Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich (1746–1827)

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Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss educator whose views profoundly affected the history and philosophy of education. Pestalozzi's father, a clergyman in Zürich, then the most lively center of awakening German culture and literature, died when his son was six years old. Pestalozzi's profound piety, the desire to love and to be loved, his compassion for suffering—and his extreme sensitivity and awkwardness in dealing with the practical affairs of life—were due largely to the exclusive upbringing of his pious mother.

After graduating from the Collegium Humanitatis (a secondary school), he turned to agriculture and experimented at his newly acquired farm, the Neuhof, with a school for the children of the neighboring farmers that was to combine elementary education with practical work. The Neuhof enterprise was a failure, financially as well as educationally, but it brought him the insights that determined his later educational, social, and religious theory and practice. These insights are jotted down in aphoristic style in Die Abendstunde eines Einsiedlers (Evening hour of a hermit; 1780), one of those astounding works of sudden illumination which we sometimes find in the lives of men of rare genius.

As a young man, Pestalozzi sympathized with a liberal student movement which was considered subversive by the patrician government of Zürich. He also sympathized actively with the Swiss and French revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century but was soon disappointed in the development of both.

In 1789 he took over the education of the desolate children of the town of Stans, which had been the scene of a battle between the French and the Swiss and had been badly ransacked by the French victors. Later he founded schools at Burgdorf and Münchenbuchsee, and finally at Iverdon on the shore of the Lake of Neuchâtel, attracting increasingly the attention of reform-minded men and women all over Europe. "Pestalozzianism," as a method of education that emphasized the importance of individual differences and the stimulation of the child's self-activity as against mere rote learning, was transferred also to the United States and resulted, about 1860, in a thorough reorganization of its elementary schools.

Like John Amos Comenius (whom he mentions, without being influenced by him), Pestalozzi was able to fuse his Christ-centered piety with a romantic concept of nature. First impressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas he later rejected, he used the term nature as synonymous with all that is genuine, authentic, and free from artificiality. He regarded it as the function of education, as of all other social activities, to find the "organic" or "elemental" principles by which the inherent talent of every person could be developed to his fullest individuality, or to his "truth." His concept of truth, therefore, does not aim at logical universality; rather, it is, to use a modern term, existential.

A person can be educated toward maturity only if he has been allowed to sense in his earliest infancy and under the care of his mother and his family the vital element in all human relations, altruistic love. And he can safely pass over to his next developmental stage only if he has fully mastered the experiences and tasks of the preceding stage, if the whole of his personality has been formed by the "education of the heart, the hand and the mind," if the things he has learned have become really his own and have aroused a sense of commitment, and if, finally, he discovers the vertical line, his personal relation to God, without which all relations between man and man, man and nature, and man and knowledge remain empty and meaningless.

According to Pestalozzi, it is the curse of modern civilization that its hasty and primarily verbal education does not give man enough time for the process of Anschauung, a term perhaps best translated as "internalized apperception," or as dwelling on the meaning and challenge of an impression. Thus modern civilization leads a person more and more away from his deeper self into a tangle of self-perceptions, of useless, if not dangerous, knowledge, and of false ambitions, which will make him unhappy.

As in many similar cases, Pestalozzi's fame as an educator has prevented the scholarly world from recognizing the full scope and depth of his interests. Besides a few and often inadequate accounts, little attention has been paid to Pestalozzi as a man of passionate concern for social justice and for new forms of religious education which were intentionally prevented by corrupt ecclesiastical institutions.

Nor has his essay "Meine Nachforschungen über den Gang der Natur in der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechtes" (On the path of nature in the history of mankind) received sufficient attention, although it is profounder and more realistic than the contemplations on human progress by the Marquis de Condorcet, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, and other philosophers of the Enlightenment. According to Pestalozzi, the development of the human race is reflected in the life of every person. Each of us has in himself the primitive, the social, and the ethical human. Injustice, therefore, will remain, although we may profit from the experiences of earlier generations. But the state of moral freedom will be achieved by only a few chosen individuals, and they (in this sentence he refers to his own life) will hardly find a niche in the house of humankind.

Philosophy of Education, History Of.

Sämtliche Werke, edited by A. Buchenau et al. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1927–. Critical edition, not yet completed.

Gesammelte Werke in zehn Bänden, edited by Emilie Bosshart et al. Zürich, 1944–1947.

Werke, edited by Paul Baumgartner. Zürich: Rotapfel, 1944–1949.

Leonard and Gertrude. Translated by Eva Channing. Boston, 1885.

How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, edited by Ebenezer Cooke, and translated by L. E. Holland and Francis Turner. London, 1894.

Pestalozzi's Main Writings, edited by J. A. Green. New York, 1912.

Anderson, L. F., ed. Pestalozzi. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931.

Gutek, Gerald Lee. Pestalozzi and Education. New York: Random House, 1968.

Silber, Käte. Pestalozzi: The Man and His Work. 3rd ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1973.

Ulich, Robert. History of Educational Thought, 258–270. New York: American Book, 1950.

Ulich, Robert. Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom, 480–507. Cambridge, MA, 1959.

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