AMACLSPESIAL

PESTALOZZI'S POOR SCHOOL AT NEUHOF.

interest, wholly destitute of humanity, are in danger, in case of unforseen accident, of being able to find within themselves no means of escape from entire ruin.* Full of a love for my father-land, which hoped for it almost impossible things, and longed to lead it back to its native dignity and power, I sought with the greatest activity not only for the possible but for the certain means of averting the coming evil, and of awakening anew the remainder of the ancient home happiness, home industry, and home manners. These designs sank deep into my heart and often made me feel with sorrow what a high and indispensable human duty it is to labor for the poor and miserable, with all the means which our race possesses, in church, state or individuals, that he may attain to a consciousness of his own dignity through his feeling of the universal powers and endowments which he possesses, awakened within him; that he may not only learn to gabble over by rote the religious maxim that 'man is created in the image of God, and is bound to live and die as the child of God,' but may himself experience its truth by virtue of the divine power within him, so that he may be irresistibly and really elevated not only above the ploughing oxen, but above the man in purple and silk, who lives unworthily of his high destiny."

With such lofty and magnificent views, and with a heart at even a higher level of love, Pestalozzi labored at Neuhof from sunrise to sunset, amongst his beggar children. He lived steadily up to his principles, laboring in his vocation to the full extent of his powers; always knew what he was seeking, cared not for the morrow, but felt from moment to moment the needs of the present. Among his children were very many ungovernable ones of a better class, and still worse, many who had brought themselves from a better condition to beggary, and who were presumptuous and pretentious by reason of their former situation; to whom the energetic discipline which he applied, according to his design, was at first hateful. They considered their situation with him as more degrading than that in which they had been before. Neuhof was full every Sunday of the mothers and relatives of children who found their situation not what they had expected. All the impertinences which a miserable rabble of beggars could indulge in a house without visible protection or imposing exterior, were practiced, to encourage the children in their discontent; even so far that they were often tempted to run away by night just after they had been washed clean and clad in their Sunday clothes. However, these difficulties would little by little

⚫ Upon the influence of manufacturing wealth amongst the Swiss at that time. Pestalozzi expresses himself thus in another place: "The paternal love of the upper and the filial love of the lower classes, in consequence of the increase of the manufacturing interest, is going more and more to ruin under the effects of ignoble wealth. The blinding height of arrogance derived from an eminent position obtained by money, the deceitful cornucopia of an unreliable life of mere pleasure, has drawn all within its destructive influence, even down to the commonest of the people, and carried them into the crooked path of a spiritless and pow. erless routine life. Truth. honor, sympathy, moderation, are daily vanishing. Pride, insolence, recklessness, contemptuousness, laxity, immorality, the eager pursuit of vain and ostentatious pleasure, the cherishing of boundless selfishness, have taken the place of the ancient simplicity, faith and honor.

have been overcome, had not Pestalozzi pushed his undertaking to an extent altogether beyond his means, and undertaken to modify it according to the original design, which supposed the possession of the utmost knowledge of manufacturing and of human nature; qualities in which he was lacking in the same measure in which he needed them urgently for managing his institution. Moreover, he hurried on to the higher branches of instruction, before supplying the solid foundation of acquaintance with the lower; an error recognized as the leading one of the teaching of the age, against which he had striven in his scheme of education with all his strength. For the sake of a fallacious prospect of greater profit, in higher branches of industry, he committed, in teaching his children to spin and weave, the very faults which he had so strongly abjured in all his expressed opinions upon education, and which he saw to be so dangerous to children of all classes. He would attempt to secure the finest spinning, before his children had acquired even a small amount of firmness and surety of hand in coarse work; and undertook to manufacture muslin before his weavers had attained skill in weaving common cotton stuff.

