P. engineering a new road.

changing his schools into true places of education, in which the moral, intellectual, and physical powers which God has put into our nature may be drawn out, so that the man may be enabled to live a life such as a man should live, contented in himself and satisfying other people. Thus and only thus does the man, whom in God's wide world nobody helps and nobody can help, learn to help himself." "The public common school-coach throughout Europe must not simply be better horsed, but still more it must be turned round and be brought on to an entirely new road." (Quoted by Morf, P. I, p. 211.)

§ 54. Pestalozzi was now working heart and soul at the engineering of this " new road." His grand successes hitherto had been gained more by the heart than by the head; but the school course must draw out the faculties of the head as well as of the heart. Pestalozzi made all instruction start from what children observed for themselves. "I laid special stress," he says, " on just what usually affected their senses. And as I dwelt much on elementary knowledge, I wanted to know when the child receives its first lesson, and I soon came to the conviction that the first hour of learning dates from birth. From the very moment that the child's senses open to the impressions of nature, nature teaches it. Its new life is but the faculty, now come to maturity, of receiving impressions; it is the awakening of the germs now perfect which will go on using all their forces and energies to secure the development of their proper organisation; it is the awakening of the animal now complete which will and shall become a man. So the sole instruction given to the human being consists merely in the art of giving a helping hand to this natural tendency towards its proper development; and this art consists essentially in the means

X

Psychologizing instruction.

of putting the child's impressions in connexion and harmony with the precise degree of development the child has reached. There must be then in the impressions to be given him by instruction, a regular gradation; and the beginning and the progress of his various knowledges must exactly correspond with the beginning and increase in his powers as they are developed. From this I soon saw that this gradation must be ascertained for all the branches of human knowledge, especially for those fundamental notions from which our thinking power takes its rise. On such principles and no others is it possible to construct real school books and books about teaching" (Wie Gertrud, &c., Letter I.).

66

§ 55. In endeavouring to put teaching, as he said, “on a psychological basis,” Pestalozzi compared it to a mechanism. On one occasion when expounding his views, he was interrupted by the exclamation, "Vous voulez mécaniser l'éducation!" Pestalozzi was weak in French, and he took these words to mean, You wish to get at the mechanism of education.” He accordingly assented, and was in his turn misunderstood. Soon afterwards he endeavoured to express the new thing by a new word and said, "Ich will den menschlichen Unterricht psychologisieren; I wish to psychologise instruction," and this he explains to mean that he sought to make instruction fall in with the eternal laws which govern the development of the human intellect (Morf, I, p. 227). But this was a task which no one man could accomplish, not even Pestalozzi. The eternal laws which govern the development of mind have not been completely ascertained even after investigations carried on during thousands of years; and Pestalozzi did not know what had been established by previous thinkers. He made a gigantic effort to find both the laws and their application,

School course.

Singing; and the beautiful.

but if he had continued to stand alone he could have done but little. Happily he attracted to him some young and vigorous assistants, who caught his enthusiasm and worked in his spirit. They did much, but there was one thing the Master could not communicate-his genius.

§ 56. Just at this time, before Pestalozzi found associates in his work, he drew up for a "Society of Friends of Education" an account of his method; and this begins with the words I have already quoted, "I want to psychologise education." Basing all instruction on Anschauung (which is nearly equivalent to the child's own observation), he explains how this may be used for a series of exercises, and he takes as the general elements of culture the following language, drawing, writing, arithmetic, and the art of measuring. In the education of the poor he would lay special stress on the importance of two things, then and since much neglected, viz., singing and the sense of the beautiful. The mother's cradle song should begin a series leading up to hymns of praise to God. Education should develop in all a sense of the beauties of Nature. "Nature is full of lovely sights, yet Europe has done nothing either to awaken in the poor a sense for these beauties, or to arrange them in such a way as to produce a series of impressions capable of developing this sense. . If ever popular education should cease to be the barbarous absurdity it now is, and put itself into harmony with the real needs of our nature, this want will be supplied." (R.'s Guimps, 186.)

57. In the last year of the eighteenth century (1800) Pestalozzi was toiling away, constant to his purpose but not clearly seeing the road before him. In March, 1800, he wrote to Zschokke: "For thirty years my life has been a well

P.'s poverty. Kruesi joins him.

nigh hopeless struggle against the most frightful poverty. . For thirty years I have had to forego many of the barest necessaries of life, and have had to shun the society of my fellow-men from sheer lack of decent clothes. Many and inany a time have I gone without a dinner and eaten in bitterness a dry crust of bread on the road at a time when even the poorest were seated round a table. All this I have suffered and am still suffering to-day, and with no other object than the realization of my plans for helping the poor" (R.'s Guimps, 189). It was clear that he could not help others till he himself got help; and he now did get just the help he wanted, an assistant who though a schoolmaster was, strange to say, perfectly ready to learn, and to throw himself into carrying out another man's ideas. This was Hermann Kruesi, a man twenty-five years old, who from the age of 18 had been master of the village school at Gais in Appenzell. In consequence of the war between the French and Austrians, Appenzell was now reduced to a state of famine, and bands of children were sent off to other cantons to escape starvation. Fischer, a friend of Pestalozzi's, and himself an educationist taught by Salzmann (supra 289), wrote from Burgdorf to the pastor of Gais, offering to get thirty children taken in by the people of Burgdorf, and asking that they might be sent with some one who would look after them in the day-time and teach them. In answer to this invitation Kruesi, after a week's march, entered Burgdorf with a troop of little ones. The children were drawn up in an open place, and benevolent people chose which they would adopt. Kruesi was taken into the Castle which the Government had made over partly to Fischer, partly to Pestalozzi. In it Kruesi opened a dayschool. Fischer soon afterwards died; and Pestalozzi

P.'s assistants.

The Burgdorf Institute.

proposed to Kruesi, who had become entirely converted to his views, that they should unite and together carry on the school in the Castle. By a decree of 23rd July, 1800, the Executive Council granted to Pestalozzi the gratuitous use of as much of the Castle and garden as he needed, and thus was established Pestalozzi's celebrated Institute at Burgdorf.

§ 58. Very soon Kruesi enlisted other helpers who had read Leonard and Gertrude, viz., Tobler and Buss, and this is his account of the party : "Our society thus consisted of four very different men. the founder, whose chief reputation was that of a dreamy writer, incapable in practical life, and three young men, one [Tobler] a private tutor whose youth had been much neglected, who had begun to study late, and whose pedagogic efforts had never produced the results his character and talents seemed to promise; another [Buss], a bookbinder, who devoted his leisure to singing and drawing; and a third [Kruesi himself], a village schoolmaster who carried out the duties of his office as best he could without having been in any way prepared for them. Those who looked on this group of men, scarce one of them with a home of his own, naturally formed but a small opinion of their capabilities. And yet our work succeeded, and won the public confidence beyond the expectations of those who knew us, and even beyond our own" (R.'s Guimps, 304).

§ 59. With assistance from the Government there was added to the united schools of Pestalozzi and Kruesi a training class for teachers; and elementary teachers were sent to spend a month at Burgdorf and learn of Pestalozzi, as years afterwards they were sent to the same town to learn of Froebel. This Institute opened in January, 1801,