480. German Pedagogy.—For two centuries Germany has been the classical land of pedagogy; and to render an account of all the efforts put forth in that country in the domain of education it would be necessary to write several volumes.

From the opening of the eighteenth century, says Dittes, “a change for the better takes place. Ideas become facts. The importance of education is more and more recognized; pedagogy shakes off the ancient dust of the school and interests itself in actual life; it is no longer willing to be a collateral function of the Church, but begins to become an independent art and science. A few theologians will still render it important service, but in general they will do this outside the Church, and often in opposition to it.”

While awaiting the grand and fruitful impulsion of Pestalozzi, the history of pedagogy ought to mention at least the Pietists, “whose educational establishments contributed to prepare the way for the new methods,” and after them, the Philanthropists, of whom Basedow is the most celebrated representative.

481. The Pietists and Francke (1663-1727).—Francke played nearly the same part in Germany that La Salle did in France. He founded two establishments at Halle, the PÆdagogium and the Orphan Asylum, which, in 1727, contained more than two thousand pupils. He belonged to the sect of Pietists, Lutherans who professed an austere morality, and, in conformity with the principles of his denomination, he made piety the supreme end of education.

That which distinguishes and commends Francke, is his talent for organization. He was right in giving marked attention to the material condition of schools and to needed supplies of apparatus. The PÆdagogium was installed in 1715 in comfortable quarters, and there were annexed to it a botanical garden, a museum of natural history, physical apparatus, a chemical and an anatomical laboratory, and a shop for the cutting and polishing of glass.

After him his disciples, Niemeyer, Semler, and Hecker, continued his work, and, in certain respects, reformed it. They founded the first real schools of Germany. They kept up the practical spirit, the professional pedagogy of their master, and assured the development of those educational establishments which still exist to-day under the name of the Institutions of Francke.

482. The Philanthropists and Basedow (1723-1790).—With Basedow, a more liberal spirit, borrowed in part from Rousseau, gained entrance into German pedagogy. Basedow founded at Dessau a school which received the praise of the philosopher Kant, and of the clergyman Oberlin. He designated it by a name which reflects his humanitarian intentions, the Philanthropinum. In the methods which he employed in it he seems always to have had before his eyes the exclamation of Rousseau: “Things, things! Too many words!” The intuitive method, or that of teaching by sight, was practised in the school of Dessau.

The principal work of Basedow, his Elementary Book, is scarcely more than the Orbis Pictus of Comenius reconstructed according to the principles of Rousseau. At Dessau, the pretence was made of teaching a language in six months. “Our methods,” says Basedow, “make studies only one-third as long and thrice as agreeable.” An abuse was made of mechanical exercises. The children, at the command of the master: Imitamini sartorem,—Imitamini sutorem,—all began to imitate the motions of a tailor who is sewing, or of a shoemaker who is using his awl. Graver still, Basedow made such an abuse of object lessons as to represent to children certain scenes within the sick-chamber, for the purpose of teaching them their duties and obligations to their mothers.[216]

483. Schools for the People.—Great efforts were made in the eighteenth century, in the Catholic, as well as in the Protestant countries of Germany, towards the development of popular instruction. Maria Theresa and Frederick II. considered public instruction as an affair of the State. Private enterprise was added to the efforts of the government. In Prussia, a nobleman, Rochow (1734-1805), founded village schools; and in Austria, two ecclesiastics, Felbiger (1724-1788) and Kindermann (1740-1801), contributed by their activity in education to the reform of schools.

Nevertheless, the results were still very poor, and the public school, especially the village school, remained in a sorry condition.

“Almost everywhere,” says Dittes, “there were employed as teachers, domestics, corrupt artisans, discharged soldiers, degraded students, and, in general, persons of questionable morality and education. Their pay was mean, and their authority slight. Attendance at school, generally very irregular, was almost everywhere entirely suspended in summer. Many villages had no school, and scarcely anywhere was the school attended by all the children. In many countries, most of the children, especially the girls, were wholly without instruction. The people, especially the peasantry, regarded the school as a burden. The clergy, it is true, always regarded themselves as the proprietors of the school, but on the whole they did but very little for it, and even arrested its progress. The nobility was but little favorable, in general, to intellectual culture for the people.... Instruction remained mechanical and the discipline rude. It is reported that a Suabian schoolmaster, who died in 1782, had inflicted during his experience in teaching 911,527 canings, 124,010 whippings, 10,235 boxes on the ear, and 1,115,800 thumps on the head. Moreover, he had made boys kneel 777 times on triangular sticks, had caused the fool’s cap to be worn 5001[217] times, and the stick to be held in air 1707 times. He had used something like 3000 words of abuse....”

484. Pestalozzi (1746-1827).—In Switzerland, the situation of primary instruction was scarcely better. The teachers were gathered up at hazard; their pay was wretched; in general they had no lodgings of their own, and they were obliged to hire themselves out for domestic service among the well-off inhabitants of the villages, in order to find food and lodging among them. A mean spirit of caste still dominated instruction, and the poor remained sunk in ignorance.

