[154] In the pages of this Journal Pestalozzi taught that it was “the domestic virtues which determine the happiness of a nation.” Again he says: “On the throne and in the cottage man has equal need of religion, and becomes the most wretched being on the earth if he forget his God.” “The child at his mother’s breast is weaker and more dependent than any creature on earth, and yet he already feels the first moral impressions of love and gratitude.” “Morality is nothing but a result of the development of the first sentiments of love and gratitude felt by the infant. The first development of the child’s powers should come from his participation in the work of his home; for this work is what his parents understand best, what most absorbs their attention, and what they can best teach. But even if this were not so, work undertaken to supply real needs would be just as truly the surest foundation of a good education. To engage the attention of the child, to exercise his judgment, to raise his heart to noble sentiments, these I think the chief ends of education: and how can these ends be reached so surely as by training the child as early as possible in the various daily duties of domestic life?” It would seem then that at this time Pestalozzi was for basing education on domestic labour and would teach the child to be useful. But it is hard to see how this principle could always be applied.
[155] One of these I have already given ([supra p. 292]). I will give another, not as by any means one of the best, but as a fit companion to Rousseau’s “two dogs.”
“26. The two colts.
“Two colts as like as two eggs, fell into different hands. One was bought by a peasant whose only thought was to harness it to his plough as soon as possible: this one turned out a bad horse. The other fell to the lot of a man who by looking after it well and training it carefully, made a noble steed of it, strong and mettlesome. Fathers and mothers, if your children’s faculties are not carefully trained and directed right, they will become not only useless, but hurtful; and the greater the faculties the greater the danger.”
Compare Rousseau: “Just look at those two dogs; they are of the same litter, they have been brought up and treated precisely alike, they have never been separated; and yet one of them is sharp, lively, affectionate, and very intelligent: the other is dull, lumpish, surly, and nobody could ever teach him anything. Simply a difference of temperament has produced in them a difference of character, just as a simple difference of our interior organisation produces in us a difference of mind.” N. Héloise. 5me P. Lettre iii.
[156] Pestalozzi was with the children at Stanz only during the first half of 1799.
[157] As Pestalozzi wrote to Gessner (How Gertrude, &c.): “You see street-gossip is not always entirely wrong; I really could not write properly, nor read, nor reckon. But people always jump to wrong conclusions from such ‘notorious facts.’ At Stanz you saw that I could teach writing without myself being able to write properly.” He here anticipates a paradox of Jacotot’s.
[158] Years afterwards Napoleon, though he could not foresee Sedan, got a notion that after all there was something in Pestalozzi; and that the aim of the system was to put the freedom and development of the individual in the place of the mechanical routine of the old schools, which tended to produce a mass of dull uniformity. With this aim, as Guimps says, Napoleon was quite out of sympathy, and whenever the subject was mentioned he would say, “The Pestalozzians are Jesuits”; thus very inaccurately expressing an accurate notion that there was more in them than could be understood at the first glance.
[159] Pestalozzi had from this country some more discerning visitors, e.g., J. P. Greaves, to whom Pestalozzi addressed Letters, which were translated and published in this country; also Dr. Mayo, who was at Yverdun with his pupils for three years from 1818 and afterwards conducted a celebrated Pestalozzian school at Cheam. Dr. Mayo in 1826 lectured on Pestalozzi’s system at the Royal Institution. Sir Jas. Kay-Shuttleworth and Mr. Tufnell also drew attention to it in the “Minutes of Council on Education.”
[160] The disciple is not above his master, and if parents and teachers are without sympathy and religious feeling the children will also be without faith and love. This cannot be urged too strongly on those who have charge of the young. But there is no test by which we can ascertain that a master has these essential qualifications. As in the Christian ministry the unfit can be shut out only by their own consciences. But let no one think to understand education if he loses sight of what Joseph Payne has called “Pestalozzi’s simple but profound discovery—the teacher must have a heart.” “Soul is kindled only by soul,” says Carlyle; “to teach religion the first thing needful and also the last and only thing is finding of a man who has religion. All else follows.”