Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi Research Paper

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s work deals with a wealth of subjects in the fields of general politics, social policy, constitutional law, jurisprudence, literature, anthropology, philosophy, pedagogy, and social pedagogy, and it is documented in 30 volumes in the Critical Edition Samtliche Werke und Briefe, 15 of which have hitherto appeared (also available on CDROM).

Pestalozzi was, in both his personal and literary life, actively opposed to social injustice, oppression, exploitation, dependence, and lack of political freedom. His ambition was to free the poor and their children from powerlessness, to help them to be able to secure their own individual subsistence, as well as to abolish the very political conditions which caused this hardship. He constantly gave central importance in his work to social justice, the satisfaction of needs, ownership and work, domestic order, and basic needs for all, including children. The subjects he addressed were rooted in social reality. Pestalozzi reflected upon and analyzed the everyday life of the poor masses, the everyday life of children, and the everyday political life of his time.

The special form of this relation to reality Michel Soetard (1981) has convincingly called the ‘Principle Reality.’

2. Life And Work

2.1 1746–1799: Childhood, Youth, And Early Career

2.1.1 Family Origins And Childhood. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was born in Zurich on the 12 January 1746, the son of the surgeon Johann Baptist Pestalozzi and his wife Susanna, nee Hotz. At that time, Zurich was a center of European culture, a city state with an exclusive merchant and entrepreneurial aristocracy. The town was regarded as rich, with a small number of old families holding power in the city council. Neither his father’s family nor his mother’s—who originally came from the Zurich area where her father was a parish priest—belonged to this group. The married couple produced seven children in 9 years of marriage from which only three grew to maturity. When Pestalozzi—one of seven children—was 5 years old, his father died at the age of 33, leaving his mother to take care of four small children. In order to lead a bourgeois life in spite of the financial predicament, economizing and makingdo became a staple of their dismal everyday life. Pestalozzi had therefore to endure poverty. In the country at his grandfather’s house in Hong, where his grandfather was a parish priest, he became acquainted early on with the miserable social condition of the provincial population which was to occupy him for a lifetime.

2.1.2 School And Studies. In Zurich, Pestalozzi— who had the civic rights—grew up with the sons of the patrician families whose carefree material situation was permanently laid out before his eyes. He enjoyed the schooling of a city-dweller, and went to the city elementary school from 1751 to 1754; he was then a pupil from 1754 to 1763 at the Schola Abbatissana in Zurich, the Schola Carolina, and the Collegium humanitatis (also in Zurich), the latter being a Latin school. After some initial difficulties he was a good pupil, though because of his financial situation he was always an outsider because of his ‘extraordinary carelessness and uncleanliness.’ From 1763 to 1765 he studied at Zurich’s theological college, the Carolinum. The appearance of an anonymous pamphlet he had co-written caused the abrupt end to his studies. It was clear to him in any case that he did not wish to become a priest.

In Zurich there were—following the example of other European countries—patriotic and physiocratic societies. From 1764, Pestalozzi belonged to the circle of patriots of the Helvetic Society. The Zurich scholars Bodmer and Breitinger in particular had their circle of influence here. The much-admired model was Rousseau. Republican works were read and written. It was in this context that Pestalozzi’s first publications Agis (1766) and Wunsche (1766) appeared. In 1767, Pestalozzi began a short agricultural apprenticeship with the Bern physiocrat Tschiffeli.