It was in the very midst of this wretched and unpropitious state of affairs that there appeared, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the most celebrated of modern educators, a man who, we may be sure, was not exempt from faults, whose mind had deficiencies and weaknesses, and whom we have no intention of shielding from criticism, by covering him with the praises of a superstitious admiration; but who is pre-eminently great by reason of his unquenchable love for the people, his ardent self-sacrifice, and his pedagogic instinct. During the eighty years of his troubled life, Pestalozzi never ceased to work for children, and to devote himself to their instruction. War or the ill-will of his countrymen destroyed his schools to no purpose. Without ever despairing, he straightway rebuilt them farther away, sometimes succeeding, through the gift of ardent speech, which never deserted him, in communicating the inspiration to those about him; gathering up in all places orphans and vagabonds, like a kidnapper of a new species; forgetting that he was poor, when he saw an occasion to be charitable, and that he was ill, when it was necessary to teach; and, finally, pursuing with an unconquerable energy, through hindrances and obstacles of every description, his educational apostleship. “It is death or success!” he wrote. “My zeal to accomplish the dream of my life would have carried me through air or through fire, no matter how, to the highest peak of the Alps!”

485. The Education of Pestalozzi.—The life of Pestalozzi is intimately related to his educational work. To comprehend the educator, it is first necessary to have become acquainted with the man.

Born at Zurich in 1746, Pestalozzi died at Brugg in Argovia in 1827. This unfortunate great man always felt the effects of the sentimental and unpractical education given him by his mother, who was left a widow with three children in 1751. He early formed the habit of feeling and of being touched with emotion, rather than of reasoning and of reflecting. The laughing-stock of his companions, who made sport of his awkwardness, the little scholar of Zurich accustomed himself to live alone and to become a dreamer. Later, towards 1760, the student of the academy distinguished himself by his political enthusiasm and his revolutionary daring. At that early period he had conceived a profound feeling for the miseries and the needs of the people, and he already proposed as the purpose of his life the healing of the diseases of society. At the same time there was developed in him an irresistible taste for a simple, frugal, and almost ascetic life. To restrain his desires had become the essential rule of his conduct, and, to put it in practice, he forced himself to sleep on a plank, and to subsist on bread and vegetables. Life in the open air had an especial attraction for him. Each year he spent his vacations in the country at his grandfather’s, who was a minister at Hoengg. Omne malum ex urbe was his favorite thought.

486. Pestalozzi an Agriculturist (1765-1775).—Pestalozzi’s call to be a teacher manifested itself at first only by some vague aspirations, of which it would be easy to find the trace in the short essays of his youth, and in the articles which he contributed in his twentieth year to a students’ journal published at Zurich. After having tried his hand unsuccessfully at theology and law, he became an agriculturist. When he established at Neuhof an agricultural enterprise, he thought less of enriching himself than of raising the material condition of the Swiss peasantry by organizing new industries. But notwithstanding his good intent, and the assistance of the devoted woman whom he had married in 1769, Anna Schultess, Pestalozzi, more enterprising than skillful, failed in his industrial establishments. In 1775 he had exhausted his resources. It is then that he formed an heroic resolution which typifies his indiscreet generosity. Poor, and scarcely more than able to support himself, he opened on his farm an asylum for poor children.

487. How Pestalozzi became an Educator.—The asylum for poor children at Neuhof (1775-1780) is, so to speak, the first step in the pedagogical career of Pestalozzi. The others will be the orphan asylum at Stanz (1798-1799), the primary schools at Burgdorf (1799), the institute at Burgdorf (1801-1804), and, finally, the institute at Yverdun (1805-1825).

The first question that is raised when we study systems of education, is, how the authors of those systems became teachers.

The best, perhaps, are those who became such because of their great love for humanity, or because of their tender love for their children. Pestalozzi is of this class. It is because he has ardently dreamed from his youth of the moral amelioration of the people; and it is also because he has followed with a tender solicitude the first steps of his little son Jacob on life’s journey, that he became a great teacher.

488. The Education of his Son.—The Father’s Journal,[218] where Pestalozzi noted from day to day the progress of his child, shows him intent on applying the principles of Rousseau. At the age of eleven, Jacob, like Émile, did not yet know how to read or to write. Things before words, the intuition of sensible objects, few exercises in judgment, respect for the powers of the child, an equal anxiety to husband his liberty and to secure his obedience, the constant endeavor to diffuse joy and good humor over education,—such were the principal traits of the education which Pestalozzi gave his son, an education which was a real experiment in pedagogy, from which the pupil perhaps suffered somewhat, but from which humanity was to derive profit. From this period Pestalozzi conceived some of the ideas which became the principles of his method. The father had made the educator. One of the superiorities of Pestalozzi over Rousseau is, that he loved and educated his own child.

489. The Asylum at Neuhof.—Madame de StaËl was right in saying that “we must consider Pestalozzi’s school as limited to childhood. The education which it gives is designed only for the common people.” And, in fact, the first and the last establishments of Pestalozzi were schools for small children. In the last years of his life, when he was obliged to leave the institute of Yverdun, he returned to Neuhof, and there had constructed a school for poor children.

The school at Neuhof was to be above all else, in Pestalozzi’s thought, an experiment in moral and material regeneration through labor, through order, and through instruction. Many exercises in language, singing, reading of the Bible,—such were the intellectual occupations. But the greater part of the time was devoted to agricultural labor, to the cultivation of madder.

Notwithstanding his admirable devotion, Pestalozzi did not long succeed in his philanthropic plans. He had to contend against the prejudices of parents, and the ingratitude of the children. Very often the little beggars whom he had gathered up waited only till they had received from him new clothing, and then ran away and resumed their vagabond life. Besides, he lacked resources. He became poor, and fell more and more into debt. His friends, who had aided him on the start, warned him that he would die in a hospital or in a mad-house.

“For thirty years,” he says himself, “my life was a desperate struggle against the most frightful poverty.... More than a thousand times I was obliged to go without dinner, and at noon, when even the poorest were seated around a table, I devoured a morsel of bread upon the highway ...; and all this that I might minister to the needs of the poor, by the realization of my principles.”

