Chapter XII: Part 12

§ 65. At this time he was no less loved by his assistants, who put up with any quarters that could be found for them, and received no salary. We read that the money paid by the scholars was kept in the room of “the head of the family”; every master could get the key, and when they required clothes they took from these funds just the sum requisite. This system, or want of system, went on for some time without abuse. As Vuillemin says, it was like a return to the early days of the Christian Church.

§ 66. We have seen that the first Emperor Napoleon “could not be bothered about questions of A, B, C.” His was the pride that goes before a fall. On the other hand the Prussian Government which he brought to the dust in the battle of Jena (1806) had the wisdom to perceive that children will become men, and that the nature of the instruction they receive will in a great measure determine what kind of men they turn out. How was Prussia again to raise its head? Its rulers decided that it was by the education of the people. “We have lost in territory,” said the king; “our power and our credit abroad have fallen; but we must and will go to work to gain in power and in credit at home. It is for this reason that I desire above everything that the greatest attention be paid to the education of the people” (Guimps, 319). About the same time the Queen (Louisa) wrote in her private diary, “I am reading _Leonard and Gertrude_, and I delight in being transported into the Swiss village. If I could do as I liked I should take a carriage and start for Switzerland to see Pestalozzi; I should warmly shake him by the hand, and my eyes filled with tears would speak my gratitude.... With what goodness, with what zeal, he labours for the welfare of his fellow-creatures! Yes, in the name of humanity, I thank him with my whole heart.”

So in the day of humiliation Prussia seriously went to work at the education of the people, and this she did on the lines pointed out by Pestalozzi. To him they were directed by their philosopher Fichte, who in his _Addresses to the German Nation_ (delivered at Berlin 1807-8) declared that education was the only means of raising a nation, and that all sound reform of public instruction must be based on the principles of Pestalozzi.

To bring these principles to bear on popular education, the Prussian Government sent seventeen young men for a three years’ course to Pestalozzi’s Institute, “where,” as the Minister said in a letter to Pestalozzi, “they will be prepared not only in mind and judgment, but also in heart, for the noble vocation which they are to follow, and will be filled with a sense of the holiness of their task, and with new zeal for the work to which you have devoted your life.”

§ 67. Among the eminent men who were drawn to Yverdun were some who afterwards did great things in education, as _e.g._, Karl Ritter, Karl von Raumer the historian of education, the philosopher Herbart, and a man who was destined to have more influence than anyone, except perhaps Pestalozzi himself—I mean Friedrich Froebel. Ritter’s testimony is especially striking. “I have seen,” says he, “more than the Paradise of Switzerland, for I have seen Pestalozzi, and recognised how great his heart is, and how great his genius; never have I been so filled with a sense of the sacredness of my vocation and the dignity of human nature as in the days I spent with this noble man.... Pestalozzi knew less geography than a child in one of our primary schools, yet it was from him that I gained my chief knowledge of this science; for it was in listening to him that I first conceived the idea of the natural method. It was he who opened the way to me, and I take pleasure in attributing whatever value my work may have entirely to him.”

§ 68. At this time we read glowing accounts of the healthy and happy life of the children; and throughout Pestalozzi never lost a single pupil by illness. With a body of very able assistants, instruction was carried on for ten hours out of the twenty-four; but in these hours there was reckoned the time spent in drill, gymnastics, hand-work, and singing. The monotony of school-life was also broken by frequent “festivals.”

§ 69. And yet the Institute had taken into it the seeds of its own ruin. There were several causes of failure, though these were not visible till the house was divided against itself.

§ 70. First, Pestalozzi based the morality and discipline of the school on the relations of family life. He would be the “father” of all the children. At Burgdorf this relation seemed a reality, but it completely failed at Yverdun when the Institute became, from the number of the pupils and their differences in language, habits, and antecedents, a little world. The pupils still called him “Father Pestalozzi,” but he could no longer know them as a father should know his children. Thus the discipline of affection slowly disappeared, and there was no school discipline to take its place.

§ 71. Next, we can see that even at Burgdorf, and still more at Yverdun, Pestalozzi was attempting to do impossibilities. According to his system, the faculties of the child were to be developed in a natural unbroken order, and the first exercises were to give the child the power of surmounting later difficulties by its own exertions. But this education could not be started at any age, and yet children of every age and every country were received into the Institution. It was not likely that the fresh comers could be made to understand that they “knew nothing,” and must start over again on a totally different road. The teachers might take such pupils to the water of “sense-impressions,” but they could not inspire the inclination to drink, nor induce the lad to learn what he supposed himself to know already. (_Cfr. supra_ p. 64, § 4.)