2.1.3 Livelihood. In February 1769, Pestalozzi became a farmer in Mullingen and ran into heavy debt. On 30 September 1769, he married Anna Schulthess (1738–1815), and on the 13 August 1770 their only child Hans Jakob, called Jaqueli (1770–1801), was born. Pestalozzi built a manor house, the ‘Neuhof auf dem Birrfeld’ which he moved into with his young family in 1771. Crop failure, bad purchases of land, and other mistakes led to failure and almost to financial ruin. In 1794, he founded an institution for the poor at the Neuhof. His initial interest was more entrepreneurial than pedagogical; in his NeuhofSchriften (published in 1777), Pestalozzi accompanied his essays with a journalistic advertising campaign for support for his project. In his Bitte an Menschenfreunde, he successfully enlisted the support of, amongst others, Niklaus Emanuel Tscharner (1727–1794), the chairman of the Bern Society for Economics. Pestalozzi discovered his interest in all things pedagogical during his time at the Neuhof, motivated by his interaction with the poor children of the Neuhof: ‘I saw how the overwhelming cruelty of self-interest constantly destroys the body and soul of almost—and I mean almost—all of these children.’ Pestalozzi’s institution failed financially, but he was later to make use of his experiences in the field of national education.

In the middle of the Neuhof crisis, the political work about Zurich Freyheit meiner Vaterstatt (1799)— which remained unpublished—was written in which he lamented the wealth of the city and its devastating effects on the constitution and political culture of Zurich.

2.2 From 1780 To 1799: Livelihood As An Independent Writer

Out of the necessity of having to finance himself, Pestalozzi became a writer. In 1780 he published Abendstunde eines Einsiedlers whose theme is cultivating people: ‘Cultivating people towards the truth means cultivating their being and their nature towards a reassuring wisdom.’ Then he wrote the first part of Lienhard und Gertrud, which appeared in 1781. Lienhard und Gertrud is a pedagogical novel which its author broadened into a novelistic pedagogical text. The theme of the novel is the story of the education and cultivation of an entire village. With Lienhard und Gertrud, Pestalozzi wrote about a fictitious village which he called Bonnal in a novel showing both the development and the education of the characters. The subject of the novel is bound together by a kaleidoscope of multifaceted and fictitious stories of education, cultivation, and socialization.

In the second (1783) and third (1785) books, it becomes clear how many individual fates have been embroiled in the deplorable state of affairs in Bonnal for many years, and that it is thereby not only a question of individual error, but at the same time of failings which lie more deeply in the political structure. Only in the fourth book (1787) does it become possible to continue telling the story of Bonnal and to organize it structurally as a story of reform, with, of course, further novelistic twists and turns and subplots. The village as the scene of the action is increasingly abandoned. Paragraph by paragraph Pestalozzi outlines his ideas for new legislation, the distribution of land, jurisdiction, and the culture of debate and justice. The novel is therefore increasingly interrupted on the level of action and plot, becomes more difficult to read, and thus loses its original novelistic character. The literary code transforms into a politically discursive text. Lienhard und Gertrud became Pestalozzi’s greatest literary success. Pestalozzi was soon to become known far beyond the Swiss borders, first of all not as a pedagog, but as a writer. The novel brought him the title of Honorary Citizen during the French Revolution.

In Gesetzgebung und Kindermord (written in 1780 and printed in 1783), Pestalozzi declared the prevailing legal practice throughout Europe of executing childmurderesses—mostly after extreme humiliation and torture—as inhuman. He mounted an emotive defence of a large number of child-murderesses, whom he viewed as innocent. To him, poor girls and women had the fundamental right to sexuality and marriage, to their children, to protection and support, and to recognition and help. The work was a plea against capital punishment.

In 1782, Pestalozzi published Christoph und Else, a novel of instruction, even a ‘novel’ for the novel Lienhard und Gertrud. It was to be used as a guide to how adults should read Lienhard und Gertrud. A peasant family talk together over 30 evenings about the plot, the theme, and the constellation of characters in Lienhard und Gertrud. On 26 August 1792, Pestalozzi was appointed an Honorary French Citizen and never renounced the honorary title in spite of all the criticism of the Terror, an action which aroused suspicion in conservative circles. The outcome of Pestalozzi’s examination of the revolution was the work Javoder Nein? (1793) in which he made the Ancien Regime responsible for the devastating outrages in Europe and thus justified the revolution, though at the same time he sharply denounced the revolutionary Terror.