Through these and the like mistakes, through his ignorance of business, and his great lack of a sound practical faculty of learning it, it happened that Pestalozzi fell every year deeper in debts; and when these also from time to time had been paid by the self-sacrificing generosity of his noble wife, there came at last an end of this means of help, and in a few years the greater part of his substance and his expected inheritance was dissolved into smoke. The great confidence which he had enjoyed among his neighbors, changed when his undertaking failed so soon, into an utter and blind rejection of any shadow even of faith in his enterprise, or of belief in his possessing any capacity at all as a teacher. But such is the way of the world; it treated Pestalozzi, when poor, as it treats all who become poor by their own faults. Their money being gone, it withdraws also its confidence from them, in matters where they really are capable and efficient.

His enterprise failed, in a manner excessively painful, both to himself and his wife, in the year 1780, in the fifth year of its existence. His misfortune was complete; he was now poor. He felt most deeply the condition of his noble hearted wife, who in the excess of her devotion had mortgaged away for him nearly all her possessions. His situation was indeed shocking. In his over handsome country house, he was often destitute of bread, wood, and a few pennies, wherewith to defend himself from cold and hunger. Only the entire forbearance of his creditors and the kind help of his friends preserved him from despair and entire ruin.

Thus he lived a poor and destitute life in Neuhof for eighteen years, fighting with want and misery. He lived as a poor man amongst the poor; suffered what the common people suffered, and saw what they were. He studied the wants of the lower classes and the sources of their misery, in a manner which would have been impossible for one in better circumstances.

PESTALOZZI AND THE SCHOOLS OF GERMANY.

FROM THE GERMAN OF DR. DIESTERWEG.

EVERY one considers it a matter of course that all our children go to school until they grow up to be youths and maidens. The observance of this custom begins at the sixth year. But the parents have long before spoken of the school to the child; he looks eagerly forward to the day of entrance; and when it takes place, he is absorbed in his school and his teacher for the next six or eight years or more. We always think of children and schools or children and books together. To be a child and to learn, have become almost synonymous terms. To find children in school, or passing along the streets with the apparatus which they use there, makes no one wonder. It is only the reverse, which attracts attention. The school fills a very important part in the life of the young. In fact school life is almost the whole life of childhood and youth; we can hardly conceive of them without it. Without school, without education, what would parents do with their children? Without them, where would they secure the young the necessary preparation for actual life?

With our present organization of society, schools are indispensable institutions. Many others may perish in the course of time; many have already perished; but schools abide, and increase. Where they do not exist, we expect barbarity and ignorance; where they flourish, civilization and knowledge.

No apology is necessary for sending our children to school. At school they learn. There they acquire mental activity and knowledge; the manifold varieties of things; to gain the knowledge of things in heaven above and in the earth beneath, and under the earth; of stones, and plants, and animals, and men; of past, present, and future.

[The remainder of the discourse treats of three points :

1. What were the schools before Pestalozzi?

2. What did they become by his means, and since; that is, what are they now?

3. What was Pestalozzi's life and labors?]

I. THE OLD SCHOOLS.

Our present system of common or public schools-that is schools which are open to all children under certain regulations--date from the discovery of printing in 1436, when books began to be furnished so cheaply that the poor could buy them. Especially after Martin Luther had translated the Bible into German, and the desire to possess and understand that invaluable book became universal, did there also become universal the desire to know how to read. Men sought to learn, not only for the sake of reading the Scriptures, but also to be able to read and

sing the psalms, and to learn the catechism. For this purpose schools for children were established, which were essentially reading schools. Reading was the first and principal study; next came singing, and then memorizing texts, songs, and the catechism. At first the ministers taught; but afterward the duty was turned over to the inferior church officers, the choristers and sextons. Their duties as choristers and sextons were paramount, and as schoolmasters only secondary. The children paid a small monthly fee; no more being thought necessary, since the schoolmaster derived a salary from the church.

Nobody either made or knew how to make great pretensions to educational skill. If the teacher communicated to his scholars the acquirements above mentioned, and kept them in order, he gave satisfaction; and no one thought any thing about separate institutions for school children. There were no school books distinctively so called; the children learned their lessons in the Bible or the Psalter, and read either in the Old or the New Testament.