490. Pestalozzi a Writer.—After the check to his undertaking at Neuhof, Pestalozzi renounced for some time all practical activity, and it was by his writings that he manifested, from 1780 to 1787, his zeal in education.

In 1780 appeared the Evening Hours of a Recluse, a series of aphorisms on the rise of a people through education. In this, Pestalozzi sharply criticised the artificial method of the school, and insisted on the necessity of developing the soul through what is within,—through interior culture:—

“The school everywhere puts the order of words before the order of free nature.”

“The home is the basis of the education of humanity.”

“Man, it is within yourself, it is in the inner sense of your power, that resides nature’s instrument for your development.”

491. Leonard and Gertrude.—In 1781 Pestalozzi published the first volume of Leonard and Gertrude. He had written it within the blank spaces of an old account book. This book, the most celebrated perhaps of all Pestalozzi’s writings, is a sort of popular romance in which the author brings upon the stage a family of working-people. Gertrude here represents the ideas of Pestalozzi on the education of children. The three other volumes (1783, 1785, 1787) relate the regeneration of a village through the concerted action of legislation, administration, religion, and the school, and especially the school, “which is the centre whence everything should proceed.”

Leonard and Gertrude is the only one of Pestalozzi’s works which Diesterweg[219] recommends to practical teachers.

“It was my first word,” says Pestalozzi, “to the heart of the poor and of the abandoned of the land.”

In making Gertrude the principal character of his romance, Pestalozzi wished to emphasize one of his fundamental ideas, which was to place the instruction and the education of the people in the hands of mothers.

492. New Experiments in Agriculture.—From 1787 to 1797 Pestalozzi returned to farming. It is from this period that date his relations with Fellenberg, the celebrated founder of Agricultural Institutes, and with the philosopher Fichte, who showed him the agreement of his ideas with the doctrine of Kant. His name began to become celebrated, and, in 1792, the Legislative Assembly proclaimed him a French citizen, in company with Washington and Klopstock.

During these years of farm labor, Pestalozzi had meditated different works which appeared in 1797.

493. Other Works of Pestalozzi.—Educational thought pervades all the literary works of Pestalozzi. Thus his Fables, short compositions in prose, all have a moral and educational tendency. Also, in his Researches on the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race, he sought to justify the preponderant office which he accorded to nature in the education of man. But Pestalozzi was not successful in philosophical dissertations.

“This book,” he says himself, “is to me only another proof of my lack of ability; it is simply a diversion of my imaginative faculty, a work relatively weak.... No one,” he adds, “understands me, and it has been hinted that the whole work has been taken for nonsense.”

This judgment is severe, but it is only just. Pestalozzi had an intuition of truth, but he was incapable of giving a theoretical demonstration of it. His thought all aglow, and his language all imagery, did not submit to the concise and methodical exposition of abstract truths.

494. The Orphan Asylum at Stanz (1798-1799).—Up to 1798 Pestalozzi had scarcely found the occasion to put in practice his principles and his dreams. The Helvetic Revolution, which he hailed with enthusiasm as the signal of a social regeneration for his country, finally gave him the means of making a trial of his theories, which, by a strange destiny, had been applied by other hands before having been applied by his own.

The Helvetic government, whose sentiments were in harmony with the democratic sentiments of Pestalozzi, offered him the direction of a normal school. But he declined, in order that he might remain a teacher. He was about to take charge of a school, the plan of which he had organized, when events called him to direct an orphan asylum at Stanz.

495. Methods followed at Stanz.—From six to eight o’clock in the morning, and from four to eight in the afternoon, Pestalozzi heard the lessons of his pupils. The rest of the time was devoted to manual labor. Even during the lesson, the child at Stanz “drew, wrote, and worked.” To establish order in a school which contained eighty pupils, Pestalozzi had the idea of resorting to rhythm; “and it was found,” he says, “that the rhythmical pronunciation increased the impression produced by the lesson.” Having to do with pupils absolutely ignorant, he kept them for a long time on the elements; he practised them on the first elements till they had mastered them. He simplified the methods, and sought in each branch of instruction a point of departure adapted to the nascent faculties of the child. The mode of teaching was simultaneous. All the pupils repeated in a high tone of voice the words of the teacher; but the instruction was also mutual:—

“Children instructed children; they themselves tried the experiment; all I did was to suggest it. Here again I obeyed necessity. Not having a single assistant, I had the idea of putting one of the most advanced pupils between two others who were less advanced.”

Reading was combined with writing. Natural history and geography were taught to children under the form of conversational lessons.

But what engrossed Pestalozzi above all else was to develop the moral sentiments and the interior forces of the conscience. He wished to make himself loved by his pupils, to awaken among them, in their daily association, sentiments of fraternal affection, to excite the conception of each virtue before formulating its precept, and to give the children moral lessons through the influence of nature which surrounded them and through the activity which was imposed on them.

Pestalozzi’s chimera, in the organization at Stanz, was to transport into the school the conditions of domestic life—the desire to be a father to a hundred children.

“I was convinced that my heart would change the condition of my children just as promptly as the sun of spring would reanimate the earth benumbed by the winter.”

“It was necessary that my children should observe, from dawn to evening, at every moment of the day, upon my brow and on my lips, that my affections were fixed on them, that their happiness was my happiness, and that their pleasures were my pleasures.”

“I was everything to my children. I was alone with them from morning till night.... Their hands were in my hands. Their eyes were fixed on my eyes.”