In 1797, Pestalozzi’s main philosophical work Meine Nachforschungen uber den Gang der Natur in der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts appeared. The initial question was ‘What am I, and what is mankind?’ Pestalozzi expounded a natural state, a social state, and a moral state of humanity, and went on to discuss the individual human being as a ‘work of himself,’ a ‘work of nature,’ and a ‘work of morality.’

In 1798, the revolution also reached Switzerland. For a short time, a Helvetic Republic was established. Pestalozzi became the editor of the ‘Helvetisches Volksblatt’—the publication organ of the new Helvetic government—and at first worked on behalf of the government. He wrote texts, appeals, and pamphlets, as well as Abhandlung uber die Natur des Helvetischen Zehnden. Whereas the typical pamphlets on both sides at the time of the revolution constituted obvious works of political agitation in favor of one side or the other, Pestalozzi was a mediator who urged the often very hostile opposing groups towards agreement. He became a soother of passions in his pamphlets. Pestalozzi wanted to promote the unity of the Swiss in the crisis year of 1798, the unity between the poor and rich population, the unity of town and country, and the unity of the Inner-Swiss (Catholic) cantons and the majority Protestant cantons.

2.3 1799–1827 The Pedagog And Institute Director: From Stans To Yverdon

2.3.1 Stans. At the age of 53, Pestalozzi received a government commission to run an orphanage in Stans. From 7 December 1798 to 8 June 1799, he lived there together with a housekeeper and as many as 80 children by the end. His pedagogical work and his pedagogical writing were now supported by two pillars. The first was a love of children and a passion for his work. Pestalozzi made himself into the ‘father’ and ‘mother’ of all the children; he tried to transpose the notion of the great importance of satisfying basic needs. The second was that the fundamental principle of the ‘method’—which was on the one hand an almost technocratic syllabic reading method—was at the same time elevated by the idea of an elementary method of moral education. From then on, Pestalozzi’s elementary education and elementary method were central themes. The institute, however, came to a sudden end. Pestalozzi had to hand over the building to French soldiers returning from the Russian campaign for use as a hospital and leave the institute, an action which made him fall into deep depression and despair. During this time, he wrote his strongly influential work, the Stanser Brief (1799), which contained a passionate plea for the malleability of human beings, including, and indeed especially, for the malleability of poor, neglected children.

2.3.2 Burgdorf. Pestalozzi became a teacher in Burgdorf on 23 July 1799. The announcement of a schoolmasters’ conference in Burgdorf Palace followed on the 24 October 1800. The appearance of Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt followed in 1801. In the first part, Pestalozzi reported on Stans in autobiographical form, on his first endeavors in Burgdorf, on his young colleagues, some of whom accompanied him for a considerably long time, and on how he conceived method, the unity of knowledge, ability, and feeling. Pestalozzi developed a research program which he continued in Yverdon and which aimed at developing suitable learning aids in the three directions which he soon named ‘HeadHeartHand.’ The principles of the new teaching method consisted of the ability to visualize, simplification, logical progression, and individualization. The method was aimed at developing the autonomy of the child, at creating an independent personality which could secure its own subsistence.

From November 1802 to February 1803, Pestalozzi traveled to Paris as a member of the Consulta. He was, however, unable to push through his concept for national education there. In June 1804, the institute at Burgdorf was moved to Munchbuchsee, and at the end of August the opening of a subsidiary institute followed in Yverdon, a town in French-speaking Switzerland, and on the 6 July 1805, Munchbuchsee was closed. From 1804 to 1825, Pestalozzi ran one of the largest European educational institutes of the time in the rooms of the palace at Yverdon in French Switzerland. Yverdon was an experimental school on the level of its teaching, education, and teacher training. In order to be able to disseminate the new knowledge acquired from the everyday pedagogical research, a printing works was set up specifically for this purpose. Pestalozzi, who until that time had always written his works alone, now published journals, teaching books, teaching material, discourses on teaching methods, appeals, and speeches with his colleagues. At the center of these works stood Pestalozzi’s concept of an elementary education of people which could be applied to different teaching disciplines.