§ 72. But there was a greater mischief at work than either of these. In his discourse to the members of the Institution on New Year’s Day, 1808, Pestalozzi surprised them all by his gloom. He had had a coffin brought in, and he stood beside it. “This work,” said he, “was founded by love, but love has disappeared from our midst.” This was only too true, and the discord was more deeply rooted than at first appeared. Among the brood of Pestalozzians there was a Catholic shepherd lad from Tyrol, Joseph Schmid by name, and he, in the end, proved a veritable cuckoo. As he shewed very marked ability in mathematics, he became one of the assistant masters; and a good deal of the fame of the Institution rested on the performances of his pupils. But his ideas differed totally from those of his colleagues, especially from those of Niederer, a clergyman with a turn for philosophy, who had become Pestalozzi’s chief exponent.

§ 73. After Pestalozzi’s gloomy speech, the masters, with the exception of Schmid, urged Pestalozzi to apply for a Government inquiry into the state of the Institution. This Pestalozzi did, and Commissioners were appointed, among them an educationist, Père Girard of Freiburg, by whom the Report was drawn up. The Report was not favourable. Père Girard was by no means inclined to sit at the feet of Pestalozzi, as he had principles of his own. Pestalozzi, he thought, laid far too much stress on mathematics, and he drew from him a statement that everything taught to a child should seem as certain as that two and two made four. “Then,” said Girard, “if I had thirty children I would not intrust you with one of them. You could not teach him that I was his father.” Thus the Report, though very friendly in tone, was by no means friendly in spirit. The Commissioners simply compared the performances of the scholars with what pupils of the same age could do in good schools of the ordinary type, and Père Girard stated, though not in the Report, that the Institution was inferior to the Cantonal School of Aargau. But the comparison of these incommensurables only shews that Girard was not capable of understanding what was going on at Yverdun. Indeed, he asserts “not only that the mother-tongue was neglected,” but also that the children, “though they had reached a high pitch of excellence in abstract mathematics, were inconceivably weak in all ordinary practical calculations.” This is absurd. In Pestalozzian teaching the abstract never went before ordinary practical calculations. The good Father evidently blunders, and takes “head-reckoning” for abstract, and pen or pencil arithmetic for practical work. Reckoning with slate or paper is no doubt “ordinary,” but a distinction has often to be drawn between what is ordinary and what is practical.

§ 74. Soon after this the disputes between Schmid and his colleagues waxed so fierce that Schmid was virtually driven away. In 1810 he left Yverdun, and declared the Institution “a disgrace to humanity.” Great was the disorder into which the Institution now fell from having over it only a genius with “an unrivalled incapacity to govern.” The days which “remind us of the early Church” were no more, and financial difficulties naturally followed them. For the next five years things went from bad to worse, and the masters were then driven to the desperate, and, as it proved, the fatal step of inviting the able and strong-willed Schmid back again. He came in 1815, he acquired entire control over Pestalozzi, and drove from him all his most faithful adherents, among them not only Niederer, who had invited the return of his rival, but even Kruesi and the faithful servant, Elizabeth Naef, now Mrs. Kruesi, the widow of Kruesi’s brother. Pestalozzi’s grandson married Schmid’s sister, and thus united with him by family ties, Schmid took entire possession of the old man and kept it till the end. His former colleagues seem to have been deceived in their estimate both of Schmid’s integrity and ability. He completed the ruin of the Institution, and he was finally expelled from Yverdun by the Magistrates.

§ 75. But while Pestalozzi seemed falling lower and lower to the eyes of the inhabitants of Yverdun, and so had little honour in his own country, his fame was spreading all over Europe. Of this Yverdun was to reap the benefit. In 1813-14, Austrian troops marched across Switzerland to invade France. In January, 1814, the Castle and other buildings in Yverdun were “requisitioned” for a military hospital, many of the Austrian soldiers being down with typhus fever. In a great fright the Municipality sent off two deputies to headquarters, then at Basel, to petition that this order might be withdrawn. As the order threatened the destruction of his Institution, Pestalozzi went with them, and it was entirely to him they owed their success. On their return they reported that “no military hospital would be established at Yverdun, and that M. Pestalozzi had been received with most extraordinary favour.”

§ 75. On this occasion Pestalozzi took the opportunity of preaching to the Emperor Alexander on the necessity of establishing good schools and of emancipating the serfs. The Emperor took the lecture in good part, and allowed the philanthropist to drive him into a corner and “button-hole” him.

§ 76. In 1815 Pestalozzi received a visit from an Englishman, or more accurately Scotsman—Dr. Bell, who, however, like most of our compatriots, could find nothing in Pestalozzi. Whatever we may think of Bell as an educationist, he was certainly a poor prophet. On leaving Yverdun he said, “In another twelve years mutual instruction will be adopted by the whole world and Pestalozzi’s method will be forgotten.”[159]

§ 77. In December, 1815, Pestalozzi was thrown more completely into the power of Schmid by losing the only companion from whom nothing but death could separate him—his wife. At the funeral Pestalozzi, standing by the coffin, and as if heard by her whose earthly remains were in it, ran over the disasters and trials they had passed through together, and the sacrifices she had made for him. “What in those days of affliction,” said he, “gave us strength to bear our troubles and recover hope?” and taking up a Bible he went on, “_This_ is the source whence you drew, whence we both drew courage, strength, and peace.”

