Nevertheless, the results were still very poor, and the public school, especially the village school, remained in a sorry condition.
“Almost everywhere,” says Dittes, “there were employed as teachers, domestics, corrupt artisans, discharged soldiers, degraded students, and, in general, persons of questionable morality and education. Their pay was mean, and their authority slight. Attendance at school, generally very irregular, was almost everywhere entirely suspended in summer. Many villages had no school, and scarcely anywhere was the school attended by all the children. In many countries, most of the children, especially the girls, were wholly without instruction. The people, especially the peasantry, regarded the school as a burden. The clergy, it is true, always regarded themselves as the proprietors of the school, but on the whole they did but very little for it, and even arrested its progress. The nobility was but little favorable, in general, to intellectual culture for the people.... Instruction remained mechanical and the discipline rude. It is reported that a Suabian schoolmaster, who died in 1782, had inflicted during his experience in teaching 911,527 canings, 124,010 whippings, 10,235 boxes on the ear, and 1,115,800 thumps on the head. Moreover, he had made boys kneel 777 times on triangular sticks, had caused the fool’s cap to be worn 5001[217] times, and the stick to be held in air 1707 times. He had used something like 3000 words of abuse....”
484. Pestalozzi (1746-1827).—In Switzerland, the situation of primary instruction was scarcely better. The teachers were gathered up at hazard; their pay was wretched; in general they had no lodgings of their own, and they were obliged to hire themselves out for domestic service among the well-off inhabitants of the villages, in order to find food and lodging among them. A mean spirit of caste still dominated instruction, and the poor remained sunk in ignorance.
It was in the very midst of this wretched and unpropitious state of affairs that there appeared, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the most celebrated of modern educators, a man who, we may be sure, was not exempt from faults, whose mind had deficiencies and weaknesses, and whom we have no intention of shielding from criticism, by covering him with the praises of a superstitious admiration; but who is pre-eminently great by reason of his unquenchable love for the people, his ardent self-sacrifice, and his pedagogic instinct. During the eighty years of his troubled life, Pestalozzi never ceased to work for children, and to devote himself to their instruction. War or the ill-will of his countrymen destroyed his schools to no purpose. Without ever despairing, he straightway rebuilt them farther away, sometimes succeeding, through the gift of ardent speech, which never deserted him, in communicating the inspiration to those about him; gathering up in all places orphans and vagabonds, like a kidnapper of a new species; forgetting that he was poor, when he saw an occasion to be charitable, and that he was ill, when it was necessary to teach; and, finally, pursuing with an unconquerable energy, through hindrances and obstacles of every description, his educational apostleship. “It is death or success!” he wrote. “My zeal to accomplish the dream of my life would have carried me through air or through fire, no matter how, to the highest peak of the Alps!”
485. The Education of Pestalozzi.—The life of Pestalozzi is intimately related to his educational work. To comprehend the educator, it is first necessary to have become acquainted with the man.
Born at Zurich in 1746, Pestalozzi died at Brugg in Argovia in 1827. This unfortunate great man always felt the effects of the sentimental and unpractical education given him by his mother, who was left a widow with three children in 1751. He early formed the habit of feeling and of being touched with emotion, rather than of reasoning and of reflecting. The laughing-stock of his companions, who made sport of his awkwardness, the little scholar of Zurich accustomed himself to live alone and to become a dreamer. Later, towards 1760, the student of the academy distinguished himself by his political enthusiasm and his revolutionary daring. At that early period he had conceived a profound feeling for the miseries and the needs of the people, and he already proposed as the purpose of his life the healing of the diseases of society. At the same time there was developed in him an irresistible taste for a simple, frugal, and almost ascetic life. To restrain his desires had become the essential rule of his conduct, and, to put it in practice, he forced himself to sleep on a plank, and to subsist on bread and vegetables. Life in the open air had an especial attraction for him. Each year he spent his vacations in the country at his grandfather’s, who was a minister at Hœngg. Omne malum ex urbe was his favorite thought.
486. Pestalozzi an Agriculturist (1765-1775).—Pestalozzi’s call to be a teacher manifested itself at first only by some vague aspirations, of which it would be easy to find the trace in the short essays of his youth, and in the articles which he contributed in his twentieth year to a students’ journal published at Zurich. After having tried his hand unsuccessfully at theology and law, he became an agriculturist. When he established at Neuhof an agricultural enterprise, he thought less of enriching himself than of raising the material condition of the Swiss peasantry by organizing new industries. But notwithstanding his good intent, and the assistance of the devoted woman whom he had married in 1769, Anna Schultess, Pestalozzi, more enterprising than skillful, failed in his industrial establishments. In 1775 he had exhausted his resources. It is then that he formed an heroic resolution which typifies his indiscreet generosity. Poor, and scarcely more than able to support himself, he opened on his farm an asylum for poor children.
487. How Pestalozzi became an Educator.—The asylum for poor children at Neuhof (1775-1780) is, so to speak, the first step in the pedagogical career of Pestalozzi. The others will be the orphan asylum at Stanz (1798-1799), the primary schools at Burgdorf (1799), the institute at Burgdorf (1801-1804), and, finally, the institute at Yverdun (1805-1825).