Pestalozzi was not widely read in the literature of education; in fact, the Émile was about the only such book he ever read, as he himself tells us. It is, nevertheless, apparent that he was quite as much influenced by Comenius as by Rousseau. The vital principle of his reforms—love of and sympathy for the child—had been as forcefully enunciated by Comenius as by Rousseau; and the saner and more practical character of Pestalozzi’s enthusiasm would lead one to suppose that he was less influenced by the author of the Émile than by the Moravian reformer. “The first qualification for the task [of teaching],” says Pestalozzi, in a letter to Greaves,[44] “is thinking love.” And this spirit dominated all his efforts in behalf of educational reform. He says: “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 your child. But he must be taught to climb it—not by the cold calculations of the head, or by the mere impulses of the heart, but by a combination of both.”
Both reformers started with the child at birth, and made domestic education fundamental to their schemes. “Maternal love,” says Pestalozzi, “is the first agent in education. Nature has qualified the mother to be the chief factor in the education of the child.” In How Gertrude teaches her children[45] he tells us, “It is the main design of my method to make home instruction again possible to our neglected people, and to induce every mother whose heart beats for her child to make use of my elementary exercises.” Again, in the account of his school at Stanz, he says: “My aim was to simplify teaching so that the common people might be induced to begin the instruction of their children, and thus render superfluous the teaching of the elements in the schools. As the mother is the first to nourish her child physically, so also, by the appointment of God, she must be the first to give it spiritual and mental nourishment. I consider that very great evils have been occasioned by sending children too early to school; and by adopting so many artificial means of educating them away from home. The time will come, so soon as we shall have simplified instruction, when every mother will be able to teach, without the help of others, and thereby, at the same time, go on herself always learning.” This, it will be recalled, was also Comenius’ cherished desire in the School of infancy.
Comenius and Pestalozzi stand almost alone among the great educational reformers in proclaiming the doctrine of universal education—training for the poor as well as the rich, for the lowly born as well as for the privileged classes, for girls as well as boys. “Popular education,” says Pestalozzi, “once lay before me like an immense marsh, in the mire of which I waded about, until I had discovered the source from which its waters sprang, as well as the causes by which their free course is obstructed, and made myself acquainted with those points from which a hope of draining its pools might be conceived. Ever since my youthful days, the course of my feelings, which rolled on like a mighty stream, was directed to this one point,—to stop the sources of that misery in which I saw the people around me immersed.” Such regeneration he thought could be brought about by consecrated and intelligent schoolmasters, and particularly, as G. Stanley Hall notes in his admirable introduction to the American translation of Leonard and Gertrude,[46] “by the love and devotion of noble women overflowing from the domestic circle into the community, by the good Gertrudes of all stations in life, the born educators of the race, whose work and whose ‘key-words’ we men pedagogues must ponder well if our teaching is to be ethically inspired.”
The study of nature, and this at first hand, was likewise an inheritance from Comenius. Pestalozzi makes observation the basis of all knowledge. “If I look back and ask myself what I have really done toward the improvement of methods of elementary instruction, I find that in recognizing observation as the absolute basis of all knowledge, I have established the first and most important principle of instruction. I have endeavored to discover what ought to be the character of the instruction itself, and what are the fundamental laws according to which the education of the human race must be determined by nature.”
Comenius was the first of the educational reformers to recognize the importance of geography as a subject of school study; and although he had it taught in the schools he conducted, and gave it important consideration in his educational schemes, the study received no fresh recognition until the time of Pestalozzi. At Stanz, at Burgdorf, and at Yverdon, geography ranked as one of the foremost elementary school studies. And not only was geography taught in the schoolrooms, but better than that, it was taught in the open air. Vulliemin, who was two years a student under Pestalozzi at Yverdon, writes: “The first elements of geography were taught us on the ground. We began the study by taking a walk along a narrow valley on the outskirts of Yverdon. We were led to observe all its details, and then to help ourselves to some clay we found there. This we carried back in our baskets, and, on our return home, we had to make a model of the ground walked over, and of the surrounding country; this we did on long tables. Our walks were extended, from time to time, and, on our return, we added new features as we learned them.”
Pestalozzi was fortunate in having with him at Yverdon two eminently successful German teachers, who comprehended his aims, and who subsequently applied his methods in the fatherland. One was Hennig, the author of a popular pedagogic work on home geography, and the other was Karl Ritter, the deservedly renowned German geographer. Ritter brought with him to Yverdon two young men from Frankfort whom he was tutoring, and he served Pestalozzi in the capacity of a pupil-teacher; and, while a developed man when he entered the institution, in 1807, he came to Yverdon, as so many other enthusiastic Germans had done, to study pedagogy with the most distinguished master of the century. Years later, when Ritter had become the best-known geographer of his age, he wrote: “Pestalozzi knew less geography than a child in one of our primary schools, yet it was from him that I gained my chief knowledge of this science; for it was in listening to him that I first conceived the idea of the natural method. It was he who opened the way to me, and I take pleasure in attributing whatever value my work may have entirely to him.”
Comenius and Pestalozzi had much in common in their aims as educational reformers; and they together share, as Dr. Hoffmeister[47] points out, the honor of having originated and carefully elaborated one of the most efficient elementary school systems in Europe—the Volksschule in Germany. Pestalozzi gave himself to education, or, to use his own significant characterization, “I have lived all my days like a beggar, that I might teach beggars how to live like men.” Comenius gave himself, also, and he gave besides a half-dozen books, which take classic rank in the permanent literature of education.
Fröbel
The large obligations of the founder of the kindergarten to both Comenius and Pestalozzi cannot be gainsaid. Fröbel’s attention was called to the writings of the Moravian reformer early in his educational career by Professor Krause, Herder, and others interested in his schemes. “Comenius proposes an entirely new basis of education,” Professor Krause wrote to Fröbel. “He attempts to find a method of education, consciously based upon science, whereby teachers will teach less, and learners will learn more; whereby there will be less noise in the schools, less distaste, fewer idle pupils, more happiness and progress; whereby confusion, division, and darkness will give place to order, intelligence, and peace.” He adds, “Comenius was the first to advocate Pestalozzi’s doctrine of observation (Anschauung).” Mr. Hauschmann,[48] one of Fröbel’s biographers, remarks: “Krause looked upon Fröbel as the educational successor of Comenius and Pestalozzi. Fröbel, he thought, might show, as it had never been shown before, how the Pestalozzian doctrine of Anschauung was to be applied to the education of every child.”
The weeks spent with Pestalozzi in the autumn of 1805 and the two subsequent years (1808–1810) passed with him at Yverdon, gave Fröbel ample opportunity to study thoroughly the Swiss reformer’s theories and practices; and these he subsequently applied with even greater skill than his master had done. Schmid, the German historian of education, says, “Fröbel, the pupil of Pestalozzi, and a genius like his master, completed the reformer’s system; taking the results at which Pestalozzi had arrived through the necessities of his position, Fröbel developed the ideas involved in them, not by further experience, but by deduction from the nature of man, and thus he attained to the conception of true human development and to the requirements of true education.”