§ 78. The “death agony of the Institution,” as Guimps calls it, lasted for some years, but in this gloomy period there are only two incidents I will mention. The first is the publication of Pestalozzi’s writings, for which Schmid and Pestalozzi sought subscriptions; and the appeal was so cordially answered that Pestalozzi received £2,000. This sum he wished to devote to the carrying out of a plan he had always cherished of an orphanage at Neuhof; but the money seems to have melted we do not know how.

§ 79. The other incident is that of Pestalozzi’s last success. In spite of Schmid he would open a school for twelve neglected children at Clindy, a hamlet near Yverdun. Here he produced results like those which had crowned his first efforts at Neuhof, Stanz, and Burgdorf. Old, absent-minded, and incapable as he seemed in ordinary affairs, he, as though by enchantment, gained the attention and the affection of the children, and bent them entirely to his will. In a few months the number of children had risen to thirty, and wonderful progress had been made. Clindy at once became celebrated. Pestalozzi was induced to admit some children whose friends paid for them, and Schmid then persuaded the old man to remove the school into the Castle.

§ 80. In 1824 the Institution, which had lasted for twenty years, was finally closed, and Pestalozzi went to spend his remaining days (nearly three years as it proved) at Neuhof, which was then in the hands of his grandson. The year before his death he visited an orphanage conducted on his principles by Zeller at Beuggen near Rheinfelden. The children sang a poem of Goethe’s quoted in _Leonard and Gertrude_, and had a crown of oak ready to put on the old man’s head; but this he declined. “I am not worthy of it,” said he, “keep it for innocence.”

§ 81. On 17th February, 1827, at the age of eighty-one, Pestalozzi fell asleep.

§ 82. “The reform needed,” said Pestalozzi, “is not that the school-coach should be better horsed, but that it should be turned right round and started on a new track.” This may seem a violent metaphor, but perhaps it is not more violent than the change that was (and in this country still is) necessary. Let us try to ascertain what is the right road according to Pestalozzi, and then see on what road the school-coach is now travelling.

§ 83. The grand change advocated by Pestalozzi was a change of _object_. The main object of the school should not be to _teach_ but to _develop_.

§ 84. This change of object naturally brings many changes with it. Measured by their capacity for acquiring school knowledge and skill young children may be considered, as one of H.M. Inspectors considered them, “the fag-end of the school.” But if the school exists not to teach but to develop, young children, instead of being the “fag-end,” become the most important part of all. In the development of all organisms more depends on the earlier than on the later stages; and there is no reason to doubt that this law holds in the case of human beings. On this account, from the days of Pestalozzi educational science has been greatly, I may say mainly, concerned with young children. For the dominating thought has been that the young human being is an undeveloped organism, and that in education that organism is developed. So the essence of Pestalozzianism lies not so much in its method as in its aim, not more in what it does than in what it endeavours to do.

§ 85. And thus it was that Pestalozzi (in Raumer’s words) “compelled the scholastic world to revise the whole of their task, to reflect on the nature and destiny of man, and also on the proper way of leading him from his youth towards that destiny.” And it was his love of his fellow-creatures that raised him to this standpoint. He was moved by “the enthusiasm of humanity.” Consumed with grief for the degradation of the Swiss peasantry, he never lost faith in their true dignity as men, and in the possibility of raising them to a condition worthy of it. He cast about for the best means of thus raising them, and decided that it could be effected, not by any improvement in their outward circumstances, but by an education which should make them what their Creator intended them to be, and should give them the use and the consciousness of all their inborn faculties. “From my youth up,” he says, “I felt what a high and indispensable human duty it is to labour for the poor and miserable; ... that he may attain to a consciousness of his own dignity through his feeling of the universal powers and endowments which he possesses awakened within him; that he may not only learn to gabble over by rote the religious maxim that ‘man is created in the image of God, and is bound to live and die as a child of God,’ but may himself experience its truth by virtue of the Divine power within him, so that he may be raised, not only above the ploughing oxen, but also above the man in purple and silk who lives unworthily of his high destiny” (Quoted in Barnard, p. 13).

Again he says (and I quote at length on the point, as it is indeed the key to Pestalozzianism), “Why have I insisted so strongly on attention to early physical and intellectual education? Because I consider these as merely leading to a higher aim, to qualify the human being for the free and full use of all the faculties implanted by the Creator, and to direct all these faculties towards the perfection of the whole being of man, that he may be enabled to act in his peculiar station as an instrument of that All-wise and Almighty Power that has called him into life” (To Greaves, p. 160).

§ 86. Believing in this high aim of education, Pestalozzi required a proper early training for all alike. “Every human being,” said he, “has a claim to a judicious development of his faculties by those to whom the care of his infancy is confided” (_Ib._ p. 163).

