Pestalozzi, JOHANN HEINRICH, educational theorist, was born at Zurich, 12th January 1745. Eccentric, quixotic, eager to be an adjuster of social wrongs from his youth, he sought to realise his aims through educating the young. He shares with Rousseau, whose Émile greatly influenced his mind, the honour of conceiving a method which is the corner-stone of all sound theories of primary education. From his day onward two ideas of education co-existed—the older one, applicable to the children of the classes; his, applicable to the children of the masses; the former being in many ways improved by an encroachment of the latter upon its traditional domain. Pestalozzi, living during the period of the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, found in his disturbed country, in the misery inflicted by war, opportunity for the display of self-sacrifice, devotion to the oppressed, and that unselish love of the children of the very poor which especially distinguished him. Illiterate, ill-dressed, a bad speaker, and a bad manager, Pestalozzi was unfit for the everyday business of life, and all his undertakings resulted in practical failure, though rousing the admiration of Europe, and calling forth down to the present day in many countries, more especially in Germany, a crowd of disciples, who have carried out the principles of their master with great enthusiasm. Although he was totally unable to cope with the world, Pestalozzi's personality was instinct with a loving sensibility; he awoke men to a sense of responsibility to childhood, and ushered the 19th century upon the stage of history as the educational age par excellence.
His life is soon told. Believing justly in the moralising virtue of agricultural occupations and rural environment, he chose a farm upon which to dwell with his collected waifs and strays as a father among his own. The farm Neuhof, in the canton Aargau, stranded on a faulty domestic economy after a five years' struggle (1780). Pestalozzi withdrew then from practical life, to think out the educational problem. His Evening Hours of a Hermit was the first fruit of his meditations, and develops the following thoughts: before undertaking to educate man, learn to know him; the method whereby to educate man should be founded upon his own nature; in his nature are hidden the forces that draw out his faculties, exercise them; exercise, the instrument of education, connects the wants of our nature with the objects that satisfy them; to rejoice in the fullness of your strength, make your education answer to your needs and to the inner call of your soul. Then came a social novel, Leonard and Gertrude, in four volumes. The former is a drunken stone-mason, the latter his wife, and a good one; the scene, a village given over to corruption. At last the minister, the schoolmaster, Gertrude with a few peasant-women, set about the reform of the village. This story created much attention, and was followed by a long period of literary activity on the part of its author. In 1798 he plunged into action again by opening his orphan school at Stanz. The picture he there makes of a moneyless, helpless, homeless lover of children, gathering homeless, helpless, children around him in an old convent in a township ruined by war, and set upon by a hostile and ignorant peasantry, is a noble and pathetic picture. But times and men proved too hard for Pestalozzi. At the end of eight months this establishment was broken up.
He next wended his steps to the people's school at Berthoud (Burgdorf), in canton Berne, only to be ejected from his subordinate position there, at the age of fifty-five, by the jealous and bigoted senior master. He knew then the bitterest pangs of poverty, and had even to keep away from church for want of clothes. In partnership with others, and under the patronage of the Swiss government, he opened an experimental school of his own, still at Berthoud. While there he published How Gertrude Educates her Children. Germany greedily devoured the book. It is the recognised exposition of the Pestalozzian method, and sets forth that the development of human nature should be in dependence upon natural laws, with which it is the business of every good education to comply; in order to establish a good teaching method, learn first to understand nature, its general processes in man, and its particular processes in each individual; observation, the result of which is a spontaneous perception (intuition) of things, is the method by which all objects of knowledge are brought home to us. This last affirmation, containing in essence the whole theory of so-called intuitive education, is the corner-stone on which the German Volksschule ('folk-school') is built, the guiding principle of numberless books written for children, and the subject of numberless treatises on education.
In 1805 Pestalozzi moved his school to Yverdon, which here drew upon him the eyes of all Europe; in spite, however, of this his greatest moment of popularity and promise of worldly success, he entered upon a course of mistakes that led him to the grave, a disappointed and unsuccessful man. Deviating from the field of primary teaching, he applied his method in a large secondary school for the sons of notable Europeans attracted by his fame. His old incapacity in practical affairs brought the school down step by step till it was closed in 1825, and Pestalozzi, aged eighty, distracted by the enmity of some of his former colleagues, sinking under difficulties of his own making, an object of mingled pity and respect, addressed to mankind the Song of the Swan, a last educational prayer, and withdrew to Brugg (Aargau), where he died, 17th February 1827. Pestalozzi's books are all written in German.
See the article 'Pestalozzi' in the last edition of Quick's Essays (1890); Morf, Zur Biographie Pestalozzis (4 vols. 1864-89); De Guimps' monograph, translated by John Russell (1890); Krüsi's Pestalozzi (New York, 1875); Leonard and Gertrude (Eng. trans. 1825); and, above all, Pestalozzi, Étude Biographique (1890), by J. Guillaume.