At the height of its impact in 1809, the institute had 150 pupils from 6 to 16 years old, 31 teachers and assistant teachers, and 40 young people as observers from all over Europe who wished to study Pestalozzi’s method. Pestalozzi’s concept of elementary teaching was already being followed ever more closely in Prussia, Spain, and many other countries. Pestalozzi’s most important work from the Yverdon period is An die Unschuld, den Ernst und den Edelmut meines Zeitalters und meines Vaterlands (1815), a treatise in the form of an address in which Pestalozzi set out his program for life: ‘The beginning and the end of my policy is education.’ Pestalozzi analyzed the approach of the industrial age with its phenomena of concentration, mechanization, and standardization. Only in education did he see the means to prepare people for the Industrial Age. The work caused a great sensation and was a literary success.

The size of the staff and the differences of interest and opinion within the teaching body increasingly led to endless quarrels which finally caused the downfall of the institute. Pestalozzi left Yverdon embittered in 1825, and returned to the Neuhof.

In the last 2 years of his life, he wrote the works Meine Lebensschicksale als Vorsteher meiner Erzie-hungsinstitute in Burgdorf und Iferten (1826), the Schwanengesang (1826), and finally the Langenthaler Rede. During the crisis which industrialization and the reorganization of the states into large administrative states gave rise to, Pestalozzi saw a great opportunity for man to return to himself, and for his inner renewal by means of a comprehensive elementary education.

After a short illness, Pestalozzi died on 17 February 1827. On 19 February, he was buried near the Neuhof in the small village of Birr.

3. Critical Reception And Research Developments

The research literature on Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s life and work, amply documented by the research papers and synopses of the Pestalozzi literature of the past 200 years, at first glance appears immensely extensive. This lies in the fact that Pestalozzi, in the history of (German-speaking) pedagogy and educational sciences, has without doubt experienced a considerable impact history which has admittedly only to a certain degree coincided with the reception history of his numerous written works. Above all, Pestalozzi’s teaching method is prescribed in many countries around the world and his bestknown works have been translated into many languages. Should one follow the numerous publications up to the present, it becomes apparent that, whereas in the first half of the twentieth century the ‘whole Pestalozzi’ became the subject, individual or partial aspects began, however, to dominate more and more markedly within the framework of the differentiation of educational science and its adjacent sciences. In this way, the paradigm exchanges in educational science are mirrored in the respective cognition interests of analyses. If the Pestalozzi from the history of ideas took center stage in scientific literature in the middle of the twentieth century, the research controversy about the political Pestalozzi (Rang 1967) was sparked off in the 1960s and 1970s. In the course of the 1970s with its far-reaching education and school reform, interest was then concentrated rather more on the practitioner and reformer. Within the research history, it furthermore became clear that, after a very intensive, bibliographically broad and verifiable acceptance of Pestalozzi the politically reforming pedagog, the research in the 1980s stagnated; indeed the number of papers and studies about Pestalozzi fell off considerably. That only changed in 1996. Since then, the trend has been moving in the direction of an examination of the research into context and reception (the impact history) alongside biographical research using new scientific methods, aimed at producing a differentiated situating of the work as regards history and content. An important impetus comes from the work of the Pestalozzi Research Center which, dividing the work between the Pestalozzianum and the University of Zurich, is pushing forward with the Critical Edition, and publishes the Neue Pestalozzi-Studien and the Neue Pestalozzi-Blatter.

Pestalozzi’s journalistic work is so diverse that it not only touches on areas of social and cultural practice as regards content, or even focuses on them explicitly as a central theme, but also represents groups of different discourse methods. In order to understand the work, interdisciplinary research is required e.g., into rhetoric, eloquence and discourse, the socioaesthetic culture of sentimentalism, social history, the relationship between the written and the spoken, the problematic nature of text selection, the relationship between truth and fiction, the theory of femininity and the ensuing mother cult of the eighteenth century.

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