Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

Swiss educator

• Born: January 12, 1746
• Birthplace: Zurich, Switzerland
• Died: February 17, 1827
• Place of death: Brugg, Switzerland

Pestalozzi spent his life seeking ways to help students improve their learning skills so that they could develop into effective adults. His method was based upon imparting an awareness of, and encouraging direct interaction with, objects, progressing from simple steps to more complex ones in an orderly pattern, thereby achieving harmonious organic development.

Early Life

Italians who immigrated to Switzerland from Locarno during the sixteenth century, the Pestalozzis settled in Zurich. By 1746, when Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (PEHS-tah-lot-see) was born, the family had been in Zurich for two hundred years and had been accorded the full rights of citizens—a privilege in a city of 145,000, only 5,000 of whom were citizens. Heinrich was the youngest of Johann Baptist and Suzanne Hotz Pestalozzi’s three children. Johann, a surgeon, died in 1751 at the age of thirty-three, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Because Pestalozzi was a sickly child, his mother sheltered him, seldom allowing him to play with other children or to do chores. He was exposed to the poor when he visited his paternal grandfather, a clergyman near Zurich. The young Pestalozzi developed an interest in and sympathy for the poor.

At Zurich’s Collegium Carolinum, Pestalozzi, an indifferent student, developed a consuming love for his country that led him to join the Helvetic Society and to write articles about the poor and suffering for its publication. Upon graduating from Collegium Carolinum, Pestalozzi entered the University of Zurich but abandoned his university studies soon after starting them. Having read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pestalozzi was particularly affected by Émile: Ou, De l’éducation (1762; Emilius and Sophia: Or, A New System of Education, 1762-1763). Rousseau’s glorification of the natural life led Pestalozzi to spend the year 1767 studying agriculture. In 1768, he bought acreage near Birr and devoted himself to cultivating it. The failure of this venture in 1774 caused him to lose everything he owned except the house, Neuhof, which dominated his property, and a plot on which he raised food for his wife, Anna, whom he had married in 1769, and their son, Jean-Jacques, named for Rousseau.

By 1773, Pestalozzi had turned Neuhof into a school where he taught poor and unfit children to become cotton spinners. He taught them mathematics and catechism as they worked, and after work the boys gardened while the girls learned sewing and cooking. Pestalozzi also taught them the skills of basic literacy. The school attracted more than fifty unkempt students, ages six to eighteen. Pestalozzi, a slim, gentle man with a kind, understanding smile, reformed many of them, serving simultaneously as teacher and surrogate father. Nevertheless, in 1779 the school closed for lack of funds.

Life’s Work

Pestalozzi was a dreamer, a true idealist, motivated primarily by his concern for those less fortunate than he and by his intense loyalty to Switzerland. He felt a deep personal commitment to make life better for his fellow humans, and he went through life seeking ways to bring about such an outcome as a way of improving society.

Pestalozzi’s exposure to teaching during the five years at Neuhof suggested to him ways to create a better society and convinced him that social amelioration, his highest goal, proceeded from the bottom up by enabling the children of the poor to find a means of sustaining themselves, of gaining self-respect through productive work such as the cotton spinning that he taught them. He was not satisfied, however, for these students to be merely cotton spinners. He expected them to work with their minds, to elevate their thinking, and to imbue their lives with a dimension that typical workers lack. His ultimate aim was to make them functioning, effective members of the ideal democratic society that he envisioned for Switzerland. He thought education was society’s obligation to all of its young. His ideas were precursors of the universal free education that was later widely accepted in developed nations.

Ruined financially by the failure of his school, Pestalozzi sought to make money by entering literary contests and thus began his career in writing. He first published Abendstunde eines Einsiedlers (1780; Evening Hours of a Hermit , 1912), which articulated his notion that human beings must work at developing their inner powers and that such development can be accomplished best within a wholesome family environment supplemented by a well-designed educational program free to everyone.

The publication of Lienhard und Gertrud: Ein Buch für das Volk (1781; Leonard and Gertrude: A Popular Story , 1800), in which Gertrude reforms her heavy-drinking spouse and, aided by the local schoolmaster, saves her community from corruption, brought Pestalozzi great attention. With this book, Pestalozzi invented the biographical novel. Before 1787, the initial novel was followed by three sequels, the most important of which is Christoph und Else lesen in den abendstunden das Buch “Lienhard und Gertrud” (1782; Christopher and Elsa read the book Leonard and Gertrude in the evening), in which Pestalozzi attempts a less sentimental, more socially critical appeal than that in the earlier book, which a sentimental reading public had misinterpreted.

It was not until two decades later, however, that Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt (1801; How Gertrude Teaches Her Children , 1894), consisting of fourteen letters about education, appeared, making its mark as the most coherent expression of Pestalozzi’s educational tenets. If his books had brought him recognition, they brought him neither job offers nor money. He struggled to survive. He even made a desperate attempt to publish a newspaper, Ein Schweizer-Blatt, but this weekly soon failed. Nevertheless, the venture was important to Pestalozzi’s development because, as editor, he wrote about how the state should deal with criminals, proposing the same sort of humane treatment for prisoners that he had accorded his students at Neuhof.

It was not until Pestalozzi was past fifty that he had another opportunity to work with children. The French invasion of Stans was a wholesale slaughter. When the French retreated, orphans had to be cared for. The Swiss government established a residential school for them, with Pestalozzi as head. Starting with fifty children, the school soon had eighty in residence. Pestalozzi worked with these students, assisted only by a housekeeper. The operation went reasonably well, even though the canton’s dominant Catholic population viewed Pestalozzi, a Protestant, with suspicion.