496. Results accomplished.—Without plan, without apparent order; merely by the action and incessant communication of his ardent soul with children ignorant and perverted by misery; reduced to his own resources in a house where he was himself “steward, accountant, footman, and almost servant all in one,” Pestalozzi obtained surprising results.

“I saw at Stanz,” he says, “the power of the human faculties.... My pupils developed rapidly; it was another race.... The children very soon felt that there existed in them forces which they did not know, and in particular they acquired a general sentiment of order and beauty. They were self-conscious, and the impression of weariness which habitually reigns in schools vanished like a shadow from my class-room. They willed, they had power, they persevered, they succeeded, and they were happy. They were not scholars who were learning, but children who felt unknown forces awakening within them, and who understood where these forces could and would lead them, and this feeling gave elevation to their mind and heart.”

“It is out of the folly of Stanz,” says Roger de Guimps, “that has come the primary school of the nineteenth century.”

While the pupils prospered, the master fell sick of overwork. When the events of the war closed the orphan asylum, it was quite time for the health of Pestalozzi. He raised blood and was at the limit of his strength.

497. The Schools of Burgdorf (1799-1802).—As soon as he had recovered his health, Pestalozzi resumed the course of his experiments. Not without difficulty he succeeded in having entrusted to him a small class in a primary school of Burgdorf. He passed for an ignoramus.

“It was whispered that I could neither write, nor compute, nor even read decently.” Pestalozzi does not defend himself against the charge, but acknowledges his incapacity, and even asserts that it is to his advantage.

“My incapacity in these respects was certainly an indispensable condition for my discovery of the simplest method of teaching.”

What troubled him most in the school at Burgdorf “was that it was subjected to rules.” “Never in my life had I borne such a burden. I was discouraged. I cringed under the routine yoke of the school.”

Nevertheless, Pestalozzi succeeded admirably in his little school. Then more advanced pupils were given him, but here his success was less. He always proceeded without a plan, and he gave himself great trouble in obtaining results that he might have attained much more easily with a little more system. Blunders, irregularities, and whimsicalities were ever compromising the action of his good will. To be convinced of this, it suffices to read the books which he published at this period, and in particular the most celebrated, of which we shall proceed to give a brief analysis.

498. How Gertrude teaches her Children.—It is under this title that in 1801 Pestalozzi published an exposition of his doctrine.[220] “It is the most important and the most profound of all his pedagogical writings,” says one of his biographers. We shall not dispute this; but this book also proves how the mind of Pestalozzi was inferior to his heart, how the writer was of less worth than the teacher. Composed under the form of letters addressed to Gessner, the work of Pestalozzi is too often a tissue of declamations, of rambling thoughts, and of personal grievances. It is the work of a brain that is in a state of ferment, and of a heart that is overflowing. The thought is painfully disentangled from out a thousand repetitions. Why need we be astonished at this literary incompetence of Pestalozzi when he himself makes the following confession: “For thirty years I had not read a single book; I could not longer read them.”

499. Pestalozzi’s Style.—The style of Pestalozzi is the very man himself: desultory, obscure, confused, but with sudden flashes and brilliant illuminations in which the warmth of his heart is exhibited. There are also too many comparisons; the imagery overwhelms the idea. Within a few pages he will compare himself, in succession, “to a sailor, who, having lost his harpoon, would try to catch a whale with a hook,” to depict the disproportion between his resources and his purpose; then to a straw, which even a cat would not lay hold of, to tell how he was despised; to an owl, to express his isolation; to a reed, to indicate his feebleness; to a mouse which fears a cat, to characterize his timidity.

500. Analysis of the Gertrude.—It is not easy to analyze one of Pestalozzi’s books. To begin with, How Gertrude teaches her Children is a very bad title, for Gertrude is not once mentioned in it. This proper name became for Pestalozzi an allegorical term by which he personifies himself.

The first three letters are rather autobiographical memoirs than an exposition of doctrine. Pestalozzi here relates his first experiments, and makes us acquainted with his assistants at Burgdorf,—KrÜsi, Tobler, and Buss. In the letters which follow, the author attempts to set forth the general principles of his method. The seventh treats of language; the eighth, of the intuition of forms, of writing, and of drawing; the ninth, of the intuition of numbers and of computation; the tenth and twelfth, of intuition in general. For Pestalozzi, intuition was, as we know, direct and experimental perception, either in the domain of sense, or in the interior regions of the consciousness. Finally, the last letters are devoted to moral and religious development.

Without designing to follow, in all its ramblings and in all its digressions, the mobile thought of Pestalozzi, we shall gather up some of the general ideas which abound in this overcharged and badly composed work.

501. Methods Simplified.—The purpose of Pestalozzi was indeed, in one sense, as he was told by one of his friends, to mechanize instruction. He wished, in fact, to simplify and determine methods to such a degree that they might be employed by the most ordinary teacher, and by the most ignorant father and mother. In a word, he hoped to organize a pedagogical machine so well set up that it could in a manner run alone.

“I believe,” he says, “that we must not dream of making progress in the instruction of the people as long as we have not found the forms of instruction which make of the teacher, at least so far as the completion of the elementary studies is concerned, the simple mechanical instrument of a method which owes its results to the nature of its processes, and not to the ability of the one who uses it. I assert that a school-book has no value, save as it can be employed by a master without instruction as well as by one who has been taught.”

