden
was overrun with wretched children who seemed to belong to nobody. They
prowled about the burned hamlets, and infested town and country like
little wolves. The government asked Pestalozzi to take charge of some of
them, and offered him some little aid. It was a singular spectacle when
this uncouth man, then in the vigor of his years (it was in 1798),
entered the ruins of a ravaged convent, with his mob of one hundred and
fifty outcast children. He was all alone with them; and some of them
were sickly and stunted; many were fretful; and not a few ferocious, or
malicious, or impudent, or full of suspicion and falsehood. He lived and
labored among them, nursed them, taught them, and soon began to open
their minds and gain their hearts. In a little while their avidity for
knowledge astonished him. The facts of the case indicate that he had an
aptitude for communicating with children's minds that amounted to
genius. Our mistake, twenty years later, was in supposing that the
virtue lay in that part of the method which could be imitated.
Pestalozzi, conversing with young creatures who had never supposed that
anybody cared for them, surprised them by his interest in what they felt
and thought. His questions roused their faculties, and sent a glow
through their feelings; and their improvement transcended all precedent.
Reports of his conversation and his achievements set others to work; and
there was such an interrogation of children as was never dreamed of
before.
One question which Pestalozzi asked of this set of pupils is memorable.
They had seen Altdorf in flames. About those blackened ruins there were
again desolate children, living as they could. Pestalozzi sounded the
minds of his pupils as to doing something in the case. When they eagerly
desired to take in twenty among them, Pestalozzi asked them whether they
could bear the consequences. They must work harder even than now; they
must live yet more barely; they might have to share their dinners and
their clothes with strangers whom they might not like. He would not
allow a rash decision. He made them fully understand what they were
undertaking, and put off the settlement of the question. Still, the
pupils said, "Let them come!"
The ravage of the war swept away this institution; but Pestalozzi could
never again be overlooked. His special function was recognized at home
and abroad. His books were translated into many languages; and the
emperors and kings of Europe were eager to apply his wisdom to the
education of their people. He was summoned to Paris to join a
consultation on the interests of Switzerland, ordered by Napoleon. But
he made his escape from Paris at the first possible moment; he did not
want imperial patronage which interfered with his work at home; but he
would have nothing to do with politics. He desired to live with children
and the poor, to open their minds, and make them good and happy.
It seemed as if he had attained his utmost wishes when the town of
Yverdun offered him its castle and grounds for a school, with perfect
freedom as to the management. For a few years the promise of educational
advancement was truly splendid. Some of Pestalozzi's own pupils became
able and devoted assistants; and other young men of the highest
qualifications devoted themselves as apostles of his mission. Here and
there over Europe establishments arose where boys, and sometimes girls,
were trained at once in industry and intellectual progress. Those who
were in the gardens, or the harvest field, or the dairy at one time of
the day, were studying languages, mathematics, or music at other hours.
And where this direct imitation of the Swiss establishments was not
attempted, there was a visible improvement in methods of instruction. We
learned to see that books and education, books and teaching, are not the
same thing. Oral instruction came into use elsewhere than at mothers'
knees; and amid some gross abuses, "the Pestalozzian system" began to
work great good.
There is almost always some dreary chapter in the history of these
representative men. In Pestalozzi's there were several; but the
dreariest of all was the last.
There never was a movement which depended more entirely for success on
the personal qualifications of its agents. We need not look further than
the next street, or the next house, to see how one person differs from
another in the faculty of genuine intercourse with children's minds. The
smallness of the number of the well-endowed with this power, is the best
reason for the large use of books in schools; and Pestalozzi's genius
for companionship with inferior minds caused a too exclusive recourse to
oral instruction. Thus, when assistants came upon the scene, there was
diversity, disagreement, disappointment, and no little disorder. We need
not go into the painful story of warring tempers and incompatible
interests. The institution declined for some years, and then was broken
up--the government of the Canton warning the manager of the concern, who
acted in Pestalozzi's name, to leave the country.
[Illustration: Pestalozzi, the children's friend.]
It needs no explanation that Pestalozzi was in some respects weak. The
failure of all his establishments and his inability to keep out of debt
show this. His faculties of imagination and sympathy overpowered the
rest of his mind. He early seized a great truth--that of the claim of
every human being to the full development of his faculties, whatever
they may be; and the concentration of his strongest powers on this great
truth made him a social reformer of a high order. He was not a
philosopher; he was not a man of good sense, or temper, or practical
ability, generally speaking; though sense, temper, and ability appeared
to be all transcendent in the particular direction taken by his
genius. Among his inferiors--and particularly friendless children--he
was a prophet and apostle; among men he was a child, and sometimes a
perverse one.
He died at the age of eighty-one, preserving, in the midst of great
pain, his enthusiasm for justice, his special love for children and the
poor, and his strong religious sentiment. Two days before his death he
spoke long and nobly, while taking leave of his family and his
enterprises. His country, and we hope the world, has remembered his good
offices to society, and forgiven his foibles.