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EDITOR'S PREFACE.

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THE name of Pestalozzi is forever dear to the hearts of all men. For he is the first teacher to announce convincingly the doctrine that all people should be educated -that, in fact; education is the one good gift to give to all, whether rich or poor. The fact that all human beings, whether the favorites of fortune or otherwise; rejoice in whatever good comes to man because of his nature and independent of all accidents of birth or circumstance, makes secure this affectionate regard of all men for the hero of modern pedagogy. Education shall be a real panacea for human ills. 'It-alone goes at the root of human misery. All other giving does not help, because it more or less hinders self-help. Education, intellectual and moral, alone develops self-help. The weaklings of society-the moral weaklings who yield to temptation and become criminal, the intellectual weaklings who break down before the problems of life and become imbecile or insane, the weaklings in will-power who can not deny themselves and save a surplus of their earnings, but allow themselves to drift along on the brink of pauperism -for these weaklings education will 'furnish a preventive. Their children may be educated in intellect and morals and thrift. It is the paramount duty of society to

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see to this education, for the sake of the rich as well as of the poor; just as society cares for good sewerage, and preand vents the pestilence which will begin with the slums but end with the palace. Education is a sanitary precaution -a spiritual sanitation.

These doctrines, adopted widely by enlightened people a century ago on the appearance of Pestalozzi's Evening Hour of a Hermit (1780) and his Leonard and Gertrude (1781-'89), have received a new emphasis in more recent times from the inevitable trend of all civilization toward democracy and local self-government. If the weakling is to have a vote, he will prove a negative power in society. He will furnish a constituency for the demagogue, and corruption in polities will ever prevail in proportion to the number of illiterate, immoral, and unthrifty people that exist in the state:...

Pestalozzi, like St. Francis, wedded poverty,* and with sublime self-sacrifice studied all its peculiarities in order to discover the true and only method of alleviating its miseries.

In the Philanthropina of Basedow experiments were made in the new education as propounded by Rousseau, but they were limited almost entirely to the children of rank and wealth. "Pestalozzi directed education also to the lower classes to. the, hitherto neglected multitude without propertyThere should be in future no dirty, hungry, ignorant, awkward, thankless, and will-less mass of people consigned, to live a merely animal existence. We can never rid ourselves of the lower classes by contributions from the wealthy not even were they to give

* Dante, Paradiso, xi-62.

their all to the poor; the only way to cure poverty is to open the possibility of intellectual culture and independent self-support to each and every human being, just because he is a human being and a citizen of the commonwealth."*

This movement of Pestalozzi is a part of the greater movement known as the French Revolution. As Pestalozzi is the prophet of the new education, so Rousseau is the prophet of the entire revolutionary movement. Pestalozzi in 1764, at the age of eighteen, read the Emile, and received the gift of the spirit. Both these prophets were of Swiss birth:

Rousseau attacked.all human institutions the family, civil society, the state, the Church-in the name of "Nature." All institutions are factitious artificial combinations formed by man, and invested with sacredness by a sort of superstition or by something worse, a selfish design. "Return to a state of Nature" is therefore the creed of the new evangel. Basedow founded his educational methods on Rousseau direct, France made experiments in throwing off the artificial incumbrances of state and Church, but ended her experiments finally by the discovery that the state of nature is a state of violence and estrangement from all that is human and humane. She slowly returned to Bourbonism through an intermediate process of Bonapartism, astonishing the world by her new departures before and since.

Rousseauism is not outgrown, however, but has frequent survivals in the minds of all young persons who are just beginning to throw off external authority and think

*Karl Rosenkranz.

for themselves. "To go back to a state of nature" has such a refreshing sound to the young enthusiast, because it dispenses at once with the necessity of that tedious process of learning the mass of conventionalities and arbitrary usages-the ceremonial observances that form the structure of civilization. Dispense with all this, and begin the search for what is true and good and beautiful once again by the light of nature. This places us all on a level-the sage by the side of the inexperienced youth. But its practical effect is nihilism..

Perhaps the happiest of all Rousseau's influences is his effect upon Pestalozzi. The education of the people as people, an education reaching all classes, owes to Pestalozzi its greatest debt, and through him to Rousseau still a large.obligation. All the weaklings shall be developed in youtly in the school and made self-active and intelligent, and. by this means become self-helpful. Pestalozzi made this solution of the problem clear to all Europe. The great philosopher Fichte persuaded Prussia to adopt public education as a state policy, while Napoleon had excused himself (1802) from adopting Pestalozzi's schemes; "He had something else besides abc's to attend to." The subsequent history of Prussia as affected by this Pestalozzian principle is the most instructive study for all who consider the humanitarian doctrines of universal education to be something visionary and other-worldly. At the present time statesmanship looks first to the war footing of the nation, and next after this, but before all else, to the education of the masses.

The reader of Pestalozzi's biography-especially of the present excellent work, which embodies so much from his writings-will study carefully the sharp differ

ences which separate his ideas from Rousseau's. These will appear first in his strongly religious character and next in his great reverence for the sacredness of the family.

His life is a succession of enthusiastic experiments, each ending in a failure of some sort. These failures are followed each by a period of depressing reflection, in the course of which Pestalozzi seems to become conscious of the personal weakness or unwisdom that had caused his plans to go wrong. He puts the fruits of his experience into a treatise, and is inspired to begin again a new experiment.

His writings furnish a store-house of knowledge of human nature—a store-house which yields most to the wisest reader. The reader enamored of Rousseau's doctrines will not find Pestalozzi's writings edifying. They will appear exasperatingly negative, exhibiting only the self-contradiction latent in their theory.

There are, moreover, many phases of Pestalozzianism which remain one-sided and hurtful, though stimulating. They furnish us also contradictions in Pestalozzi's own practice as contrasted with his theory.

Karl von Raumer, in his excellent discussion of Pestalozzi, has best exhibited these incongruities, especially in the matter of the much-famed doctrine of "things rather than words "-a dictum usually followed by a practice that teaches words rather than things or ideas of things. The more mature reader of this book therefore will watch with critical alertness the unfolding of the doctrine that all primary instruction should be addressed to sense-perception (the so-called Anschauungs-unterricht). One will not be so unreasonable as to object to sense-per