This was sheer exaggeration, and was putting too little value on the personal effort and merit of teachers. On this score, it would be useless to found normal schools. Pestalozzi, moreover, has given in his own person a striking contradiction to this singular theory; for he owed his success in teaching much more to the influence of his living speech, and to the ardent communication of the passion by which his heart was animated, than to the methodical processes which he never succeeded in combining in an efficient manner.

502. The Socratic Method.—Pestalozzi recommends the Socratic method, and he indicates with exactness some of the conditions necessary for the employment of that method. He first observes that it requires on the part of the teacher uncommon ability.

“A superficial and uncultivated intelligence,” he says, “does not sound the depths whence a Socrates made spring up intelligence and truth.”

Besides, the Socratic method can be employed only with pupils who already have some instruction. It is absolutely impracticable with children who lack both the point of departure, that is, preliminary notions, and the means of expressing these notions, that is, a knowledge of language. And as it is always necessary that Pestalozzi’s thought should wind up with a figure of speech, he adds:—

“In order that the goshawk and the eagle may plunder eggs from other birds, it is first necessary that the latter should deposit eggs in their nests.”

503. Word, Form, and Number.—A favorite idea of Pestalozzi, which remained at Yverdun, as at Burgdorf, the principle of his exercises in teaching, is that all elementary knowledge can and should be related to three principles,—word, form, and number. To the word he attached language, to form, writing and drawing, and to number, computation.

“This was,” he says, “like a ray of light in my researches, like a Deus ex machina!” Nothing justifies such enthusiasm. It would be very easy to show that Pestalozzi’s classification, besides that it offers no practical interest, is not justifiable from the theoretical point of view, first because one of the elements of his trilogy, the word, or language, comprises the other two; and then because a large part of knowledge, for example, all physical qualities, does not permit the distinction of which he was superstitiously fond.

504. Intuitive Exercises.—What is of more value is the importance which Pestalozzi ascribes to intuition. An incident worthy of note is that it is not Pestalozzi himself, but one of the children of his school, who first had the idea of the direct observation of the objects which serve as the text for the lesson. One day as, according to his custom, he was giving his pupils a long description of what they observed in a drawing where a window was represented, he noticed that one of his little auditors, instead of looking at the picture, was attentively studying the real window of the school-room.

From that moment Pestalozzi put aside all his drawings, and took the objects themselves for subjects of observation.

“The child,” he said, “wishes nothing to intervene between nature and himself.”

Ramsauer, a pupil at Burgdorf, has described, not without some inaccuracy perhaps, the intuitive exercises which Pestalozzi offered to his pupils:—

“The exercises in language were the best we had, especially those which had reference to the wainscoting of the school-room. He spent whole hours before that wainscoting, very old and torn, busy in examining the holes and rents, with respect to number, form, position, and color, and in formulating our observations in sentences more or less developed. Then Pestalozzi would ask us, Boys, what do you see? (He never mentioned the girls.)

Pupil: I see a hole in the wainscoting.

Pestalozzi: Very well; repeat after me:—

I see a hole in the wainscoting.
I see a large hole in the wainscoting.
Through the hole I see the wall, etc., etc.”

505. The Book for Mothers.—In 1803 Pestalozzi published a work on elementary instruction, which remained unfinished, entitled The Book for Mothers. This was another Orbis Pictus without pictures. Pestalozzi’s intention was to introduce the child to a knowledge of the objects of nature or of art which fall under his observation. In this he tarried too long over the description of the organs of the body and of their functions. A French critic, Dussault, said, with reference to this:—

“Pestalozzi gives himself much trouble to teach children that their nose is in the middle of their face.” In his anxiety to be simple and elementary, Pestalozzi often succeeds in reality in making instruction puerile. On the other hand, the PÈre Girard complains that the exercises in language which compose The Book for Mothers, “really very well arranged, are also very dry and monotonous.”

506. A Swiss Teacher in 1793.—To form a just estimate of the efforts of Pestalozzi and his assistants, we must take into account the wretched state of instruction at the period when they attempted to reform the methods of teaching. KrÜsi, Pestalozzi’s first assistant, one of those who were perhaps the nearest his heart, has himself related how he became a teacher. He was eighteen, and till then his only employment had been that of a peddler for his father. One day, as he was going about his business with a heavy load of merchandise on his shoulders, he meets on the road a revenue officer of the State, and they enter into conversation. “Do you know,” said the officer, “that the teacher of Gais is about to leave his school? Would you not like to succeed him?—It is not a question of what I would like; a school-master should have knowledge, in which I am absolutely lacking.—What a school-master can and should know with us, you might easily learn at your age.”—KrÜsi reflected, went to work, and copied more than a hundred times a specimen of writing which he had procured; and he declares that this was his only preparation. He registered for examination. The day for the trial arrived.

“There were but two competitors of us,” he says. “The principal test consisted in writing the Lord’s Prayer, and to this I gave my closest attention. I had observed that in German, use was made of capital letters; but I did not know the rule for their use, and took them for ornaments. So I distributed mine in a symmetrical manner, so that some were found even in the middle of words. In fact, neither of us knew anything.

“When the examination had been estimated, I was summoned, and Captain Schoepfer informed me that the examiners had found us both deficient; that my competitor read the better, but that I excelled him in writing; ... that, besides, my apartment, being larger than that of the other candidate, was better fitted for holding a school, and, finally, that I was elected to the vacant place.”

Is it not well to be indulgent to teachers whom we meet on the highway, who scarcely know how to write, and whom a captain commissions?