§ 87. Pestalozzi therefore most earnestly addressed himself to mothers, to convince them of the power placed in their hands, and to teach them how to use it. “The mother is qualified, and qualified by the Creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child; ... and what is demanded of her is—a _thinking love_.... God has given to thy child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point remains undecided—how shall this heart, this head, these hands, be employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated? A question the answer to which involves a futurity of happiness or misery to a life so dear to thee.... It is recorded that God opened the heavens to the patriarch of old, and showed him a ladder leading thither. This ladder is let down to every descendant of Adam; it is offered to thy child. But he must be taught to climb it. And let him not attempt it by the cold calculations of the head, or the mere impulse of the heart; but let all these powers combine, and the noble enterprise will be crowned with success. These powers are already bestowed on him, but to thee it is given to assist in calling them forth” (To Greaves, p. 21). “Maternal love is the first agent in education.... Through it the child is led to love and trust his Creator and his Redeemer.”

§ 88. From the theory of development which lay at the root of Pestalozzi’s views of education, it followed that the imparting of knowledge and the training for special pursuits held only a subordinate position in his scheme. “Education, instead of merely considering what is to be imparted to children, ought to consider first what they may be said already to possess, if not as a developed, at least as an involved faculty capable of development. Or if, instead of speaking thus in the abstract, we will but recollect that it is to the great Author of life that man owes the possession, and is responsible for the use, of his innate faculties, education should not simply decide what is to be made of a child, but rather inquire what it was intended that he should become. What is his destiny as a created and responsible being? What are his faculties as a rational and moral being? What are the means for their perfection, and the end held out as the highest object of their efforts by the Almighty Father of all, both in creation and in the page of revelation?”

§ 89. Education, then, must consist “in _a continual benevolent superintendence_, with the object of calling forth all the faculties which Providence has implanted; and its province, thus enlarged, will yet be with less difficulty surveyed from one point of view, and will have more of a systematic and truly philosophical character, than an incoherent mass of ‘lessons’—arranged without unity of principle, and gone through without interest—which too often usurps its name.”

The educator’s task then is to superintend and promote the child’s development, morally, intellectually, and physically.

§ 90. “The essential principle of education is not teaching,” said Pestalozzi; “it is love” (R.’s G., 289). Again he says, “The child loves and believes before it thinks and acts” (_Ib._ 378). And in a very striking passage (_Ib._ 329), where he compares the development of the various powers of a human being to the development of a tree, he says, “These forces of the heart—faith and love—are in the formation of immortal man what the root is for the tree.” So, according to Pestalozzi, a child without faith and love can no more grow up to be what he should be than a tree can grow without a root. Apart from this vital truth there can be no such thing as Pestalozzianism.

“Ah yet when all is thought and said
The heart still overrules the head.”

It is our hearts and affections that lead us right or wrong far more than our intellects. In advocating the training of the minds of the people, Lord Derby once remarked that as Chairman of Quarter Sessions he had found most of the culprits brought before him were stupid and ignorant. It certainly cannot be denied that the commonest kind of criminal is bad in every way. He has his body ruined by debauchery, his intellect almost in abeyance, and his heart and affections set on what is vile and degrading. If you could cultivate his intellect you would certainly raise him out of the lowest and by far the largest of the criminal classes. But he might become a criminal of a type less disgusting in externals, but in reality far more dangerous. The most atrocious miscreant of our time, if not of all time, was a man who contrived a machine to sink ships in mid-ocean, his only object being to gain a sum of money on a false insurance. This man was a type of the _élite_ of criminals, had received an intellectual training, and could not have been described by Lord Derby as ignorant or stupid.

§ 91. Pestalozzi then, much as he valued the development of the intellect, put first the moral and religious influence of education; and with him moral and religious were one and the same. He protested against the ordinary routine of elementary education, because “everywhere in it the flesh predominated over the spirit, everywhere the divine element was cast into the shade, everywhere selfishness and the passions were taken as the motives of action, everywhere mechanical habits usurped the place of intelligent spontaneity” (R.’s G., 470). Education for the people must be different to this. “Man does not live by bread alone; every child needs a religious development; every child needs to know how to pray to God in all simplicity, but with faith and love” (R.’s G., 378). “If the religious element does not run through the whole of education, this element will have little influence on the life; it remains formal or isolated”[160] (_Ib._ 381). And Pestalozzi sums up the essentials of popular education in the words: “The child accustomed from his earliest years to pray, to think, and to work, is already more than half educated” (_Ib._ 381).

§ 92. Here we see the main requisites. First the child must pray with faith and love. Next he must _think_.

“The child must think!” exclaims the schoolmaster: “Must he not learn?” To which Pestalozzi would have replied, “Most certainly he must.” Learning was not in Pestalozzi’s estimation as in Locke’s, the “last and least” thing, but learning was with him something very different from the learning imparted by the ordinary schoolmaster. Pestalozzi was very imperfectly acquainted with the thoughts and efforts of his predecessors, but the one book on education which he had studied had freed him from the “idols” of the schoolroom. This book was the _Emile_ of Rousseau, and from it he came no less than Rousseau himself to despise the learning of the schoolmaster. But when he had to face the problem of organizing a course of education for the people, Pestalozzi did not agree with Rousseau that the first twelve years should be spent in “losing time.” No, the children must learn, but they must learn in such a way as to develop all the powers of the mind. And so Pestalozzi was led to what he considered his great discovery, viz., that all instruction must be based on “Anschauung.”

