The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

Nevertheless, Pestalozzi succeeded admirably in his little school. Then more advanced pupils were given him, but here his success was less. He always proceeded without a plan, and he gave himself great trouble in obtaining results that he might have attained much more easily with a little more system. Blunders, irregularities, and whimsicalities were ever compromising the action of his good will. To be convinced of this, it suffices to read the books which he published at this period, and in particular the most celebrated, of which we shall proceed to give a brief analysis.

498. How Gertrude teaches her Children.—It is under this title that in 1801 Pestalozzi published an exposition of his doctrine.[220] “It is the most important and the most profound of all his pedagogical writings,” says one of his biographers. We shall not dispute this; but this book also proves how the mind of Pestalozzi was inferior to his heart, how the writer was of less worth than the teacher. Composed under the form of letters addressed to Gessner, the work of Pestalozzi is too often a tissue of declamations, of rambling thoughts, and of personal grievances. It is the work of a brain that is in a state of ferment, and of a heart that is overflowing. The thought is painfully disentangled from out a thousand repetitions. Why need we be astonished at this literary incompetence of Pestalozzi when he himself makes the following confession: “For thirty years I had not read a single book; I could not longer read them.”

499. Pestalozzi’s Style.—The style of Pestalozzi is the very man himself: desultory, obscure, confused, but with sudden flashes and brilliant illuminations in which the warmth of his heart is exhibited. There are also too many comparisons; the imagery overwhelms the idea. Within a few pages he will compare himself, in succession, “to a sailor, who, having lost his harpoon, would try to catch a whale with a hook,” to depict the disproportion between his resources and his purpose; then to a straw, which even a cat would not lay hold of, to tell how he was despised; to an owl, to express his isolation; to a reed, to indicate his feebleness; to a mouse which fears a cat, to characterize his timidity.

500. Analysis of the Gertrude.—It is not easy to analyze one of Pestalozzi’s books. To begin with, How Gertrude teaches her Children is a very bad title, for Gertrude is not once mentioned in it. This proper name became for Pestalozzi an allegorical term by which he personifies himself.

The first three letters are rather autobiographical memoirs than an exposition of doctrine. Pestalozzi here relates his first experiments, and makes us acquainted with his assistants at Burgdorf,—Krüsi, Tobler, and Buss. In the letters which follow, the author attempts to set forth the general principles of his method. The seventh treats of language; the eighth, of the intuition of forms, of writing, and of drawing; the ninth, of the intuition of numbers and of computation; the tenth and twelfth, of intuition in general. For Pestalozzi, intuition was, as we know, direct and experimental perception, either in the domain of sense, or in the interior regions of the consciousness. Finally, the last letters are devoted to moral and religious development.

Without designing to follow, in all its ramblings and in all its digressions, the mobile thought of Pestalozzi, we shall gather up some of the general ideas which abound in this overcharged and badly composed work.

501. Methods Simplified.—The purpose of Pestalozzi was indeed, in one sense, as he was told by one of his friends, to mechanize instruction. He wished, in fact, to simplify and determine methods to such a degree that they might be employed by the most ordinary teacher, and by the most ignorant father and mother. In a word, he hoped to organize a pedagogical machine so well set up that it could in a manner run alone.

“I believe,” he says, “that we must not dream of making progress in the instruction of the people as long as we have not found the forms of instruction which make of the teacher, at least so far as the completion of the elementary studies is concerned, the simple mechanical instrument of a method which owes its results to the nature of its processes, and not to the ability of the one who uses it. I assert that a school-book has no value, save as it can be employed by a master without instruction as well as by one who has been taught.”