Essays on Educational Reformers

by Robert Hebert Quick

§ 72. But there was a greater mischief at work than either of these. In his discourse to the members of the Institution on New Year’s Day, 1808, Pestalozzi surprised them all by his gloom. He had had a coffin brought in, and he stood beside it. “This work,” said he, “was founded by love, but love has disappeared from our midst.” This was only too true, and the discord was more deeply rooted than at first appeared. Among the brood of Pestalozzians there was a Catholic shepherd lad from Tyrol, Joseph Schmid by name, and he, in the end, proved a veritable cuckoo. As he shewed very marked ability in mathematics, he became one of the assistant masters; and a good deal of the fame of the Institution rested on the performances of his pupils. But his ideas differed totally from those of his colleagues, especially from those of Niederer, a clergyman with a turn for philosophy, who had become Pestalozzi’s chief exponent.

§ 73. After Pestalozzi’s gloomy speech, the masters, with the exception of Schmid, urged Pestalozzi to apply for a Government inquiry into the state of the Institution. This Pestalozzi did, and Commissioners were appointed, among them an educationist, Père Girard of Freiburg, by whom the Report was drawn up. The Report was not favourable. Père Girard was by no means inclined to sit at the feet of Pestalozzi, as he had principles of his own. Pestalozzi, he thought, laid far too much stress on mathematics, and he drew from him a statement that everything taught to a child should seem as certain as that two and two made four. “Then,” said Girard, “if I had thirty children I would not intrust you with one of them. You could not teach him that I was his father.” Thus the Report, though very friendly in tone, was by no means friendly in spirit. The Commissioners simply compared the performances of the scholars with what pupils of the same age could do in good schools of the ordinary type, and Père Girard stated, though not in the Report, that the Institution was inferior to the Cantonal School of Aargau. But the comparison of these incommensurables only shews that Girard was not capable of understanding what was going on at Yverdun. Indeed, he asserts “not only that the mother-tongue was neglected,” but also that the children, “though they had reached a high pitch of excellence in abstract mathematics, were inconceivably weak in all ordinary practical calculations.” This is absurd. In Pestalozzian teaching the abstract never went before ordinary practical calculations. The good Father evidently blunders, and takes “head-reckoning” for abstract, and pen or pencil arithmetic for practical work. Reckoning with slate or paper is no doubt “ordinary,” but a distinction has often to be drawn between what is ordinary and what is practical.

§ 74. Soon after this the disputes between Schmid and his colleagues waxed so fierce that Schmid was virtually driven away. In 1810 he left Yverdun, and declared the Institution “a disgrace to humanity.” Great was the disorder into which the Institution now fell from having over it only a genius with “an unrivalled incapacity to govern.” The days which “remind us of the early Church” were no more, and financial difficulties naturally followed them. For the next five years things went from bad to worse, and the masters were then driven to the desperate, and, as it proved, the fatal step of inviting the able and strong-willed Schmid back again. He came in 1815, he acquired entire control over Pestalozzi, and drove from him all his most faithful adherents, among them not only Niederer, who had invited the return of his rival, but even Kruesi and the faithful servant, Elizabeth Naef, now Mrs. Kruesi, the widow of Kruesi’s brother. Pestalozzi’s grandson married Schmid’s sister, and thus united with him by family ties, Schmid took entire possession of the old man and kept it till the end. His former colleagues seem to have been deceived in their estimate both of Schmid’s integrity and ability. He completed the ruin of the Institution, and he was finally expelled from Yverdun by the Magistrates.

§ 75. But while Pestalozzi seemed falling lower and lower to the eyes of the inhabitants of Yverdun, and so had little honour in his own country, his fame was spreading all over Europe. Of this Yverdun was to reap the benefit. In 1813-14, Austrian troops marched across Switzerland to invade France. In January, 1814, the Castle and other buildings in Yverdun were “requisitioned” for a military hospital, many of the Austrian soldiers being down with typhus fever. In a great fright the Municipality sent off two deputies to headquarters, then at Basel, to petition that this order might be withdrawn. As the order threatened the destruction of his Institution, Pestalozzi went with them, and it was entirely to him they owed their success. On their return they reported that “no military hospital would be established at Yverdun, and that M. Pestalozzi had been received with most extraordinary favour.”

§ 75. On this occasion Pestalozzi took the opportunity of preaching to the Emperor Alexander on the necessity of establishing good schools and of emancipating the serfs. The Emperor took the lecture in good part, and allowed the philanthropist to drive him into a corner and “button-hole” him.

§ 76. In 1815 Pestalozzi received a visit from an Englishman, or more accurately Scotsman—Dr. Bell, who, however, like most of our compatriots, could find nothing in Pestalozzi. Whatever we may think of Bell as an educationist, he was certainly a poor prophet. On leaving Yverdun he said, “In another twelve years mutual instruction will be adopted by the whole world and Pestalozzi’s method will be forgotten.”[159]

§ 77. In December, 1815, Pestalozzi was thrown more completely into the power of Schmid by losing the only companion from whom nothing but death could separate him—his wife. At the funeral Pestalozzi, standing by the coffin, and as if heard by her whose earthly remains were in it, ran over the disasters and trials they had passed through together, and the sacrifices she had made for him. “What in those days of affliction,” said he, “gave us strength to bear our troubles and recover hope?” and taking up a Bible he went on, “This is the source whence you drew, whence we both drew courage, strength, and peace.”

§ 78. The “death agony of the Institution,” as Guimps calls it, lasted for some years, but in this gloomy period there are only two incidents I will mention. The first is the publication of Pestalozzi’s writings, for which Schmid and Pestalozzi sought subscriptions; and the appeal was so cordially answered that Pestalozzi received £2,000. This sum he wished to devote to the carrying out of a plan he had always cherished of an orphanage at Neuhof; but the money seems to have melted we do not know how.