Pestalozzi’

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Pestalozzi believed that if children adopt the Method they will always, in practice, come to a point where very special demands will be made on their individuality: by seizing that opportunity and exploiting it, they will most certainly bring into play powers and resources that will enable them largely to dispense with the assistance and support in their education that will still be indispensable to others, and will make themselves ready to follow up and complete the remaining portion of their education, in a self-assured and independent manner. This is one of Pestalozzi’s main relevance in childhood education today.

Pestalozzi’s ideas stresses that teachers should strive to bring into play in every educational activity all three elements involved in developing the child’s capacity to act for himself: the physical-education instructor will pay attention to the child’s intellectual grasp of the exercises he performs and to their impact on his senses; the mathematics teacher will take care not to lose sight of his subject’s relevance to the children’s everyday experience but to provide an opportunity for them to apply mathematics on their own account at some stage in the educational process. Pestalozzi never tires of stressing that this balance is never definitively established and may be disturbed at any moment to give undue advantage to one of the three ‘animalities’: head, heart or hand (Delekat, F. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, der Mensch, der Philosoph und der Erzieher, 3. Aufl. 1968). Pestalozzi’s contemporary relevance is assessed in terms of his mode of thought concerning the conflict between the school’s function of integrating students into society and its duty to fashion individuals who can live in freedom: Pestalozzi’s basic objection to this theory was that by converting the Method’s underlying objective of freedom into a system it actually made it impracticable.

Pestalozzi’s ideas are thus most deeply relevant in his so far unsurpassed reconciliation of theory and practice in education. And if education has a chance of developing as an active process in which practice, scientific research theory is mutually enriching (G. Mialaret 1967), it may be asserted that Pestalozzi succeeded in consummating this triple alliance. Pestalozzi was therefore in a position to act on the specific nature of the child. By breaking the natural continuity between the theoretical and practical approaches to educational questions, Pestalozzi also inactivated the mechanism that had for centuries been turning the child into a docile instrument for testing the validity of preconceived ideas. Education is certainly a human study but it falls into a different category from the others: its dialectical relationship with practice, out of sheer respect for emerging freedom, makes it challenge the hypothesis-deduction approach adopted by the other human studies.

References:

Centre of Information and Research on Pestalozzi at Yeverdon. http://www.centrepestalozzi.ch

Barth, H. Pestalozzis Philosophie der Politik. 1954.

Delekat, F. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, der Mensch, der Philosoph und der Erzieher, 3. Aufl. 1968.

Froese, L. ; Kamper, D., usw. Zur Diskussion : Der politische Pestalozzi. 1972.

G. Mialaret. Der politische Pestalozzi. 1967.

Schönebaum, H. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Wesen und Werk. 1954 ss.

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