Johann Heinrich Hermann Krusi was an American educator. Among the papers he left at his death were many articles, lectures, and essays dealing with religious, political, literary, and educational topics.
Background
Johann Heinrich Hermann Krusi was born on June 24, 1817 in Yverdon, Switzerland. He was the son of Hermann and Catherine (Egger) Krüsi. His father had been a teacher in Pestalozzi's school at Yverdon, but shortly before Hermann's birth had established his own private school there.
Education
While Hermann was still a child the family moved from Yverdon to Trogen, where the elder Krüsi assumed charge of the Cantonal School. Here the boy's formal education began. His autobiography gives doubtful praise to the instruction he received: the formality practiced by some of his teachers seems to have been unsuited to his independent nature and inquiring mind. Later he attended the normal school at Gais, to which his father had been transferred, and he received instruction in religious education at Yverdon under Johannes Niederer, a colleague of Pestalozzi. In 1838 he went to Dresden, Germany, where he studied two years in the Blochmann-Vizthum Institute, a private Gymnasium. While here his education was expanded by travel and outside study and by visits to German normal schools. After a year at the Bunzlau Normal School in Prussia, he returned to Gais in 1841, and for the next five years was a student and an instructor in his father's school there.
Career
Krusi produced three plays and wrote some poems to which he himself attached little importance except as natural steps in the development of his intellectual life and in the expression of his emotional nature.
After his father's death in 1844 he went to England and taught in a private school for boys at Cheam. He possessed strong republican principles, however, and soon became dissatisfied with the aristocratic Cheam school. Accordingly, at the end of one term he resigned and took a teaching position in the Home and Colonial Infant Training School at King's Cross, London, a school founded and conducted by English Pestalozzians. Here he labored happily until 1852, publishing in 1850 A Progressive Course of Inventive Drawing on the Principles of Pestalozzi.
After a year's visit in Switzerland, he then came to the United States, where he became well acquainted with his countrymen, Louis Agassiz and Arnold Guyot.
He began his work in America at the so-called New England Normal College in Lancaster, Massachussets, where he remained two years as a teacher of German, French, and drawing. He then lectured in the Massachusetts and New Hampshire institutes for teachers, gave private instruction, and for two years (1857 - 59) taught in the Trenton (New Jersey) Normal School. In the summer of 1862 Edward Austin Sheldon, principal of the Oswego (New York) State Normal School, invited him to a position on the faculty, because of his well-known advocacy of Pestalozzian principles. He accepted and began his notable work in Oswego in the fall of that year.
In 1887 he retired, to spend the last sixteen years of his life in travel, study, and writing.
In 1875, however, he published Pestalozzi: His Life, Work, and Influence, and in 1907, his own autobiography, Recollections of My Life.
Personality
Krüsi was a strong character, a man of high ideals, patient, persevering, courageous, and an ardent apostle of Pestalozzi.