§ 93. The Germans, who have devoted so much thought and care and effort to education, greatly honour Pestalozzi,[161] and as his disciples aim at making all elementary instruction “anschaulich.” We English have troubled ourselves so little about Pestalozzi, or, I might say, about the theory of education, that we have not cared to get equivalent words for _Anschauung_ and _anschaulich_. For _Anschauung_ “sense-impression” has lately been tried; but this is in two ways defective; for (1) there may be “Anschauungen” beyond the range of the senses, and (2) there is in an “Anschauung” an active as well as a passive element, and this the word “impression” does not convey. The active part is brought out better by “observation”—the word used by Joseph Payne and James MacAlister; but this seems hardly wide enough. Other writers of English borrow words straight from the French, and talk about “intuition” and “intuitive,” words which were taken (first I believe by Kant) from the Latin _intueri_, “to look at _with attention and reflection_.”

§ 94. I think we shall be wise in following these writers. On good authority I have heard of a German professor who when asked if he had read some large work recently published in the distressing type of his nation, replied that he had not; he was waiting for a French translation. If the Germans find that the French express their thoughts more clearly than they can themselves, we may think ourselves fortunate when the French will act as interpreters. I therefore gladly turn to M. Buisson and translate what he says about “intuition.”

“Intuition is just the most natural and most spontaneous action of human intelligence, the action by which the mind seizes a reality without effort, hesitation, or go-between. It is a ‘direct apperception,’ made as it were at a glance. If it has to do with some matter within the province of the senses, the senses perceive it at once. Here we have the simplest case of all, the most common, the most easily noted. If the thing concerned is an idea, a reality, that is, beyond the reach of the senses, we still say that we seize it by intuition when all that is necessary is that it present itself to the mind, and the mind at once grasps it and is satisfied with it without any need of proof or investigation. We advance by intuition whenever our mind, acting by the senses, or by the judgment, or by the conscience, knows things with the same amount of evidence and the same amount of speed that a distinct view of an object affords the eye. So intuition is no separate faculty; it is nothing strange or new in the mind of man. It is just the mind itself ‘intuitively’ recognising what exists in it or around it” (_Les Conférences Péd. faites aux Instituteurs_, Delagrave, 1879, p. 331). So the “intuitive method” (to keep the French name for it) is of very wide application. “It appeals to this force _sui generis_, to this glance of the mind, to this spontaneous spring of the intelligence towards truth.” It sets the pupil’s mind to work in following his own intellectual instincts. If in our teaching we can use it, we shall have gained, as M. Buisson says, the best helper in the world, viz., the pupil. If he can be got to take an active part in the instruction all difficulty vanishes at once. Instead of having to drag him along, you will see him delighted to keep you company.

§ 95. According to M. Buisson there are three kinds of intuition—sensuous, intellectual, and moral. Similarly M. Jullien (_Esprit de Pestalozzi_, 1812, vol. j, p. 152) says that there are “intuitions” of the “internal senses” as well as of the external: the “internal senses” are four in number: first, the sense for the true; second, the sense for the beautiful; third, the sense for the good; fourth, the sense for the infinite.

§ 96. Without settling whether this analysis is complete we shall have no difficulty in admitting that both body and mind have faculties by means of which we apprehend, lay hold of, what is true and right; and it is on the use of these faculties that Pestalozzi bases instruction. No Englishman may have found a good word to indicate _Anschauung_, but one Englishman at least had the idea of it long before Pestalozzi. More than a century earlier Locke had called knowledge “the internal perception of the mind.” “Knowing is seeing,” said he; “and if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves we do so by another man’s eyes, let him use never so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very visible” (_Supra_ p. 222).

§ 97. Thus in theory Pestalozzi was, however unconsciously, a follower of Locke. But in practice they went far asunder. Locke’s thoughts were constantly occupied with philosophical investigations, and he seems to have made small account of the intellectual power of children, and to have supposed that they cannot “see” anything at all. So he cared little what was taught them, and till they reached the age of reason the tutor might give such lessons as would be useful to “young gentlemen,” the avowed object being to “keep them from sauntering.” His follower Rousseau preferred that the child’s mind should not be filled with the traditional lore of the schoolroom, and that the instructor, when the youth reached the age of twelve, should find “an unfurnished apartment to let.” Then came Pestalozzi, and he saw that at whatever age the instructor began to teach the child, he would not find an unfurnished apartment, seeing that every child learns continuously from the hour of its birth. And how does the child learn? Not by repeating words which express the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of other people,[162] but by his own experiences and feelings, and by the thoughts which these suggest to him.

