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"Citizen of French Republic."

Doubts.

§ 36. In the Swiss Journal we get a hint of the analogy between the development of the plant and of the man. This analogy, often as it had been observed before, was never before so fruitful as it became in the hands of Pestalozzi and Froebel. The passage quoted by Guimps is this: "Teach me, summer day, that man formed from the dust of the earth, grows and ripens like the plant rooted in the soil."

§ 37. Between the close of the year 1787 and 1797 Pestalozzi did not publish anything. Though he had become famous, had made the acquaintance of the greatest men in Germany, such as Goethe, Wieland, Herder, and Fichte, and had been declared a "Citizen of the French Republic," together with Bentham, Tom Payne, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Washington, Madison, Klopstock, Kozciusko, &c., he was nearly starving, and, naturally enough in that state of affairs both private and public, he was in great despondency. As we have seen, his whole life and work were founded on religion and on the only religion possible for us, the Christian religion; but carried away by his political radicalism he seems at this time to have doubted whether Christianity was more than the highest human wisdom. In October, 1793, he wrote to a friend in Berlin: “I doubt, not because I look on doubt as the truth, but because the sum of the impressions of my life has driven faith with its blessings from my soul. Thus impelled by my fate I see

think the chief ends of education: and how can these ends be reached so surely as by training the child as early as possible in the various daily duties of domestic life ?" It would seem then that at this time Pestalozzi was for basing education on domestic labour and would teach the child to be useful. But it is hard to see how this principle could always be applied.

Waiting. P.'s "Inquiry."

nothing more in Christianity but the purest and noblest teaching of the victory of the spirit over the flesh, the one possible means of raising our nature to its true nobility, or in other words of establishing the empire of the reason over the senses by the development of the purest feelings of the heart." If this was the lowest point to which Pestalozzi's faith sank in the days of the Revolution, it remained for practical purposes higher than the faith of most professing Christians then and since.

§ 38. At this time we find him complaining: "My agriculture swallows up all my time. I am longing for winter with its leisure. My time passes like a shadow." He was then forty-six years of age and seemed to himself to have done nothing.

§ 39. Another five years he had to wait before he found an opportunity for action. During this time, impelled by Fichte, he endeavoured to give his ideas philosophic completeness, and after labouring for three years with almost incredible toil he published in 1797 his "Inquiry into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race." This book is pronounced even by his biographer Guimps to be "prolix and obscure," and, says Pestalozzi, "nobody understood me." But even in this book there was much wisdom, had the world cared to learn; but the world had then no place for Pestalozzi, and as he says at the end of this book, "without even asking whether the fault was his or another's, it crushed him with its iron hammer as the mason crushes a useless stone." He was, however, not actually crushed, and a place was in time found for him.

§ 40. The world might be pardoned for neglecting an Inquiry which even a biographer finds "prolix and obscure." But why could it see nothing in another book

P.'s "Fables."

which Pestalozzi published in the same year, "Figures to my A B C Book," or according to its later title, "Fables,” a series of apologues as witty and wise as those of Lessing.*

§ 41. As I have said already (supra p. 239) there seems a marked distinction between thinkers and doers, at least in education, and we seldom find a man great in both. But with all his weakness as a practical man Pestalozzi proved great both as a thinker and a doer. He not only thought out what should be done, but he also made splendid efforts to do it. His first attempt at Neuhof was, as we have seen, all his own; so was the next at Stanz; but afterwards he had to work with others, and the work would have come to a standstill if he had not gained the co-operation of the magistrates, the parents of the children, and his own

* One of these I have already given (supra p. 292). I will give another, not as by any means one of the best, but as a fit companion to Rousseau's two dogs."

66

"26. THE TWO COLTS.

One was

"Two colts as like as two eggs, fell into different hands. bought by a peasant whose only thought was to harness it to his plough as soon as possible: this one turned out a bad horse. The other fell to the lot of a man who by looking after it well and training it carefully, made a noble steed of it, strong and mettlesome. Fathers and mothers, if your children's faculties are not carefully trained and directed right, they will become not only useless, but hurtful; and the greater the faculties the greater the danger."

Compare Rousseau: "Just look at those two dogs; they are of the same litter, they have been brought up and treated precisely alike, they have never been separated; and yet one of them is sharp, lively, affectionate, and very intelligent: the other is dull, lumpish, surly, and nobody could ever teach him anything. Simply a difference of temperament has produced in them a difference of character, just as a simple difference of our interior organisation produces in us a difference of mind." N. Héloise. 5me P. Lettre iii.

P.'s own principles.

assistants. So he never again had the free hand, or at least the free thought which bore such good fruit in his enforced cessation from practice in the years between 1780 and 1798. It is well then to ask, as his biographer Guimps has asked, what was the main outcome of Pestalozzi's thought before he plunged into action a second time in 1798.

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§ 42. Pestalozzi set himself to find a means of rescuing the people from their poverty and degradation. This he held would last as long as their moral and intellectual poverty lasted; so there was no hope except in an education that should make them better and more intelligent. In studying the children even of the most degraded parents he found the seeds, as it were, of a wealth of faculties, sentiments, tastes, and capabilities, which, if developed, might make them reasonable and upright human beings. But what was called education did nothing of the kind. Instead of developing the noblest part of the child's nature it neglected this entirely, and bringing to the child the knowledge, ideas, and feelings of others, it tried to make him "learn" them. So "education" did little beyond stifling the child's individuality under a mass of borrowed ideas. The schoolmaster worked, as it were, from without to within. This Pestalozzi would change, and make education begin in the child and work from within outwards. Acting on this principle he sought for some means of developing the child's inborn faculties, and he found as he says: "Nature develops all the powers of humanity by exercising them; they increase with use." (Evening Hour, Aph. 22.) No means can be found of exercising the higher faculties which can be compared with the actual relations of daily life; so Pestalozzi declares: "The pure sentiment of truth and wisdom is formed in the narrow circle of the relationships

P.'s return to action.

which affect us, the circumstances which suggest our actions, and the common knowledge which we cannot do without." And taking as his starting-point the needs, desires, and con nexions of actual life he was naturally led to associate the work of the body with that of the mind, to develop industry and study side by side, to combine the workshop and the school. With regard to instruction he was never tired of insisting on the importance of thorough mastery in the first elements, and there was to be no advance till this mastery was attained. (See what "Harry" says, supra p. 306.) "The schools," he says (E. H., No. 28), " hastily substitute an artificial method of words for the truer method of Nature which knows no hurry but waits."

$43. In this account of Pestalozzi's doctrine before 1798 I have as usual followed M. Guimps. According to him Pestalozzi had discovered "a principle which settles the law of man's development, and is the fundamental principle of education." This principle M. Guimps briefly states as follows: "All the real knowledge, useful powers, and noble sentiments that a man can acquire are but the extension of his individuality by the development of the powers and faculties that God has put in him, and by their assimilation of the elements supplied by the outer world. There exists for this development and the work of assimilation a natural and necessary order, an order which the school mostly sets at nought."

844. Now we come to the period of Pestalozzi's practical activity. In 1798 Switzerland was overrun by the French. Everything was remodelled after the French pattern; and in conformity with the existing phase in the model country the government of Switzerland was declared to be in the hands of five "Directors." Pestalozzi was a Radical, and

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