Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi | Biography

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the most important educational thinker of the Enlightenment, was born in Zurich on 12 January 1746 to Johann Baptist Pestalozzi, a surgeon, and Susanne Pestalozzi, née Hotz. He was descended from an Italian family that had settled in Zurich in the sixteenth century. After his father died in 1751, Pestalozzi experienced a sheltered childhood; he remembered that he was guarded like a sheep that was not allowed to leave the barn; he never met boys of his own age on the street; he knew none of their games or their secrets; he felt awkward among them.

After graduation from the Collegium Humanitas, a Zurich secondary school, Pestalozzi studied theology and then law at the University of Zurich. Influenced by the ideas of Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he became a member of the Helvetic Society, a reformist Swiss political organization. After learning how to run a farm from a relative in Richterswyl and a land-owner in Kirchberg, in 1767 he acquired a piece of moorland near Birr in Canton Aargau and established a farm he called "Neuhof." In 1769 he married Anna Schulthess. In 1775 he transformed the farm into a school for fifty poor children. At Neuhof, Pestalozzi tried to counter the purely verbal education that was typical of the time by allowing his pupils "Anschauung" (sense perception), that is, a direct acquaintance with physical objects rather than only with books. The Neuhof enterprise failed in 1780 because of poor financial management, but Pestalozzi gained insights from the experience that are reflected in Die Abendstunde eines Einsiedlers (1845; excerpts translated as "Evening Hour of a Hermit," 1954), a collection of aphorisms Pestalozzi wrote after the closure of the school. The work, which advocates the combining of liberal and vocational education and emphasizes the importance of the mother in the education of the child, was first published in a periodical by Pestalozzi's friend, the editor Isaak Iselin.

In 1781 Pestalozzi wrote the first volume of what was to become his best-known work, Lienhard und Gertrud: Ein Buch für das Volk (1781-1787; excerpts translated as Leonard and Gertrude: A Popular Story, Written Originally in German; Translated into French, and Now Attempted in English; with the Hope of Its Being Useful to All Classes of Society, 1801), completing the book in a matter of weeks. When he showed the manuscript to a publisher in Zurich he was told that the punctuation and spelling were all wrong and that the book's language and style were too coarse to be considered for publication. Pestalozzi turned to Iselin, who took the manuscript to the publisher Decker in Berlin; Decker agreed to publish it. Written as a popular romance, Lienhard und Gertrud: Ein Buch für das Volk portrays the struggle between good and evil in the village of Bonnal. Evil is personified in Hummel, Bonnal's richest man and the town's only employer, innkeeper, judge, and policeman; Hummel is a person who has no interest other than personal gain. Gertrud represents the ideal mother-teacher in a family of working people. Through Gertrud, Pestalozzi shows how the education of young children should be placed in the hands of mothers. While Gertrud fights to save her family from destruction, her husband, Lienhard, is torn between Hummel's continuous temptations to drink away his earnings and his loyalty to Gertrud and his children. The book, which was an immediate best-seller, made Pestalozzi famous. As a result, he was invited to become a member of the "Illuminatenorden" (Order of Enlightenment), an exclusive society which enabled Pestalozzi to correspond with members of the various European courts. Three additional volumes appeared, in 1783, 1785, and 1787, respectively.

In December 1798, to show his opposition to the bloodshed of the French Revolution, Pestalozzi went to Stans, the site of a battle between the Swiss and the French. There he asked for and was put in charge of a school for war orphans in a converted convent. The Stans school was short-lived; it was closed in July 1799 to be converted into a military hospital. Shortly before the closing, Pestalozzi wrote that the education at Stans was successful in every respect.

Following Stans, Pestalozzi operated schools at Burgdorf in Canton Bern from 1799 to 1804, at Münchenbuchsee in Canton Bern from June to October 1804, and, most successfully, at Yverdon in Canton Vaud from 1805 to 1825. The attention of European and American educators was drawn to his methods, which emphasized individual differences, sense perception, the student's self-activity rather than rote learning, graduated learning based on the natural stages of the child's maturation, and the raising of the lower classes through an educational system which enabled the potential of all children to develop to the fullest.

In 1801 Pestalozzi published Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt: Ein Versuch, den Müttern Anleitung zu geben, ihre Kinder selbst zu unterrichten, in Briefen (translated as How Gertrude Teaches Her Children: An Attempt to Help Mothers to Teach Their Own Children and an Account of The Method. A Report to the Society of the Friends of Education, Burgdorf, 1894), one of his most profound and important pedagogical writings. The title is a badly chosen one, since the name Gertrud appears not even once in the work. A collection of letters addressed to his assistants at Burgdorf, the book outlines Pestalozzi's teaching methods.

Pestalozzi's writing is generally obscure and confused, interspersed with brilliant insights; his thoughts are often poorly organized. Pestalozzi used his writings to spur public interest in education. He was by no means a natural writer with a gift for words; he became a writer, he said, to clarify his educational ideas to himself. Pestalozzi's writings did not earn him enough to support his wife and son; his income was largely derived from his schools.

Pestalozzi maintained that the primary concern of the school should not be to inculcate information but to stimulate and develop the latent powers within each child. In his schools teachers were not allowed to stifle a pupil's natural talents; instead, formal education was to be harmonized with each pupil's internal development.

Pestalozzi's principle of "Anschauung" held that the first lessons of children should be experiences of objects rather than books. Learners should discover the world around them, beginning with the immediate environment before progressing to more distant places. For example, Pestalozzi argued that number instruction should always begin with concrete objects. Thus, he began his number teaching exercises by presenting his pupils with pebbles, peas, beans, or the like. Based on these experiences, Pestalozzi designed at Yverdon an "ABC der Zahlen" (ABC of Numbers) to facilitate the teaching of arithmetic. For the teaching of form Pestalozzi designed the "ABC der Formen" (ABC of Forms) to familiarize the pupils with the different geometrical forms, develop their sense of proportion, and exercise their ability to observe objects correctly with respect to size, shape, width, and height.

Pestalozzi believed that language evolved gradually in imitation of the sounds of nature, and that each human being repeated the evolution of man in the development of speech. Thus, in teaching a child language, we must follow the course of nature. Pestalozzi divided language teaching into three stages: the teaching of individual sounds and words; the teaching of grammar and sentence structure; and the teaching of language as meaning.

At Yverdon Pestalozzi reached the peak of his educational career. Pupils and teachers came from all over the Continent to learn and teach in a home-school environment. Pestalozzi's classes, which were often visited by observers, showed him to be a father figure and friend, constantly stressing the powers of love and understanding in the educational process. At Yverdon schooling served a double function: it provided the pupil with the necessary intellectual, moral, and physical stimuli to become a useful and responsible member of society, and it sheltered the child in a familylike atmosphere of cooperation, love, and affection.

In 1826 Pestalozzi, whose wife had died in 1815, returned to Neuhof to live with his grandson. There he dictated his last book, an autobiography, Pestalozzi's Schwanengesang (Pestalozzi's Swan Song, 1826), which appeared as volume 13 of his collected writings (1819-1826). Summarizing with warmth and lucidity the major themes and experiences of Pestalozzi's life and work as a writer, teacher, and educational thinker, the work is considered by many to be the equal of Goethe's autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth, 1811-1833).

Pestalozzi died at Brugg on 17 February 1827.