nothing but apparent disorder, and an uncomfortable bustle ". The fullest sketch of Pestalozzi's proceedings in class is given by his pupil Ramsauer. In reading this it should be remembered that the events happened when Ramsauer was about ten years of age and were described thirty-eight years later. At the same time it should not be forgotten that he was so long and so intimately connected with Pestalozzi and his work that he is not very likely to have exaggerated or misrepresented matters much. This is his account: "So far as ordinary school knowledge was concerned, neither I nor the other boys. learned anything. But his zeal, love and unselfishness, combined with his painful and serious position, evident even to the children, made a most profound impression upon me, and won my child's heart, naturally disposed to be grateful, for ever. . . "It is impossible to draw a clear and complete picture of this school, but here are a few details. According to the ideas of Pestalozzi, all teaching was to start from three elements: language, number and form. He had no plan of studies and no order of lessons, and as he did not limit himself to any fixed time, he often followed the same subject for two or three hours together. We were about sixty boys and girls, from eight to fifteen years old. Our lessons lasted from eight till eleven in the morning, and from two till four in the afternoon. All the teaching was limited to drawing, arithmetic, and exercises in language. We neither read nor wrote; we had neither books nor copy-books; we learned nothing by heart. "For drawing we were given neither models nor directions; only slates and red chalk, and while Pesta lozzi was making us repeat sentences on natural history as an exercise in language, we had to draw just what we liked. But we did not know what to draw. Some of us drew little men and women, others houses, others lines or arabesques, according to their fancy. Pestalozzi never looked at what we had drawn, or rather scribbled, but from the state of our clothes it was pretty evident that we had been using red chalk. For arithmetic we had little boards divided into squares, in which were dots that we had to count, add, subtract, multiply and divide. It was from this that Krüsi and Buss first took the idea of their 'table of units,' and afterwards of their 'table of fractions'. But as Pestalozzi did nothing but make us repeat these exercises one after another, without asking us any questions, this process, excellent as it was, never did us very much good. 66 Our master never had the patience to go back, and, carried away by his excessive zeal, he paid little attention to each individual scholar. The language exercises were the best thing we had, especially those on the wall-paper of the schoolroom, which were real practices in sense-impression. We spent hours before this old and torn paper, occupied in examining the number, form, position and colour of the different designs, holes and rents, and expressing our ideas in more and more enlarged sentences. Thus he would ask: 'Boys, what do you see?' He never addressed the girls. "Answer. A hole in the paper.' "Pestalozzi. Very well, say after me: I see a hole in I see a long hole in the paper. Through Through the long narrow hole figures on the paper. the paper. I see the wall. I see I see black figures on the paper. I see a square yellow figure on the paper. By the side of the square yellow figure I see a round black one. The square figure is joined to the round figure by a large black stroke'-and so on. "Of less utility were those exercises in language which he took from natural history, and in which we had to repeat after him, and at the same time to draw, as I have already mentioned. He would say: Amphibious animals: crawling amphibious animals; creeping amphibious animals. Monkeys: long-tailed monkeys; short-tailed monkeys-and so on. "We did not understand a word of this, for not a word was explained, and it was all spoken in such a sing-song tone, and so rapidly and indistinctly, that it would have been a wonder if any one had understood anything from it; besides, Pestalozzi cried out so dreadfully loudly and so continuously, that he could not hear us repeat after him, the less so as he never waited for us when he had read out a sentence, but went on without intermission, and read off a whole page at once. What he thus read out was drawn up on a half-sheet of large-sized millboard, and our repetition consisted for the most part in saying the last word or syllable of each phrase, thus 'monkeys-monkeys,' or 'keys-keys'. There was never any questioning or recapitulations. "As Pestalozzi, in his zeal, did not take any notice of the time, we generally went on till eleven o'clock with whatever he had commenced at eight, and by ten o'clock he was always tired and hoarse. We knew when it was eleven by the noise of other school-children in the street, and then usually we all ran out, without asking permission. "I must further say that in the first years of the Burgdorf institute, nothing like a systematic plan of lessons was followed, and that the whole life of the place was so simple and home-like, that in the halfhour's recreation which followed breakfast, Pestalozzi would often become so interested in the spirited games. of the children in the playground as to allow them to go on undisturbed till ten o'clock. And on summer evenings, after bathing in the Emme, instead of beginning work again, we often stayed out till eight or nine o'clock looking for plants and minerals." The commission appointed by the "Society of the Friends of Education" to report on Pestalozzi's work at Burgdorf, mentions that singing and walking often took the place of the regular lessons. M. Stapfer states that Pestalozzi's personal neglect and his strange ways destroyed his authority so that he lost control of his pupils, and the prefect Schnell had to go to his assistance. Raumer, speaking of his stay at Yverdon, says: “If I wanted to do any work for myself, I had to do it while standing at a writing-desk in the midst of the tumult of one of the classes". Karl Ritter said: "Pestalozzi himself is unable to apply his own method in any of the simplest subjects of instruction. He is quick in grasping principles, but is helpless in matters of detail; he possesses the faculty, however, of putting his views with such force and clearness that he has no difficulty in getting them carried out." This is, however, a description of Pestalozzi at Yverdon, when, it must be remembered, he had given up actual teaching, and where most of the matter taught was on a very much higher level than he had himself ever attempted. Krüsi thus describes Pestalozzi's manner in teaching: "He had, I was going to say, almost brazen lungs, and any one who had not such would have to abandon all idea of speaking, or rather shouting, incessantly as he did. Even if I had had such lungs myself, I should often have desired that he and his pupils, when reciting or answering in class, might have used more moderation and lowered their voices. . . . He endeavoured to teach two subjects to a class at the same time; he tried in particular to combine exercises in speaking with freehand drawing and writing." |