Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer.
Background
Pestalozzi was born in Zürich, Switzerland, on January 12, 1746, the second of three children. His mother, whose maiden name was Hotze, was a native of Wädenswil on the lake of Zürich. His father died shortly afterward, and Pestalozzi was raised in poverty.
Education
In 1761, Pestalozzi attended the Gymnasium (Collegium Humanitatis) and received instruction from educators Johann Jakob Bodmer, who taught history and politics, and Johann Jakob Breitinger, who taught Greek and Hebrew. He later attended the University of Zürich, where he became interested in Johann Lavater and the Reform Party, and in the condition of the less privileged.
Career
Pestalozzi's earliest years were spent in schemes for improving the condition of the people. He tried law and politics, but his humanitarianism was mistaken for radicalism and he became very unpopular even with those he sought most to help.
In 1769 he settled on his farm, "Neuhof," at Birr, Switzerland, where he planned to fight poverty by developing improved methods of agriculture. There, Pestalozzi realized that school teaching was his true vocation and that as a schoolmaster he could fulfill his desire to improve society by helping the individual to help himself. In 1775 he turned his farm into an orphanage and began to test his ideas on child rearing.
In 1780 he wrote The Hours of a Hermit, a series of generally sad maxims reflecting his view of man's somber plight in the world and the failure of his own attempts at reform at Neuhof. He first experienced success with Leonard and Gertrude (1783), which was widely acclaimed and read as a novel and not, as it was intended to be, as an exposition of his pedagogical ideas. In 1801 he published How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, a sequel to his earlier novel and an expansion of his educational thought.
In 1799 he had been enabled to establish a school at Burgdorf, where he remained till 1804. In 1805 he removed to Yverdun, where he was the director for the next 20 years of a boarding school for boys of many nationalities. Pestalozzian principles of education were applied and observed by world leaders there. About 1815 dissensions broke out among the teachers of the school, and Pestalozzi's last ten years werechequered by weariness and sorrow. He died an embittered man on February 17, 1827, in Brugg.
Pestalozzi's main principles in education include development of the observation, training of the whole person, sympathetic way of dealing with students. His educational methods were child-centered and based on individual differences, sense perception, and the student's self-activity.
According to Pestalozzi, "the full and fruitful development" of the child according to his own nature is the goal of education. The school and teachers provide only the environment and guidance, respectively, most appropriate to free expression that allows the natural powers of the child to develop. Instruction should be adapted to each individual according to his particular changing, unfolding nature. Rather than from books, the child should learn by observing objects of the real world. Sense perceptions are of supreme importance in the development of the child's mind. Pestalozzi described such a detailed methodology both for child development and for the study of the child that a definite system of teacher training evolved also.
Quotations:
His last words were, "I forgive my enemies. May they now find peace to which I am going forever."
Personality
His early experience with the life of degradation of the poor developed in him an acute sense of justice and a determination to help the underprivileged.
Connections
In 1769 Pestalozzi married Anna Schulthess. They had a son, Jean-Jacques Pestalozzi. He was nicknamed Schaggeli and often had epileptic fits that led Pestalozzi and Schulthess to constantly worry about his health.