After six months, the orphanage was taken over by the French, who again invaded the city, as a hospital. Pestalozzi, who was emotionally and physically spent, did not return to the orphanage when the facility was returned to that purpose. Instead, at the age of fifty-two, he became an assistant teacher in the poorest school in Burgdorf, where again he instituted his radical methods of discouraging rote learning, emphasizing understanding, and having students learn from observing and working with objects.

Not long after his initial assignment in Burgdorf, Pestalozzi was appointed sole teacher in a school of about sixty students from poor families. He could now implement the methods in which he most believed. Soon, the government helped him establish in Burgdorf Castle a school that attracted children from affluent families, not the kinds of students that most interested Pestalozzi. It was during this period that Pestalozzi published How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, the book that more than any other established his reputation.

When the government requisitioned Burgdorf, Pestalozzi was finally in a position to establish his own experimental school. After a brief, abortive attempt to work with Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg at Hofwyl, Pestalozzi established his school at Yverdon in 1805. The school became important not only as an institution where children learned by novel methods that emphasized discovery, the understanding of concepts, and proceeding from the simple to the complex but also as a school that provided teacher training for hundreds of prospective teachers. Soon, governments from surrounding nations subsidized study at Yverdon for their most promising teachers.

Pestalozzi’s methods were controversial throughout his lifetime. He was convinced that education is a growing and changing process, not a fixed one. At its best, education, thought Pestalozzi, could address and cure most social ills. He believed that education must be secular rather than religious. He valued the senses over the intellect, perhaps moving further in that direction than was prudent.

Not all Pestalozzi’s methods worked to the best advantage of students. For example, employing his idea that one should proceed from the simple to the complex, Pestalozzi had beginning readers learn small syllabic constituents of words before they read whole words. He had them memorize an imposingly large “syllabary” consisting of hundreds of items such as am, em, im, om, and um before they tackled words. Methods of this sort, although hypothetically interesting, proved counterproductive.

In addition, the methods were applied to fields such as drawing, in which Pestalozzi had students draw constituent shapes—curves, lines, and circles—in isolation rather than drawing entities. His obsession with formal analysis limited his students and frustrated some teacher trainees at Yverdon, a number of whom, including Friedrich Froebel, became critical of Pestalozzi’s method. When Yverdon closed in 1825, however, two years before its founder’s death, it had made a significant impact upon education in the Western world. Objection to some of the specifics of Pestalozzi’s pedagogy in no way diminishes the effect it had upon education, particularly at the elementary level.

Significance

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi succeeded at little during his first fifty years. Had he not founded Yverdon, his books would document his social and educational philosophy. His influence, however, would be less far-ranging than it was after he gathered around him a coterie of disciples who would help propagate his work after Yverdon’s closing and his death.

Had Pestalozzi died at fifty, he would not have had the opportunity to practice in any sustained way the pedagogy that he developed. Yverdon became his laboratory. If Pestalozzi had a salient shortcoming, it was that he refused to admit the ineffectiveness of some of the methods in which he believed. This shortcoming, however, was more than counterbalanced by his devotion to children and by the sincerity of his effort.

The Pestalozzi legacy points in several directions. His school at Yverdon became a model for laboratory schools and for teacher-training institutions throughout the world. The normal school in the United States is an outgrowth of Yverdon. Pestalozzi’s emphasis on having children learn by doing rather than by reading or hearing about things leads directly to John Dewey and other progressive educators who came indirectly under Pestalozzi’s influence.

Maria Montessori’s object-centered education, which led to the establishment of Montessori schools throughout the world, employs the Pestalozzi method of learning through observing objects and arriving at generalizations from those observations. The notion of engaging the senses in learning activities can be traced to Pestalozzi and such contemporaries of his as Johann Bernhard Basedow, Froebel, and Rousseau.

Pestalozzi’s idea that education is the right of all children, not widespread in his time, is a prevailing tenet in most countries today, as is the separation of schools from religious authority, a radical view during the early nineteenth century. Few educational theorists have had the diverse effect upon modern educational practices that Pestalozzi had, though much of his significant work came after he had experienced a lifetime of failure.

Bibliography

Downs, Robert B. Heinrich Pestalozzi: Father of Modern Pedagogy. Boston: Twayne, 1975. This brief biography is well researched and well written, although its bibliography of primary sources is slightly disappointing. The chronology at the beginning of the book is a helpful, ready resource.

Green, J. A. The Educational Ideas of Pestalozzi. New York: W. B. Clive, 1914. Reprint. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969. A small book that reproduces well-selected samples of Pestalozzi’s most significant writing. Provides an excellent overview of the intellectual development of the man and his ideas.

Gutek, Gerald Lee. Pestalozzi and Education. New York: Random House, 1968. This fascinating book is the most comprehensive account of the development of Pestalozzi’s educational philosophy. An indispensable source.

Mueller, Gustav E. “Heinrich Pestalozzi: His Life and Work.” Harvard Educational Review 16 (1946): 141-159. A brilliant article that places Pestalozzi in a broad cultural context and demonstrates how his influence has pervaded most aspects of modern educational thought. Carefully researched and well reasoned.

Pestalozzianum and the Zentralbibliothek, Zürich, ed. Pestalozzi and His Times: A Pictorial Record. New York: G. E. Stechert, 1928. This handsome book contains a fine introduction that goes deeply into Pestalozzi’s background before presenting nearly one hundred pictures of the man, his family, places he lived and worked, and manuscript pages. An extraordinary book.

Schultz, Lucille M. The Young Composers: Composition’s Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Traces the development of school-based writing instruction, crediting Pestalozzi’s ideas with altering composition training to make it more child-centered and less an imitation of college-level course work.

Silber, Käte, Pestalozzi: The Man and His Work. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. A good treatment of Pestalozzi and the range of his ideas. This book supplants the earlier works and brings to light some of Pestalozzi’s writing about topics other than education.