§ 98. Elementary education then on its intellectual side is teaching the child to think. The proper subjects of thought for children Pestalozzi held to be the children’s surroundings, the realities of their own lives, the things that affect them and arouse their feelings and interests. Perhaps he did not emphasize _interest_ as much as Herbart has done since; but clearly an _Anschauung_ or “intuition” is only possible when the child is interested in the thing observed.

§ 99. The art of teaching in Pestalozzi’s system consists in analyzing the knowledge that the children should acquire about their surroundings, arranging it in a regular sequence, and bringing it to the children’s consciousness gradually and in the way in which their minds will act upon it. In this way they learn slowly, but all they learn is their own. They are not like the crow drest up in peacock’s feathers, for they have not appropriated any _dead_ knowledge (“_angelernte todte Begriffe_,” as Diesterweg has it), and it cannot be said of them, “They know about much, but _know_ nothing (_Sie kennen viel und wissen nichts_).” Their knowledge is actual knowledge, for they are taught not _what_ to think but _to think_, and to exercise their powers of observation and draw conclusions from their own experience. The teacher simply furnishes materials and occasions for this exercise in observing, and as it goes on gives his benevolent superintendence.

§ 100. They learn slowly for another reason. According to Pestalozzi the first conceptions must be dwelt upon till they are distinct and firmly fixed. Buss tells us that when he first joined Pestalozzi at Burgdorf the delay over the prime elements seemed to him a waste of time, but that afterwards he was convinced of its being the right plan, and felt that the failure of his own education was due to its incoherent and desultory character. “Not only,” says Pestalozzi, “have the first elements of knowledge in every subject the most important bearing on its complete outline, but the child’s confidence and interest are gained by perfect attainment even in the lowest stage of instruction.”[163]

§ 101. We have seen that Pestalozzi would have children learn to pray, to think, and to _work_. In schools for the _soi-disant_ “upper classes” the parents or friends of a boy sometimes say, “There is no need for him to work he will be very well off.” From this kind of demoralization Pestalozzi’s pupils were free. They would have to work, and Pestalozzi wished them to learn to work as soon as possible. In this way he sought to increase their self-respect, and to unite their school-life with their life beyond it.[164]

§ 102. Pestalozzi was tremendously in earnest, and he wished the children also to take instruction seriously. He was totally opposed to the notion which had found favour with many great authorities as _e.g._, Locke and Basedow, that instruction should always be given in the guise of amusement. “I am convinced,” says he, “that such a notion will for ever preclude solidity of knowledge, and, for want of sufficient exertions on the part of the pupils, will lead to that very result which I wish to avoid by my principle of a constant employment of the thinking powers. A child must very early in life be taught the lesson that exertion is indispensable for the attainment of knowledge”[165] (To G., xxiv, p. 117). But he should be taught at the same time that exertion is not an evil, and he should be encouraged, not frightened, into it. Healthy exertion, whether of body or mind, is always attended with a feeling of satisfaction amounting to pleasure, and where this pleasure is absent the instructor has failed in producing proper exertion. As Pestalozzi says, “Whenever children are inattentive and apparently take no interest in a lesson, the teacher should always first look to himself for the reason”[166] (_Ib._).

§ 103. But though he took so serious a view of instruction, he made instruction include and indeed give a prominent place to the arts of singing and drawing. In the Pestalozzian schools singing found immense favour with both the masters and the pupils, and the collection of songs by Nägeli, a master at Yverdun, became famous. Drawing too was practised by all. As Pestalozzi writes to Greaves (xxiv, 117), “A person who is in the habit of drawing, especially from nature, will easily perceive many circumstances which are commonly overlooked, and will form a much more correct impression even of such objects as he does not stop to examine minutely, than one who has never been taught to look upon what he sees with an intention of reproducing a likeness of it. The attention to the exact shape of the whole and the proportion of the parts, which is requisite for the taking of an adequate sketch, is converted into a habit, and becomes productive both of instruction and amusement.”

§ 104. I have now endeavoured to point out the main features of Pestalozzianism. The following is the summing up of these features given by Morf in his Contribution to Pestalozzi’s Biography:—

1. Instruction must be based on the learner’s own experience.
(Das Fundament des Unterrichts ist die Anschauung.)

2. What the learner experiences and observes must be connected
with language.

3. The time for learning is not the time for judging, not the
time for criticism.

4. In every department instruction must begin with the simplest
elements, and starting from these must be carried on step by
step according to the development of the child, that is, it
must be brought into psychological sequence.

5. At each point the instructor shall not go forward till
that part of the subject has become the proper intellectual
possession of the learner.

6. Instruction must follow the path of development, not the
path of lecturing, teaching, or telling.

7. To the educator the individuality of the child must be
sacred.

8. Not the acquisition of knowledge or skill is the main
object of elementary instruction, but the development and
strengthening of the powers of the mind.

