“Take your best pupils,” he said, “and show the Prince what we are doing. He has numerous serfs, and when he is convinced, he will have them instructed.”
These frequent exhibitions entailed a great loss of time. Disorder reigned in the instruction. The young masters whom Pestalozzi had attached to his fortunes were overwhelmed with work, and could not give sufficient attention to the preparation of their lessons. Pestalozzi was growing old, and did not succeed in completing his methods.
511. The Tentatives of Pestalozzi.—The teaching of Pestalozzi was in reality but a long groping, an experiment ceaselessly renewed. Do not require of him articulate ideas, and methods definitely established. Always on the alert, and always in quest of something better, his admirable pedagogic instinct never came to full satisfaction. His merit was that he was always on the search for truth. His theories almost always followed, rather than preceded, his experiments. A man of intuition rather than of reasoning, he acknowledges that he went forward without considering what he was doing. He had the merit of making many innovations, but he was wrong in taking counsel of no one but himself, and of his personal feelings. “We ought to read nothing,” he said; “we ought to discover everything.” Pestalozzi never knew how to profit by the experience of others.
He never arrived at complete precision in the establishment of his methods. He complained of not being understood, and he was not in fact. One of his pupils at Yverdun, Vulliemin, thus expresses himself:—
“That which was called, not without pretense, the method of Pestalozzi was an enigma for us. It was for our teachers themselves. Each of them interpreted the doctrine of the master in his own way; but we were still far from the time when these divergencies engendered discord; when our principal teachers, after each had given out that he alone had comprehended Pestalozzi, ended by asserting that Pestalozzi himself was not understood; that he had not been understood except by Schmid, said Schmid, and by Niederer, said Niederer.”
512. Methods at Yverdun.—The writer whom we have just quoted gives us valuable information on the methods which were in use at Yverdun:—
“Instruction was addressed to the intelligence rather than to the memory. Attempt, said Pestalozzi to his colleagues, to develop the child, and not to train him as one trains a dog.”
“Language was taught us by the aid of intuition; we learned to see correctly, and through this very process to form for ourselves a correct idea of the relations of things. What we had conceived clearly we had no difficulty in expressing clearly.”
“The first elements of geography were taught us on the spot.... Then we reproduced in relief with clay the valley of which we had just made a study.”
“We were made to invent geometry by having marked out for us the end to reach, and by being put on the route. The same course was followed in arithmetic; our computations were made in the head and viva voce, without the aid of paper.”