Johann Pestalozzi
What follows is a direct lift from the book Not for Profit, the subject of my posting Not For Profit.
Beginning on page 58:
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Swiss Educator Johann Pestalozzi (1746-1827) took as his target the practice of rote learning and force-feeding, ubiquitous in schools of his day. The purpose of this sort of education, as he portrays it, was the creation of docile citizens who, as grownups, would follow authority and not ask questions. In his copious writings on education, some of them in fictional form, Prestalozzi describes, by contrast, an education aimed at rendering the child active and inquisitive through the development of his or her natural critical capacities. He presents the Socratic type of education as an engaging and enlivening, and as just plain common sense – if the goal is to train the mind, and not to produce herdlike obedience.
Prestalozzzi’s was not a narrow Socratism – he also gave significance, in education, to sympathy and affection. His idea figure was a maternal figure, as well as a Socratic challenger. He was ahead of his era in urging a complete ban on corporal punishment, and he emphasized the importance of play in early education…
In the influencial novel Leonard and Gertrude (1781), Prestalozzi describes the reform of education in a small town, from an elite sort of indoctrination to a highly participatory and democratic form of mental awakening. Significantly, the agent of the radical change is a working-class woman, Gertrude, who exemplifies the maternal, the inquisitive, and the down-to-earth, all in one. In her village school, she educates boys and girls from all social classes, treating them as equals and teaching them useful practical skills…
Gertrude is also affectionate and interested in cultivating the children’s emotional capacities along with their capacity for criticism. In the 1801 book How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, Pestalozzi summarizes the principles of good schooling, making it clear that family love is the source and the animating principle of all true education…
Pestalozzi was too radical for his time and place; the various schools he started were all failures, and Napoleon, whom he approached, refused to take an interest in his ideas.
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