“It was necessary that my children should observe, from dawn to evening, at every moment of the day, upon my brow and on my lips, that my affections were fixed on them, that their happiness was my happiness, and that their pleasures were my pleasures.”
“I was everything to my children. I was alone with them from morning till night.... Their hands were in my hands. Their eyes were fixed on my eyes.”
496. Results accomplished.—Without plan, without apparent order; merely by the action and incessant communication of his ardent soul with children ignorant and perverted by misery; reduced to his own resources in a house where he was himself “steward, accountant, footman, and almost servant all in one,” Pestalozzi obtained surprising results.
“I saw at Stanz,” he says, “the power of the human faculties.... My pupils developed rapidly; it was another race.... The children very soon felt that there existed in them forces which they did not know, and in particular they acquired a general sentiment of order and beauty. They were self-conscious, and the impression of weariness which habitually reigns in schools vanished like a shadow from my class-room. They willed, they had power, they persevered, they succeeded, and they were happy. They were not scholars who were learning, but children who felt unknown forces awakening within them, and who understood where these forces could and would lead them, and this feeling gave elevation to their mind and heart.”
“It is out of the folly of Stanz,” says Roger de Guimps, “that has come the primary school of the nineteenth century.”
While the pupils prospered, the master fell sick of overwork. When the events of the war closed the orphan asylum, it was quite time for the health of Pestalozzi. He raised blood and was at the limit of his strength.
497. The Schools of Burgdorf (1799-1802).—As soon as he had recovered his health, Pestalozzi resumed the course of his experiments. Not without difficulty he succeeded in having entrusted to him a small class in a primary school of Burgdorf. He passed for an ignoramus.
“It was whispered that I could neither write, nor compute, nor even read decently.” Pestalozzi does not defend himself against the charge, but acknowledges his incapacity, and even asserts that it is to his advantage.
“My incapacity in these respects was certainly an indispensable condition for my discovery of the simplest method of teaching.”
What troubled him most in the school at Burgdorf “was that it was subjected to rules.” “Never in my life had I borne such a burden. I was discouraged. I cringed under the routine yoke of the school.”