Education and Schooling

FOCUS How did Pestalozzi define the purposes of education? How did he use children’s sensory experience with objects in his teaching method? In your educational experience, were there teachers who used Pestalozzi’s principles? Do you plan on incorporating Pestalozzian principles in your teaching?

4-3b education and schooling

Both Rousseau and Pestalozzi defined “knowing” as understanding nature, its patterns, and its laws. Pestalozzi stressed empirical, or sensory, learning, through which children learn about their environment by carefully observing natural phenomena. Like Comenius, Pestalozzi believed children should learn gradually, not be hurried, and should understand what they are studying before moving on to the next lesson.

educating Children with Special needs Pestalozzi was dedicated to teaching children with special needs. He opened his schools to children who were poor and hungry victims of poverty and to those who had social, emotional, and psychological problems. If children came to school without breakfast, he fed them before he attempted to teach them. If they were frightened, he comforted them. For him, a teacher needed to be a caring person as well as an expert in teaching methods. Pestalozzi’s principles are applicable to teaching children with special needs as well as children generally.

Influence on educational practices Today Pestalozzi’s object lessons were intro-

duced into American elementary schools in the nineteenth century. His emphasis on object lessons anticipated process-based learning. His belief in holistic education stimulated educators to encourage both cognitive and affective learning. Pestalozzi’s general method remains highly meaningful for American teachers of at-risk children.13 His stress on emotional security as a necessary precondition for skill and subject learning anticipated the contemporary emphasis on safe and secure schools that are free of bullying and violence.

13Arthur Bruhlmeier, Head, Heart, and Hand: Education in the Spirit of Pestalozzi (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2010); Rebecca Wild, Raising Curious, Creative, Confident Kids: The Pestalozzi Experiment in Child-Based Education (Boston: Shambhala, 2000). For the introduction of Pestalozzianism in the United States, see Henry Barnard, ed., Pestalozzi and Pestalozzianism: Life, Education Principles and Methods of John Henry Pestalozzi (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan University Library/Michigan Historical Reprint Series, 2005).

TiMeLine

JoHAnn FRiEdRiCH HERBART

s toc k. com r e t Ni ck u /S h u t

1700 1720

1776 Born in Oldenburg, Germany

1788 Attends classical gymnasium

1740 1760 1780

1794 Student at University of Jena