I was educated there, from the age of sixteen or seventeen to twenty. Passing into its tranquil scenes from the quiet of home and the hands of a private tutor, with the sunny hopes and high ideal and scanty experience of youth, much that I found there appeared to me at the time but natural and in the ordinary course of things, which now, by the light of a life's teachings, and by comparison with the realities as I have found them, seems to me, as I look back, rather in the nature of a dream of fancy, tinged with the glamour of optimism, than like the things one really meets with in the work-a-day world. I say this, after making what I think due allowance for the Claude-Lorraine tints in which youth is wont to invest its early recollections.
It was one of several public institutions for education founded by the benevolent enterprise of a very remarkable man. Emanuel von Fellenberg was born of a patrician family of Bern. His father had been a member of the Swiss Government, and a friend of the celebrated Pestalozzi,—a friendship which descended to the son. His mother was a descendant of the stout Van Tromp, the Dutch admiral, who was victor in more than thirty engagements, and whose spirit and courage she is said to have inherited. To this noble woman young Fellenberg owed ideas of liberty and philanthropy beyond the age in which he lived and the aristocratic class to which he belonged.
Educated at Colmar and Tübingen, the years immediately succeeding his college life were spent in travels, which brought him, at the age of twenty-three, and just after the death of Robespierre, to Paris, where he had an opportunity of studying men in the subsiding tumult of a terrible revolution.
The result appears to have been a conviction that the true element of human progress was to be found less in correction of the adult than in training of the youth. His mind imbued with the two great ideas of freedom and education, he returned to his native Bern; but taking part there against the French, he was banished, remaining in Germany an exile for several years, and during that period planning emigration, with several friends, to the United States. This intention he abandoned, on being recalled to his native country, and there offered important diplomatic and military service. In the latter capacity he quelled an insurrection of the peasantry in the Oberland; but, prompted by that sympathy for the laboring classes which was a strong element in his character, he granted these people terms so liberal that his Government refused to ratify them, whereupon he threw up his commission, recurring to his favorite educational projects, and serving for a time on the Board of Education in Bern.
But it soon became apparent that the ideas of his colleagues and himself differed too widely to permit united action. They were thinking of the commonplace routine of school instruction,—reading, writing, arithmetic, and the like. He looked to education as the regenerating agent of the world,—that agent without the aid of which liberty runs into license, and the rule of the many, as he had witnessed it in terror-stricken France, may become one of the worst forms of despotism. He looked beyond mere pedagogical routine or formal learning, to the living spirit,—to the harmonious development of every human faculty and affection, intellectual, moral, spiritual.
Resigning his situation on the Bernese Board of Education, Fellenberg expended a large fortune in the purchase of the estate of Hofwyl, about two leagues from Bern, and the erection there of the building necessary to carry into effect his own peculiar views.
It was a favorite idea of his, that society can be most effectually influenced for good by training its extremes in social position: those, on the one hand, who are born to wealth and station, whence are usually chosen lawgivers, statesmen, leaders of public opinion; and those, on the other hand, born to a heritage of ignorance and neglect, and too often trained even from tender age to vice and violence. He sought to bring these extremes of European society into harmonious relation with each other,—to raise the one from hereditary dependence and degradation, to imbue the other with healthy ideas of true nobility in place of the morbid prejudices of artificial rank. In both these efforts he was eminently successful,—in the latter, more so, in my judgment, than any educator of his age.
The establishments of Hofwyl proper[A] were, accordingly, two in number, quite distinct from each other: the Vehrli-Knaben, (Vehrli's boys,) as they were called, from the name of their admirable young teacher, Vehrli, essentially an agricultural school, on the manual-labor principle; and the college, of which it is my chief object to sketch the plan and its results. To this latter institution, in consequence of the numerous and expensive branches taught and the great number of professors employed, (about one to each four students,) those only, with few exceptions, could obtain admission whose parents possessed ample means,—the exceptions being the sons of a few of Fellenberg's Swiss friends, in moderate circumstances, whom, when they showed great promise, he admitted with little or no charge. It was by associating these with his own children in their studies that the nucleus of this college was originally formed.
From their very inception, these projects met with discouragement and opposition, especially from the patrician class, to which Fellenberg belonged. Even in republican Switzerland, these men held that their rank exonerated them from any occupation that savored much of utility; and it was with a feeling almost of dishonor to their order that they saw one of their number stoop (it was thus they phrased it) to the ignoble task of preceptor. It need hardly be said that Fellenberg held on his way, undisturbed by the idle noise of prejudice like this.
Into the Vehrli school were received destitute orphans, foundlings, and those whose parents were too indigent to provide for their education. Their time was divided nearly equally between the labors of the field and the lessons of the school. They were trained as farmers and teachers. Besides the ordinary branches, they were well grounded in botany and drawing, and made great proficiency in vocal music. Vehrli devoted himself, heart and soul, to the instruction of these children. He worked with them, studied with them, wore the same homely dress, partook of the same plain fare, slept in the same dormitory,—in short, spent his life wholly among them. After a time his pupils were in great request throughout Europe, both as teachers and as agricultural superintendents. I found one of them, when many years since I visited Holland, intrusted with the care of a public seminary supported by the Dutch Government, and his employers highly appreciated his character and abilities. The children remained till they were of age, repaying by their labor in the latter years a portion of the expenses of their early education. Ultimately this school became nearly self-supporting.