507. The Institute at Burgdorf (1802).—When Pestalozzi published the Gertrude and The Book for Mothers, he was not simply a school-master at Burgdorf; he had taken charge of an institute, that is, of a boarding-school of higher primary instruction. There also he applied the natural method, “which makes the child proceed from his own intuitions, and leads him by degrees, and through his own efforts, to abstract ideas.” The institute succeeded. The pupils of Burgdorf were distinguished especially by their skill in drawing and in mental arithmetic. Visitors were struck with their air of cheerfulness. Singing and gymnastics were held in honor, and also exercises on natural history, learned in the open field, and during walks. Mildness and liberty characterized the internal management. “It is not a school that you have here,” said a visitor, “but a family!”

508. Journey to Paris.—It was at this period that Pestalozzi made a journey to Paris, as a member of the consulta called by Bonaparte to decide the fate of Switzerland. He hoped to take advantage of his stay in France to disseminate his pedagogical ideas. But Bonaparte refused to see him, saying that he had something else to do besides discussing questions of a b c. Monge, the founder of the Polytechnic School, was more cordial, and kindly listened to the explanations of the Swiss pedagogue. But he concluded by saying, “It is too much for us!” More disdainful still, Talleyrand had said, “It is too much for the people!”

On the other hand, at the same period, the philosopher Maine de Biran, then sub-prefect at Bergerac, called a disciple of Pestalozzi, Barraud, to found schools in the department of Dordogne, and he encouraged with all his influence the application of the Pestalozzian method.

509. The Institute at Yverdun (1805-1825).—In 1803 Pestalozzi was obliged to leave the castle of Burgdorf. The Swiss government gave him in exchange the convent of MÜnchen-Buchsee. Pestalozzi transferred his institute to this place, but only for a little time. In 1805 he established himself at Yverdun, at the foot of Lake NeufchÂtel, in French Switzerland; and here, with the aid of several of his colleagues, he developed his methods anew, with brilliant success at first, but afterwards through all sorts of vicissitudes, difficulties, and miseries.

The institute at Yverdun was rather a school of secondary instruction, devoted to the middle classes, than a primary school proper. Pupils poured in from all sides. The character of the studies, however, was poorly defined, and Pestalozzi found himself somewhat out of his element in his new institution, since he excelled only in elementary methods and in the education of little children.

510. Success of the Institute.—Numerous visitors betook themselves to Yverdun, some through simple love of strolling. The institute of Yverdun made a part, so to speak, of the curiosities of Switzerland. People visited Pestalozzi as they went to see a lake or a glacier. As soon as notice was given of the arrival of a distinguished personage, Pestalozzi summoned one of his best masters, Ramsauer or Schmid.

“Take your best pupils,” he said, “and show the Prince what we are doing. He has numerous serfs, and when he is convinced, he will have them instructed.”

These frequent exhibitions entailed a great loss of time. Disorder reigned in the instruction. The young masters whom Pestalozzi had attached to his fortunes were overwhelmed with work, and could not give sufficient attention to the preparation of their lessons. Pestalozzi was growing old, and did not succeed in completing his methods.

511. The Tentatives of Pestalozzi.—The teaching of Pestalozzi was in reality but a long groping, an experiment ceaselessly renewed. Do not require of him articulate ideas, and methods definitely established. Always on the alert, and always in quest of something better, his admirable pedagogic instinct never came to full satisfaction. His merit was that he was always on the search for truth. His theories almost always followed, rather than preceded, his experiments. A man of intuition rather than of reasoning, he acknowledges that he went forward without considering what he was doing. He had the merit of making many innovations, but he was wrong in taking counsel of no one but himself, and of his personal feelings. “We ought to read nothing,” he said; “we ought to discover everything.” Pestalozzi never knew how to profit by the experience of others.

He never arrived at complete precision in the establishment of his methods. He complained of not being understood, and he was not in fact. One of his pupils at Yverdun, Vulliemin, thus expresses himself:—

“That which was called, not without pretense, the method of Pestalozzi was an enigma for us. It was for our teachers themselves. Each of them interpreted the doctrine of the master in his own way; but we were still far from the time when these divergencies engendered discord; when our principal teachers, after each had given out that he alone had comprehended Pestalozzi, ended by asserting that Pestalozzi himself was not understood; that he had not been understood except by Schmid, said Schmid, and by Niederer, said Niederer.”

512. Methods at Yverdun.—The writer whom we have just quoted gives us valuable information on the methods which were in use at Yverdun:—

“Instruction was addressed to the intelligence rather than to the memory. Attempt, said Pestalozzi to his colleagues, to develop the child, and not to train him as one trains a dog.”

“Language was taught us by the aid of intuition; we learned to see correctly, and through this very process to form for ourselves a correct idea of the relations of things. What we had conceived clearly we had no difficulty in expressing clearly.”

“The first elements of geography were taught us on the spot.... Then we reproduced in relief with clay the valley of which we had just made a study.”

“We were made to invent geometry by having marked out for us the end to reach, and by being put on the route. The same course was followed in arithmetic; our computations were made in the head and viva voce, without the aid of paper.”

513. Decadence of the Institute.—Yverdun enjoyed an extraordinary notoriety for some years. But little by little the faults of the method became apparent. Internal discords and the misunderstanding of Pestalozzi’s colleagues, of Niederer, “the philosopher of the method,” and of Schmid, the mathematician, hastened the decadence of an establishment in which order and discipline had never reigned. Pestalozzi was content with being the spur of the institute. He became more and more unfit for practical affairs. He allowed all liberty to his assistants, and also to his pupils. At Yverdun the pupils addressed their teachers in familiar style. The touching fiction of paternity transported into the school, which was successful with Pestalozzi in his first experience in teaching, and with a small number of pupils, was no longer practicable at Yverdun, with a mass of pupils of every age and of every disposition.

