513. Decadence of the Institute.—Yverdun enjoyed an extraordinary notoriety for some years. But little by little the faults of the method became apparent. Internal discords and the misunderstanding of Pestalozzi’s colleagues, of Niederer, “the philosopher of the method,” and of Schmid, the mathematician, hastened the decadence of an establishment in which order and discipline had never reigned. Pestalozzi was content with being the spur of the institute. He became more and more unfit for practical affairs. He allowed all liberty to his assistants, and also to his pupils. At Yverdun the pupils addressed their teachers in familiar style. The touching fiction of paternity transported into the school, which was successful with Pestalozzi in his first experience in teaching, and with a small number of pupils, was no longer practicable at Yverdun, with a mass of pupils of every age and of every disposition.
514. Judgment of Père Girard.—In 1809 the Père Girard[221] was commissioned by the Swiss government to inspect the institute. The result was not favorable, though Girard acknowledges that he conceived the idea of his own method from studying at first hand that of Pestalozzi.
The principal criticism of Girard bears on the abuse of mathematics, which, under the influence of Schmid, became in fact more and more the principal occupation of teachers and pupils.
“I made the remark,” he says, “to my old friend Pestalozzi, that the mathematics exercised an unjustifiable sway in his establishment, and that I feared the results of this on the education that was given. Whereupon he replied to me with spirit, as was his manner: ‘This is because I wish my children to believe nothing which cannot be demonstrated as clearly to them as that two and two make four.’ My reply was in the same strain: ‘In that case, if I had thirty sons, I would not entrust one of them to you, for it would be impossible for you to demonstrate to him, as you can that two and two make four, that I am his father, and that I have a right to his obedience.’”
It is evident that Pestalozzi was deviating from his own inclinations. The general character of his pedagogy is in fact to avoid abstraction, and in all things to aim at concrete and living intuition. Even in religion, he deliberately excluded dogmatic teaching, precise and literal form, and sought only to awaken in the soul a religious sentiment, sincere and profound. The Père Girard had remarked to him that the religious instruction of his pupils was vague and indeterminate, and that their aspirations lacked the doctrinal form. “The form,” replied Pestalozzi, “I am still looking for it!”
515. The Last Years of Pestalozzi.—Disheartened by the decadence of his institute, Pestalozzi left Yverdun in 1824, and sought a retreat at Neuhof, on the farm where he had tried his first experiments in popular education. It is here that he wrote his last two works,—The Swan’s Song and My Destinies. January 25, 1827, he was taken to Brugg to consult a physician. He died there February 17; and two days after he was buried at Birr. It is there that the Canton of Argovia erected a monument to him in 1846, with the following inscription:—
“Here lies Henry Pestalozzi, born at Zurich, January 12, 1746, died at Brugg, February 17, 1827, savior of the poor at Neuhof, preacher of the people in Leonard and Gertrude, father of orphans at Stanz, founder of the new people’s school at Burgdorf and at München-Buchsee, educator of humanity at Yverdun, man, Christian, citizen: everything for others, nothing for himself. Blessed be his name.”
516. Essential Principles.—Pestalozzi never took the trouble to formulate the essential principles of his pedagogy. Incapable of all labor in abstract reflection, he borrowed from his friends, on every possible occasion, the logical exposition of his own methods. In his first letter to Gessner, he is only too happy to reproduce the observations of the philanthropist Fischer, who distinguished five essential principles in his system:—
1. To give the mind an intensive culture, and not simply extensive: to form the mind, and not to content one’s self with furnishing it;