9. With knowledge (_Wissen_) must come power (_Können_), with
information (_Kenntniss_) skill (_Fertigkeit_).

10. Intercourse between educator and pupil, and school
discipline especially, must be based on and controlled by love.

11. Instruction shall be subordinated to the aim of _education_.

12. The ground of moral-religious bringing up lies in the
relation of mother and child.[167]

§ 105. Having now seen in which direction Pestalozzi would start the school-coach, let us examine (with reference to England only) the direction in which it is travelling at present.

§ 106. For educational purposes we may, with Lord Beaconsfield, regard the English as composed of two nations, the rich and the poor. Let us consider these separately.

In the case of the rich we find that the worst part of our educational course—the part most wrong in theory and pernicious in practice—is the schooling of young children, say between six and twelve years old. Before the age of six some few are fortunate enough to attend a good Kindergarten; but the opportunity of doing this is at present rare, and for most children of well-to-do parents there is, up to six years old, little or no organised instruction. Pestalozzi would have every mother made capable of giving such instruction. Froebel would have every child sent to a skilled “Kindergärtnerin.” It seems to me beyond question that children gain immensely from joining a properly-managed Kindergarten; but where this is impossible, perhaps the mother may leave the child to the series of impressions which come to its senses without any regular order. According to the first Lord Lytton, the mother’s interference might remind us of the man who thought his bees would make honey faster if, instead of going in search of flowers, they were shut up and had flowers brought to them. The way in which young children turn from object to object, like the bees from flower to flower, seems to show that at this stage their intellectual training goes on whether we help it or not. There is no doubt an education for children however young, and the mother is the teacher, but the lessons have more to do with the heart than the head.

§ 107. But the time for regular teaching comes at last, and what is to be done then? Let us consider briefly what _is_ done.

Hitherto, the only defence ever made of our school-course leading up to residence at a University, has been that it aims not at giving knowledge but at training the mind. Youths then are supposed to be engaged, not in gaining knowledge, but in training their faculties for adult life. But when we come to provide for the “education” of children, we never think of training their faculties for youth, but endeavour solely to inculcate what will then come in useful. We see clearly enough that it would be absurd to cram the mind of a youth with laws of science or art or commerce which he could not understand, on the ground that the getting-up of these things might save him trouble in after-life. But we do not hesitate to sacrifice childhood to the learning by heart of grammar rules, Latin declensions, historical dates, and the like, with no thought whatever of the child’s faculties, but simply with a view of giving him knowledge (so-called) that will come in useful five or six years afterwards. We do not treat youths thus, probably because we have more sympathy with them, or at least understand them better. The intellectual life to which the senses and the imagination are subordinated in the man has already begun in the youth. In an inferior degree he can do what the man can do, and understand what the man can understand. He has already some notion of reasoning, and abstraction, and generalisation. But with the child it is very different. His active faculties may be said almost to differ in kind from a man’s. He has a feeling for the sensuous world which he will lose as he grows up. His strong imagination, under no control of the reason, is constantly at work building castles in the air, and investing the doll or the puppet-show with all the properties of the things they represent. His feelings and affections, easily excited, find an object to love or dislike in every person and thing he meets with. On the other hand, he has only vague notions of the abstract, and has no interest except in actual known persons, animals, and things.

§ 108. There is, then, between the child of eight or nine and the youth of fourteen or fifteen a greater difference than between the youth and the man of twenty; and this demands a corresponding difference in their studies. And yet, as matters are carried on now, the child is too often kept to the drudgery of learning by rote mere collections of hard words, perhaps, too, in a foreign language: and absorbed in the present, he is not much comforted by the teacher’s assurance that “some day” these things will come in useful.

§ 109. How to educate the child is doubtless the most difficult problem of all, and it is generally allotted to those who are the least likely to find a satisfactory solution.

The earliest educator of the children of many rich parents is the nursemaid—a person not usually distinguished by either intellectual or moral excellence.[168] At an early age this educator is superseded by the Preparatory School. Taken as a body, the ladies who open “establishments for young gentlemen” cannot be said to hold enlarged views, or, indeed, any views whatever, on the subject of education. Their intention is not so much to cultivate the children’s faculties as to make a livelihood, and to hear no complaints that pupils who have left them have been found deficient in the expected knowledge by the master of the next school. If anyone would investigate the sort of teaching which is considered adapted to the capacity of children at this stage, let him look into a standard work still in vogue (“Mangnall’s Questions”), from which the young of both sexes acquire a great quantity and variety of learning; the whole of ancient and modern history and biography, together with the heathen mythology, the planetary system, and the names of all the constellations, lying very compactly in about 300 pages.[169]

Unfortunately, moreover, from the gentility of these ladies, their scholars’ bodies are often treated in preparatory schools no less injuriously than their minds. It may be natural in a child to use his lungs and delight in noise, but this can hardly be considered _genteel_, so the tendency is, as far as possible, suppressed. It is found, too, that if children are allowed to run about they get dirty and spoil their clothes, and do not look like “young gentlemen,” so they are made to take exercise in a much more genteel fashion, walking slowly two-and-two, _with gloves on_.[170]