514. Judgment of PÈre Girard.—In 1809 the PÈre Girard[221] was commissioned by the Swiss government to inspect the institute. The result was not favorable, though Girard acknowledges that he conceived the idea of his own method from studying at first hand that of Pestalozzi.

The principal criticism of Girard bears on the abuse of mathematics, which, under the influence of Schmid, became in fact more and more the principal occupation of teachers and pupils.

“I made the remark,” he says, “to my old friend Pestalozzi, that the mathematics exercised an unjustifiable sway in his establishment, and that I feared the results of this on the education that was given. Whereupon he replied to me with spirit, as was his manner: ‘This is because I wish my children to believe nothing which cannot be demonstrated as clearly to them as that two and two make four.’ My reply was in the same strain: ‘In that case, if I had thirty sons, I would not entrust one of them to you, for it would be impossible for you to demonstrate to him, as you can that two and two make four, that I am his father, and that I have a right to his obedience.’”

It is evident that Pestalozzi was deviating from his own inclinations. The general character of his pedagogy is in fact to avoid abstraction, and in all things to aim at concrete and living intuition. Even in religion, he deliberately excluded dogmatic teaching, precise and literal form, and sought only to awaken in the soul a religious sentiment, sincere and profound. The PÈre Girard had remarked to him that the religious instruction of his pupils was vague and indeterminate, and that their aspirations lacked the doctrinal form. “The form,” replied Pestalozzi, “I am still looking for it!”

515. The Last Years of Pestalozzi.—Disheartened by the decadence of his institute, Pestalozzi left Yverdun in 1824, and sought a retreat at Neuhof, on the farm where he had tried his first experiments in popular education. It is here that he wrote his last two works,—The Swan’s Song and My Destinies. January 25, 1827, he was taken to Brugg to consult a physician. He died there February 17; and two days after he was buried at Birr. It is there that the Canton of Argovia erected a monument to him in 1846, with the following inscription:—

“Here lies Henry Pestalozzi, born at Zurich, January 12, 1746, died at Brugg, February 17, 1827, savior of the poor at Neuhof, preacher of the people in Leonard and Gertrude, father of orphans at Stanz, founder of the new people’s school at Burgdorf and at MÜnchen-Buchsee, educator of humanity at Yverdun, man, Christian, citizen: everything for others, nothing for himself. Blessed be his name.”

516. Essential Principles.—Pestalozzi never took the trouble to formulate the essential principles of his pedagogy. Incapable of all labor in abstract reflection, he borrowed from his friends, on every possible occasion, the logical exposition of his own methods. In his first letter to Gessner, he is only too happy to reproduce the observations of the philanthropist Fischer, who distinguished five essential principles in his system:—

1. To give the mind an intensive culture, and not simply extensive: to form the mind, and not to content one’s self with furnishing it;

2. To connect all instruction with the study of language;

3. To furnish the mind for all its operations with fundamental data, mother ideas;

4. To simplify the mechanism of instruction and study;

5. To popularize science.

On several points, indeed, Pestalozzi calls in question the translation which Fischer has given of his thought; but, notwithstanding these reservations, powerless to find a more exact formula, he accepts as a finality this interpretation of his doctrine.

Later, another witness of the life of Pestalozzi, Morf, also condensed into a few maxims the pedagogy of the great teacher:—

1. Intuition is the basis of instruction;

2. Language ought to be associated with intuition;

3. The time to learn is not that of judging and of criticising;

4. In each branch, instruction ought to begin with the simplest elements, and to progress by degrees while following the development of the child, that is to say, through a series of steps psychologically connected;

5. We should dwell long enough on each part of the instruction for the pupil to gain a complete mastery of it;

6. Instruction ought to follow the order of natural development, and not that of synthetic exposition;

7. The individuality of the child is sacred;

8. The principal end of elementary instruction is not to cause the child to acquire knowledge and talents, but to develop and increase the forces of his intelligence;

9. To wisdom there must be joined power; to theoretical knowledge, practical skill;

10. The relations between master and pupil ought to be based on love;

11. Instruction proper ought to be made subordinate to the higher purpose of education.

Each one of these aphorisms would need a long commentary. It is sufficient, however, to study them in the aggregate, in order to form an almost exact idea of that truly humane pedagogy which reposes on psychological principles.

KrÜsi could say of his master: “With respect to the ordinary knowledge and practices of the school, Pestalozzi was far below a good village magister; but he possessed something infinitely superior to that which can be given by a course of instruction, whatever it may be. He knew that which remains concealed from a great number of teachers,—the human spirit and the laws of its development and culture, the human heart and the means of vivifying it and ennobling it.”

517. Pedagogical Processes.—The pedagogy of Pestalozzi is no less valid in its processes than in its principles. Without presuming to enumerate everything, we will indicate succinctly some of the scholastic practices which he employed and recommended:—

The child should know how to speak before learning to read.

For reading, use should be made of movable letters glued on pasteboard. Before writing, the pupil should draw. The first exercises in writing should be upon slates.

In the study of language, the evolution of nature should be followed, first studying nouns, then qualificatives, and finally propositions.

The elements of computation shall be taught by the aid of material objects taken as units, or at least by means of strokes drawn on a board. Oral computation shall be the most employed.

The pupil ought, in order to form an accurate and exact idea of numbers, to conceive them always as a collection of strokes or of concrete things, and not as abstract figures. A small table divided into squares in which points are represented, serves to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

There was neither book nor copy-book in the schools of Burgdorf.