Each child read by himself; the simultaneous method was not known. One after another stepped up to the table where the master sat. He pointed out one letter at a time, and named it; the child named it after him; he drilled him in recognizing and remembering each. Then they took letter by letter of the words, and by getting acquainted with them in this way, the child gradually learned to read. This was a difficult method for him; a very difficult one. Years usually passed before any facility had been acquired; many did not learn in four years. It was imitative and purely mechanical labor on both sides. To understand what was read was seldom thought of. The syllables were pronounced with equal force, and the reading was without grace or expression.

Where it was possible, but unnaturally and mechanically, learning by heart was practiced. The children drawled out texts of Scripture, psalms, and the contents of the catechism from the beginning to end; short questions and long answers alike, all in the same monotonous manner. Anybody with delicate cars who heard the sound once, would remember it all his life long. There are people yet living, who were taught in that unintelligent way, who can corroborate these statements. Of the actual contents of the words whose sounds they had thus barely committed to memory by little and little, the children knew absolutely almost nothing. They learned superficially and understood superficially. Nothing really passed into their minds; at least nothing during their school years.

The instruction in singing was no better. The master sang to them the psalm-tunes over and over, until they could sing them, or rather screech them, after him.

Such was the condition of instruction in our schools during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and two-thirds of the eighteenth centuries; confined to one or two studies, and those taught in the most imperfect and mechanical way.

It was natural that youth endowed, when healthy, with an ever increas

ing capacity for pleasure in living, should feel the utmost reluctance at attending school. To be employed daily, for three or four hours, or more, in this mechanical toil, was no light task; and it therefore became necessary to force the children to sit still, and study their lessons. During all that time, especially in the seventeenth century, during the fearful thirty years' war, and subsequently, as the age was sunk in barbarism, the children of course entered the schools ignorant and untrained. "As the old ones sung, so twittered the young." /Stern severity and cruel punishments were the order of the day; and by them the children were kept in order. Parents governed children too young to attend, by threats of the schoolmaster and the school; and when they went, it was with fear and trembling. The rod, the cane, the raw-hide, were necessary apparatus in each school. The punishments of the teacher exceeded those of a prison. Kneeling on peas, sitting in the shame-bench, standing in the pillory, wearing an ass-cap, standing before the school door in the open street with a label on the back or breast, and other similar devices, were the remedies which the rude men of the age devised. To name a single example of a boy whom all have heard of, of high gifts, and of reputable family,-Dr. Martin Luther reckoned up fifteen or sixteen times that he was whipped upon the back in one forenoon. The learning and the training corresponds; the one was strictly a mechanical process; the other, only bodily punishment./What wonder that from such schools there came forth a rude generation; that men and women looked back all their lives to the school as to a dungeon, and to the teacher as a taskmaster, and jailer; that the schoolmaster was of a small repute; that understrappers were selected for school duty and school discipline; that dark, cold kennels were used for school-rooms; that the schoolmaster's place especially in the country, was assigned him amongst the servants and the like.

This could not last; it has not, thank God! When and by what efforts of admirable men the change took place, I shall relate a little on. Let us now look at the present.

II. THE MODERN SCHOOLS.

What are our schools in this present fifth decade of the nineteenth century, and what are they from year to year growing to be? Upon this subject I can of course only give my readers a fresher and livelier impression of matters which they already understand. I begin with the exterior-not only every town, but every village of our father-land has at present its own school-houses. They are usually so noticeable for architecture, airiness and dimensions, as to be recognized at the first glance. The districts often compete amicably with each other in their appearance, and make great sacrifices for superiority.

In the school-house resides the teacher; a man who is often an object of the ridicule of the young, but who, if really a teacher, deserves and possesses the respect of the old. Many of course fail to obtain an adequate reward, especially for their highest aspirations, in their important