§ 110. At nine or ten years old, boys are commonly put to a school taught by masters. Here they lose sight of their gloves, and learn the use of their limbs; but their minds are not so fortunate as their bodies. The studies of the school have been arranged without any thought of their peculiar needs. The youngest class is generally the largest, often much the largest, and it is handed over to the least competent and worst paid master on the staff of teachers. The reason is, that little boys are found to learn the tasks imposed upon them very slowly. A youth or a man who came fresh to the Latin grammar would learn in a morning as much as the master, with great labour, can get into children in a week. It is thought, therefore, that the best teaching should be applied where it will have the most obvious results. If anyone were to say to the manager of a school, “The master who takes the lowest form teaches badly, and the children learn nothing”; he would perhaps say, “Very likely; but if I paid a much higher salary, and got a better man, they would learn but little.” The only thing the school-manager thinks of is, How much do the little boys learn of what is taught in the higher forms? How their faculties are being developed, or whether they have any faculties except for reading, writing, and arithmetic, and for getting grammar-rules, &c. by heart, he is not so “unpractical” as to enquire.

§ 111. With reference to the education of the first of our “two nations,” it seems then pretty clear that Pestalozzi would require that the school-coach should be turned and started in a totally different direction.

§ 112. What about the education of the other “nation,” a nation of which the verb “to rule” has for many centuries been used in the passive voice, but can be used in that voice no longer? A century ago, with the partial exception of Scotland and Massachusetts, there was no such thing as school education for the people to be found anywhere in Europe or America. But from 1789 onwards power has been passing more and more from the few to the many; and as a natural consequence folk-schools (for which we have not yet found a name) have become of vast importance everywhere. The Germans, as we have seen, have been the disciples of Pestalozzi, and their elementary education in everything bears traces of his ideas. The English have organised a great system of elementary education in total ignorance of Pestalozzi. As usual, we seem to have supposed that the right system would come to us “in sleep.” But has it come? The children of the poor are now compelled by the law to attend an elementary school. What sort of an education has the law there provided for them? The Education Department professes to measure everything by results. Let us do the same. Suppose that on his leaving school we wished to forecast a lad’s future. What should we try to find out about him? No doubt we should ask what he knew; but this would not be by any means the main thing. His skill would interest us, and still more would his state of health. But what we should ask first and foremost is this, Whom does he love? Whom does he admire and imitate? What does he care about? What interests him? It is only when the answers to these questions are satisfactory, that we can think hopefully of his future; and it is only in so far as the school-course has tended to make the answers satisfactory, that it deserves our approval. Schools such as Pestalozzi designed would have thus deserved our approval; but we cannot say this of the schools into which the children of the English poor are now driven. In these schools the heart and the affections are not thought of, the powers of neither mind nor body are developed by exercise, and the children do not acquire any interests that will raise or benefit them.

§ 113. An advocate of our system would not deny this, but would probably say, “The question for us to consider is, not what is the best that in the most favourable circumstances might be attempted, but what is the best that in very restricted and by no means favourable circumstances, we are likely to get. The teachers in our schools are not self-devoting Pestalozzis, but only ordinary men and women, and still worse, ordinary boys and girls.[171] It would be of no use talking to our teachers (still less our pupil-teachers) about developing the affections and the mental or bodily powers of the children. All such talk could end in nothing but silly cant. As for character, we expect the school to cultivate in the children habits of order, neatness, industry. Beyond this we cannot go.”

And yet, though this seems reasonable, we feel that it is not quite satisfactory. If so much depends in all of us on “admiration, hope, and love,” we can hardly consider a system of education that entirely ignores them to be well adapted to the needs of human nature. If Pestalozzi was right, we must be wrong. We have never supposed the object of the school to be the development of the faculties of heart, of head, and of hand, but we have thought of nothing but learning—learning first of all to read, write, and cipher, and then in “good” schools, one or more “extra subjects” may be taken up, and a grant obtained for them. The sole object, both of managers and teachers, is to prepare for the Inspector, who comes once a year, and from an examination of five hours or so, pronounces on what the children have learnt.

§ 114. The engineer most concerned in the construction of this machine, the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, announced that there could be “no such thing as a science of education;” and as when we have no opinion of our own we always adopt the opinion of some positive person, we took his word for it. But what if the confident Mr. Lowe was mistaken? What if there _is_ such a science, and the aim of it is that children should grow up not so much to _know_ something as to _be_ something? In this case we shall be obliged sooner or later to give up Mr. Lowe and to come round to Pestalozzi.[172] Science is correct inferences drawn from the facts of the universe; and where such science exists, confident assertions that it does not and cannot exist are dangerous for the confident persons and for those who follow them. Even if “there is no such thing as a science of education,” such a thing as _education_ there is; and this is just what Mr. Lowe, and we may say the English, practically deny. They make arrangements for instruction and mete out “the grant” according to the results obtained, but they totally fail to conceive of the existence of _education_, education which has instruction among its various agents.