The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

A few hours a week were devoted to military exercises.

Surely everything is not to be commended in the processes which we have just indicated. It is not necessary, for example, that the child conceive, when he computes, the content of numbers, and Pestalozzi sometimes makes an abuse of sense intuition. He introduces analysis, and an analysis too subtile and too minute, into studies where nature alone does her work. “My method,” he said, “is but a refinement of the processes of nature.” He refines too much.

518. Pestalozzi and Rousseau.—Pestalozzi has often acknowledged what he owed to Rousseau. “My chimerical and unpractical spirit was taken,” he said, “with that chimerical and impracticable book.... The system of liberty ideally established by Rousseau, excited in me an infinite longing for a wider and more bounteous sphere of activity.”

The great superiority of Pestalozzi over Rousseau, is that he worked for the people,—that he applied to a great number of children the principles which Rousseau embodied only in an individual and privileged education. Émile, after all, is an aristocrat. He is rich, and of good ancestry; and is endowed with all the gifts of nature and fortune. Real pupils do not offer, in general, to the action of teachers, material as docile and complaisant. Pestalozzi had to do only with children of the common people, who have everything to learn at school, because they have found at home, with busy or careless parents, neither encouragement nor example,—because their early years have been only a long intellectual slumber. For these benumbed natures, many exercises are necessary which would properly be regarded as useless if it were a question of instructing children of another condition. Before condemning, before ridiculing, the trifling practices of Pestalozzi, and of teachers of the same school, we should consider the use to which these processes were applied. The real organizer of the education of childhood and of the people, Pestalozzi has a right to the plaudits of all those who are interested in the future of the masses of the people.

519. Conclusion.—We should not flatter ourselves that merely by means of an analysis of Pestalozzi’s methods, we can comprehend the service of a man who excelled in the warmth of his charity, in his ardor of devotion and of propagandism, and in I know not what that makes a grand personality, more than by the clearness and the exactness of his theories. It is somewhat with Pestalozzi as with those great actors who carry with them to their tomb a part of the secret of their art.

He was especially great in heart and in love. To read some of his writings, we would sometimes be tempted to say that his intellect was far inferior to the expectation excited by his name; but what a splendid revenge he takes in the domain of sentiment!

He passionately loved the people. He knew their sufferings, and nothing turned him from his anxiety to cure them. In the presence of a beautiful landscape, he thought less of the charming scene that was displayed before his eyes than of the poor people who, under those splendors of nature, led a life of misery.

That which assures him an immortal glory is the high purpose that he set before himself,—his ardor to regenerate humanity through instruction. Of what consequence is it that the results obtained were so disproportionate to his efforts, and that he could say, “The contrast between what I would and what I could is so great that it cannot be expressed”? Even the French Revolution did not succeed in the matter of instruction, in making its works commensurate with its aspirations.

The love and the admiration of all the friends of instruction are forever secured to Pestalozzi. He was the most suggestive, the most stimulating, of modern educators. If it was not given him to act sufficiently on French pedagogy, he was in Germany the great inspirer of reform in popular education. While he was despised by Bonaparte, he obtained, in 1802, from the philosopher Fichte, this fine compliment, “It is from the institute of Pestalozzi that I expect the regeneration of the German nation.”