The children had nothing to learn by heart. They had to repeat all at once and in accord the instructions of the master. Each lesson lasted but an hour, and was followed by a short interval devoted to recreation.

Manual labor, making paper boxes, working in the garden, gymnastics, were associated with mental labor. The last hour of each day was devoted to optional labor. The pupils said, “We are working for ourselves.”

A few hours a week were devoted to military exercises.

Surely everything is not to be commended in the processes which we have just indicated. It is not necessary, for example, that the child conceive, when he computes, the content of numbers, and Pestalozzi sometimes makes an abuse of sense intuition. He introduces analysis, and an analysis too subtile and too minute, into studies where nature alone does her work. “My method,” he said, “is but a refinement of the processes of nature.” He refines too much.

518. Pestalozzi and Rousseau.—Pestalozzi has often acknowledged what he owed to Rousseau. “My chimerical and unpractical spirit was taken,” he said, “with that chimerical and impracticable book.... The system of liberty ideally established by Rousseau, excited in me an infinite longing for a wider and more bounteous sphere of activity.”

The great superiority of Pestalozzi over Rousseau, is that he worked for the people,—that he applied to a great number of children the principles which Rousseau embodied only in an individual and privileged education. Émile, after all, is an aristocrat. He is rich, and of good ancestry; and is endowed with all the gifts of nature and fortune. Real pupils do not offer, in general, to the action of teachers, material as docile and complaisant. Pestalozzi had to do only with children of the common people, who have everything to learn at school, because they have found at home, with busy or careless parents, neither encouragement nor example,—because their early years have been only a long intellectual slumber. For these benumbed natures, many exercises are necessary which would properly be regarded as useless if it were a question of instructing children of another condition. Before condemning, before ridiculing, the trifling practices of Pestalozzi, and of teachers of the same school, we should consider the use to which these processes were applied. The real organizer of the education of childhood and of the people, Pestalozzi has a right to the plaudits of all those who are interested in the future of the masses of the people.

519. Conclusion.—We should not flatter ourselves that merely by means of an analysis of Pestalozzi’s methods, we can comprehend the service of a man who excelled in the warmth of his charity, in his ardor of devotion and of propagandism, and in I know not what that makes a grand personality, more than by the clearness and the exactness of his theories. It is somewhat with Pestalozzi as with those great actors who carry with them to their tomb a part of the secret of their art.

He was especially great in heart and in love. To read some of his writings, we would sometimes be tempted to say that his intellect was far inferior to the expectation excited by his name; but what a splendid revenge he takes in the domain of sentiment!

He passionately loved the people. He knew their sufferings, and nothing turned him from his anxiety to cure them. In the presence of a beautiful landscape, he thought less of the charming scene that was displayed before his eyes than of the poor people who, under those splendors of nature, led a life of misery.

That which assures him an immortal glory is the high purpose that he set before himself,—his ardor to regenerate humanity through instruction. Of what consequence is it that the results obtained were so disproportionate to his efforts, and that he could say, “The contrast between what I would and what I could is so great that it cannot be expressed”? Even the French Revolution did not succeed in the matter of instruction, in making its works commensurate with its aspirations.

The love and the admiration of all the friends of instruction are forever secured to Pestalozzi. He was the most suggestive, the most stimulating, of modern educators. If it was not given him to act sufficiently on French pedagogy, he was in Germany the great inspirer of reform in popular education. While he was despised by Bonaparte, he obtained, in 1802, from the philosopher Fichte, this fine compliment, “It is from the institute of Pestalozzi that I expect the regeneration of the German nation.”

[520. Analytical Summary.—1. Inveniam viam aut faciam. To know the end is to find the way; and to be possessed of an impulse to reach an end is to make a way. There are thus two categories of educational reformers. Some see a goal by the light of reason and reflection, and then lay out a logical route to it which they may or may not traverse, but which some one will ultimately traverse. Others are dominated by an intense feeling, and grope their uncertain way towards a goal whose outline and position are only dimly discerned through the mists of emotion. With some, the motive is intellectual, with others, it is emotional; and in their higher manifestations these endowments are mutually exclusive.

2. Pestalozzi belongs pre-eminently to the emotional reformers. He felt intensely, but he saw vaguely. His impulses were the highest and the noblest that can animate the human soul, but at every stage in his career his success was compromised by his inability to see things in their normal relations and proportions. Conscious of his inability to frame a rational defence of his system, he was glad to borrow philosophic insight from abroad; but he could not live with colleagues who would test the logic of his methods.

3. Tested by the simplest rules of order, symmetry, and economy, the schools organized by Pestalozzi were failures; but tested by the exalted humanity, the heroic devotion, and self-sacrifice of their founder, and by the new life which, through his example, was henceforth to animate the teaching profession, his schools were successful beyond all precedent. Judged by modern standards, Pestalozzi was a poor teacher, but an unsurpassed educator.

4. The conception which the humanitarian warmth of Pestalozzi’s nature converted into a motive, was that true education is a growth, the outward evolution of an inward life. The conception itself was as old as David and Socrates, but it had ceased to have the power of a living truth.

5. The history of human thought shows that there has ever been a tendency to separate form from content, or letter from spirit, and as constant a predilection for form or letter, as distinguished from content or spirit; and the essential work of reform has consisted in reanimation. This illustrates and defines Pestalozzi’s mission as an educator. The story of his devotion and suffering is the most pathetic in the history of education, and it should be unnecessary to repeat the lesson that was taught at such cost.]