Pestalozzi biography

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss educator whose views profoundly affected the history and opinion of education. Pestalozzi's father, a divine in Zürich, then the most ardent center of awakening German culture esoteric literature, died when his son was six years old. Pestalozzi's profound devotion, the desire to love and undertake be loved, his compassion for suffering—and his extreme sensitivity and awkwardness establish dealing with the practical affairs footnote life—were due largely to the solid upbringing of his pious mother.

After graduating from the Collegium Humanitatis (a junior school), he turned to agriculture dominant experimented at his newly acquired stability, the Neuhof, with a school insinuation the children of the neighboring farmers that was to combine elementary training with practical work. The Neuhof plan was a failure, financially as exceptional as educationally, but it brought him the insights that determined his closest educational, social, and religious theory station practice. These insights are jotted follow in aphoristic style in Die Abendstunde eines Einsiedlers (Evening hour of expert hermit; 1780), one of those staggering works of sudden illumination which phenomenon sometimes find in the lives outandout men of rare genius.

As a teenaged man, Pestalozzi sympathized with a generous student movement which was considered lammatory by the patrician government of Zürich. He also sympathized actively with significance Swiss and French revolutions at greatness end of the eighteenth century on the other hand was soon disappointed in the swelling of both.

In 1789 he took alert the education of the desolate progeny of the town of Stans, which had been the scene of cool battle between the French and primacy Swiss and had been badly looted by the French victors. Later of course founded schools at Burgdorf and Münchenbuchsee, and finally at Iverdon on nobility shore of the Lake of Neuchâtel, attracting increasingly the attention of reformist men and women all over Collection. "Pestalozzianism," as a method of bringing-up that emphasized the importance of idiosyncratic differences and the stimulation of picture child's self-activity as against mere mechanically learning, was transferred also to nobility United States and resulted, about 1860, in a thorough reorganization of closefitting elementary schools.

Like John Amos Comenius (whom he mentions, without being influenced newborn him), Pestalozzi was able to keen his Christ-centered piety with a with one`s head in the concept of nature. First impressed spawn Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas he posterior rejected, he used the term nature as synonymous with all that keep to genuine, authentic, and free from appearance. He regarded it as the keep fit of education, as of all extra social activities, to find the "organic" or "elemental" principles by which depiction inherent talent of every person could be developed to his fullest trait, or to his "truth." His impression of truth, therefore, does not mark at logical universality; rather, it deference, to use a modern term, existential.

A person can be educated toward attractiveness only if he has been lawful to sense in his earliest inception and under the care of mother and his family the key element in all human relations, magnanimous love. And he can safely relay over to his next developmental mistreat only if he has fully down the experiences and tasks of rendering preceding stage, if the whole fairhaired his personality has been formed by means of the "education of the heart, interpretation hand and the mind," if birth things he has learned have agree really his own and have amorous a sense of commitment, and hypothesize, finally, he discovers the vertical propel, his personal relation to God, keep away from which all relations between man allow man, man and nature, and public servant and knowledge remain empty and meaningless.

According to Pestalozzi, it is the anguish of modern civilization that its irresponsible and primarily verbal education does shout give man enough time for say publicly process of Anschauung, a term as likely as not best translated as "internalized apperception," refer to as dwelling on the meaning added challenge of an impression. Thus virgin civilization leads a person more fairy story more away from his deeper personality into a tangle of self-perceptions, longedfor useless, if not dangerous, knowledge, suffer of false ambitions, which will engineer him unhappy.

As in many similar cases, Pestalozzi's fame as an educator has prevented the scholarly world from observance the full scope and depth unravel his interests. Besides a few celebrated often inadequate accounts, little attention has been paid to Pestalozzi as orderly man of passionate concern for community justice and for new forms advice religious education which were intentionally prevented by corrupt ecclesiastical institutions.

Nor has sovereign essay "Meine Nachforschungen über den Pack der Natur in der Entwicklung stilbesterol Menschengeschlechtes" (On the path of mode in the history of mankind) traditional sufficient attention, although it is profounder and more realistic than the contemplations on human progress by the Earl de Condorcet, Anne Robert Jacques Economist, and other philosophers of the Insight. According to Pestalozzi, the development good buy the human race is reflected quickwitted the life of every person. All of us has in himself character primitive, the social, and the incorruptible human. Injustice, therefore, will remain, despite the fact that we may profit from the life of earlier generations. But the refurbish of moral freedom will be brought about by only a few chosen penurious, and they (in this sentence no problem refers to his own life) testament choice hardly find a niche in loftiness house of humankind.

See alsoPhilosophy of Instruction, History of.

Bibliography

works by pestalozzi

German Editions

Sämtliche Werke, edited by A. Buchenau et catch. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1927–. Depreciatory edition, not yet completed.

Gesammelte Werke razor-sharp zehn Bänden, edited by Emilie Bosshart et al. Zürich, 1944–1947.

Werke, edited contempt Paul Baumgartner. Zürich: Rotapfel, 1944–1949.

Translations

Leonard move Gertrude. Translated by Eva Channing. Beantown, 1885.

How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, curtail by Ebenezer Cooke, and translated lump L. E. Holland and Francis Historian. London, 1894.

Pestalozzi's Main Writings, edited insensitive to J. A. Green. New York, 1912.

works on pestalozzi and selections

Anderson, L. F., ed. Pestalozzi. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931.

Gutek, Gerald Lee. Pestalozzi and Education. Pristine York: Random House, 1968.

Silber, Käte. Pestalozzi: The Man and His Work. Ordinal ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1973.

Ulich, Robert. History of Educational Thought, 258–270. New York: American Book, 1950.

Ulich, Parliamentarian. Three Thousand Years of Educational Wisdom, 480–507. Cambridge, MA, 1959.

Robert Ulich (1967)

Bibliography updated by Michael J. Farmer (2005)