The first question that is raised when we study systems of education, is, how the authors of those systems became teachers.
The best, perhaps, are those who became such because of their great love for humanity, or because of their tender love for their children. Pestalozzi is of this class. It is because he has ardently dreamed from his youth of the moral amelioration of the people; and it is also because he has followed with a tender solicitude the first steps of his little son Jacob on life’s journey, that he became a great teacher.
488. The Education of his Son.—The Father’s Journal,[218] where Pestalozzi noted from day to day the progress of his child, shows him intent on applying the principles of Rousseau. At the age of eleven, Jacob, like Émile, did not yet know how to read or to write. Things before words, the intuition of sensible objects, few exercises in judgment, respect for the powers of the child, an equal anxiety to husband his liberty and to secure his obedience, the constant endeavor to diffuse joy and good humor over education,—such were the principal traits of the education which Pestalozzi gave his son, an education which was a real experiment in pedagogy, from which the pupil perhaps suffered somewhat, but from which humanity was to derive profit. From this period Pestalozzi conceived some of the ideas which became the principles of his method. The father had made the educator. One of the superiorities of Pestalozzi over Rousseau is, that he loved and educated his own child.
489. The Asylum at Neuhof.—Madame de Staël was right in saying that “we must consider Pestalozzi’s school as limited to childhood. The education which it gives is designed only for the common people.” And, in fact, the first and the last establishments of Pestalozzi were schools for small children. In the last years of his life, when he was obliged to leave the institute of Yverdun, he returned to Neuhof, and there had constructed a school for poor children.
The school at Neuhof was to be above all else, in Pestalozzi’s thought, an experiment in moral and material regeneration through labor, through order, and through instruction. Many exercises in language, singing, reading of the Bible,—such were the intellectual occupations. But the greater part of the time was devoted to agricultural labor, to the cultivation of madder.
Notwithstanding his admirable devotion, Pestalozzi did not long succeed in his philanthropic plans. He had to contend against the prejudices of parents, and the ingratitude of the children. Very often the little beggars whom he had gathered up waited only till they had received from him new clothing, and then ran away and resumed their vagabond life. Besides, he lacked resources. He became poor, and fell more and more into debt. His friends, who had aided him on the start, warned him that he would die in a hospital or in a mad-house.
“For thirty years,” he says himself, “my life was a desperate struggle against the most frightful poverty.... More than a thousand times I was obliged to go without dinner, and at noon, when even the poorest were seated around a table, I devoured a morsel of bread upon the highway ...; and all this that I might minister to the needs of the poor, by the realization of my principles.”
490. Pestalozzi a Writer.—After the check to his undertaking at Neuhof, Pestalozzi renounced for some time all practical activity, and it was by his writings that he manifested, from 1780 to 1787, his zeal in education.
In 1780 appeared the Evening Hours of a Recluse, a series of aphorisms on the rise of a people through education. In this, Pestalozzi sharply criticised the artificial method of the school, and insisted on the necessity of developing the soul through what is within,—through interior culture:—
“The school everywhere puts the order of words before the order of free nature.”