§ 86. Believing in this high aim of education, Pestalozzi required a proper early training for all alike. “Every human being,” said he, “has a claim to a judicious development of his faculties by those to whom the care of his infancy is confided” (Ib. p. 163).
§ 87. Pestalozzi therefore most earnestly addressed himself to mothers, to convince them of the power placed in their hands, and to teach them how to use it. “The mother is qualified, and qualified by the Creator Himself, to become the principal agent in the development of her child; ... and what is demanded of her is—a thinking love.... God has given to thy child all the faculties of our nature, but the grand point remains undecided—how shall this heart, this head, these hands, be employed? to whose service shall they be dedicated? A question the answer to which involves a futurity of happiness or misery to a life so dear to thee.... It is recorded that God opened the heavens to the patriarch of old, and showed him a ladder leading thither. This ladder is let down to every descendant of Adam; it is offered to thy child. But he must be taught to climb it. And let him not attempt it by the cold calculations of the head, or the mere impulse of the heart; but let all these powers combine, and the noble enterprise will be crowned with success. These powers are already bestowed on him, but to thee it is given to assist in calling them forth” (To Greaves, p. 21). “Maternal love is the first agent in education.... Through it the child is led to love and trust his Creator and his Redeemer.”
§ 88. From the theory of development which lay at the root of Pestalozzi’s views of education, it followed that the imparting of knowledge and the training for special pursuits held only a subordinate position in his scheme. “Education, instead of merely considering what is to be imparted to children, ought to consider first what they may be said already to possess, if not as a developed, at least as an involved faculty capable of development. Or if, instead of speaking thus in the abstract, we will but recollect that it is to the great Author of life that man owes the possession, and is responsible for the use, of his innate faculties, education should not simply decide what is to be made of a child, but rather inquire what it was intended that he should become. What is his destiny as a created and responsible being? What are his faculties as a rational and moral being? What are the means for their perfection, and the end held out as the highest object of their efforts by the Almighty Father of all, both in creation and in the page of revelation?”
§ 89. Education, then, must consist “in a continual benevolent superintendence, with the object of calling forth all the faculties which Providence has implanted; and its province, thus enlarged, will yet be with less difficulty surveyed from one point of view, and will have more of a systematic and truly philosophical character, than an incoherent mass of ‘lessons’—arranged without unity of principle, and gone through without interest—which too often usurps its name.”
The educator’s task then is to superintend and promote the child’s development, morally, intellectually, and physically.
§ 90. “The essential principle of education is not teaching,” said Pestalozzi; “it is love” (R.’s G., 289). Again he says, “The child loves and believes before it thinks and acts” (Ib. 378). And in a very striking passage (Ib. 329), where he compares the development of the various powers of a human being to the development of a tree, he says, “These forces of the heart—faith and love—are in the formation of immortal man what the root is for the tree.” So, according to Pestalozzi, a child without faith and love can no more grow up to be what he should be than a tree can grow without a root. Apart from this vital truth there can be no such thing as Pestalozzianism.
“Ah yet when all is thought and said
The heart still overrules the head.”
It is our hearts and affections that lead us right or wrong far more than our intellects. In advocating the training of the minds of the people, Lord Derby once remarked that as Chairman of Quarter Sessions he had found most of the culprits brought before him were stupid and ignorant. It certainly cannot be denied that the commonest kind of criminal is bad in every way. He has his body ruined by debauchery, his intellect almost in abeyance, and his heart and affections set on what is vile and degrading. If you could cultivate his intellect you would certainly raise him out of the lowest and by far the largest of the criminal classes. But he might become a criminal of a type less disgusting in externals, but in reality far more dangerous. The most atrocious miscreant of our time, if not of all time, was a man who contrived a machine to sink ships in mid-ocean, his only object being to gain a sum of money on a false insurance. This man was a type of the élite of criminals, had received an intellectual training, and could not have been described by Lord Derby as ignorant or stupid.
§ 91. Pestalozzi then, much as he valued the development of the intellect, put first the moral and religious influence of education; and with him moral and religious were one and the same. He protested against the ordinary routine of elementary education, because “everywhere in it the flesh predominated over the spirit, everywhere the divine element was cast into the shade, everywhere selfishness and the passions were taken as the motives of action, everywhere mechanical habits usurped the place of intelligent spontaneity” (R.’s G., 470). Education for the people must be different to this. “Man does not live by bread alone; every child needs a religious development; every child needs to know how to pray to God in all simplicity, but with faith and love” (R.’s G., 378). “If the religious element does not run through the whole of education, this element will have little influence on the life; it remains formal or isolated”[160] (Ib. 381). And Pestalozzi sums up the essentials of popular education in the words: “The child accustomed from his earliest years to pray, to think, and to work, is already more than half educated” (Ib. 381).