“The home is the basis of the education of humanity.”
“Man, it is within yourself, it is in the inner sense of your power, that resides nature’s instrument for your development.”
491. Leonard and Gertrude.—In 1781 Pestalozzi published the first volume of Leonard and Gertrude. He had written it within the blank spaces of an old account book. This book, the most celebrated perhaps of all Pestalozzi’s writings, is a sort of popular romance in which the author brings upon the stage a family of working-people. Gertrude here represents the ideas of Pestalozzi on the education of children. The three other volumes (1783, 1785, 1787) relate the regeneration of a village through the concerted action of legislation, administration, religion, and the school, and especially the school, “which is the centre whence everything should proceed.”
Leonard and Gertrude is the only one of Pestalozzi’s works which Diesterweg[219] recommends to practical teachers.
“It was my first word,” says Pestalozzi, “to the heart of the poor and of the abandoned of the land.”
In making Gertrude the principal character of his romance, Pestalozzi wished to emphasize one of his fundamental ideas, which was to place the instruction and the education of the people in the hands of mothers.
492. New Experiments in Agriculture.—From 1787 to 1797 Pestalozzi returned to farming. It is from this period that date his relations with Fellenberg, the celebrated founder of Agricultural Institutes, and with the philosopher Fichte, who showed him the agreement of his ideas with the doctrine of Kant. His name began to become celebrated, and, in 1792, the Legislative Assembly proclaimed him a French citizen, in company with Washington and Klopstock.
During these years of farm labor, Pestalozzi had meditated different works which appeared in 1797.
493. Other Works of Pestalozzi.—Educational thought pervades all the literary works of Pestalozzi. Thus his Fables, short compositions in prose, all have a moral and educational tendency. Also, in his Researches on the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race, he sought to justify the preponderant office which he accorded to nature in the education of man. But Pestalozzi was not successful in philosophical dissertations.
“This book,” he says himself, “is to me only another proof of my lack of ability; it is simply a diversion of my imaginative faculty, a work relatively weak.... No one,” he adds, “understands me, and it has been hinted that the whole work has been taken for nonsense.”