Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) was a famous Swiss educator-democrat, theorist of the popular school, who had a tremendous influence on the development of pedagogical theory and school practice in many countries of the world. He pinned his main hopes on properly organized upbringing and education of children, on the unity of mental, moral, and physical education in combination with preparation for labor and participation in it. Pestalozzi criticized the school of his day for separating learning from life and cramming, dulling the spiritual strength of children (Horlacher, 2019). As a humanist educator, he adhered to his democratic ideals. He derived his pedagogical theory from the main goal of upbringing, which he saw in the development of all natural abilities of the child, taking into account his/her individual characteristics and age. At the same time, upbringing should form not just a harmoniously developed individual from a child, but a worker – a member of the human community.
Unlike French materialists of the 18th century, the Swiss teacher strictly differentiated the spontaneous influences of the environment on the formation of the child (“life forms”) and the conscious – pedagogical influence, carried out in school and family. The great merit of Pestalozzi lies in the development of the principle of visualization of teaching, in an effort to link sensory perception with the development of thinking.
Pestalozzi considered the development of logic, cognitive skills, the ability to logically and consistently express own thoughts, formulate concepts the most important task of teaching. Education, according to Pestalozzi, must encourage children to be independent (Aubrey & Riley, 2015). Based on his ideas for developmental education and elementary education, Pestalozzi laid the foundation for the scientific designing of methods for the initial teaching of the native language, arithmetic, geometry, geography. Developing the issues of didactics, Pestalozzi put forward the fruitful idea of elementary education, according to which children, in the process of education and upbringing, must master the basic elements of knowledge, morality, and labor methods.
In 1781, Pestalozzi published his famous pedagogical novel Lingard and Gertrude, in which he shows that “every mother should be able to teach children” (Pestalozzi & Cooke, 2013, p 39). The main character of the novel, the peasant Gertrude, skillfully raising her children, persuaded her fellow villagers to open a school in the village. In a subsequent didactic essay, How Gertrude Teaches Children, Pestalozzi reveals a teaching method based on visualization (Pestalozzi & Cooke, 2013). The student should learn what they consider necessary, and the teacher’s words should only be an explanation of what the student is getting to know with the help of direct perception. Pestalozzi believed that primary schools should be replaced by raising and educating children in families (Channing, 2019). Gertrude’s children do not study in the classroom, but in the house, in the yard, in the garden, in the field, in the forest. They have no lessons, no textbooks – all this is replaced by their own experiments and observations, accompanied and guided by live conversations with the mother.
The name “elementary education” implies such an organization of education in which the simplest elements are highlighted in the activities of children and in what they learn. The process of learning proceeds from mostly simple materials to more complex ones. Pestalozzi built the process of early teaching inductively on the basis of a gradual transition from elements to the whole. At the heart of all knowledge, according to Pestalozzi, there are elements (Pestalozzi & Cooke, 2013). For example, all objects have a number, shape, and name, and each person, when he or she wants to find out something incomprehensible, asks himself or herself three questions: 1) How many objects does he have in front of our eyes? 2) What form do they look like, what is their shape? 3) What are they called? (Jedan, 1981). He considered the unit to be the simplest element of a number, a straight line as the simplest form element, and sound as the simplest element of a word. It means that learning at elementary school level is boiled down down to the skills of counting, measuring, and mastering speech, with the application of exercises in these skills, awakens in the child the most important quality – ability of thinking. Based on his didactic positions, Pestalozzi developed a methodology for the initial teaching of children in their native language, counting, and measurement (Jedan, 1981). He strove to simplify this technique so that it could be successfully used by any peasant mother working with her child. To this end, he created sequential series of exercises for the development of children’s speech, improving their ability to count and measure.
Pestalozzi shaped his idea of elementary initial training as a certain concept, which he called “method.” The “Pestalozzi method” refers to a system of teaching children, focused on their all-round development, the formation of “mind, heart, and hand” (Channing, 2019). Leading in this concept is the interpretation of the nature-conformity of upbringing, understood as the need to build it in accordance with the inner nature of the child and the setting for the development of all forces of the spiritual and physical nature in him. At the same time, in the mental life of a person, Pestalozzi noticed five “physical and mechanical” laws: the law of gradualness and consistency, the law of coherence, the law of joint sensations, the law of causality and the law of mental identity (Horlacher, 2019). These laws must be applied to education and training using the appropriate method, which was developed by Pestalozzi.
Pestalozzi believed that the potential internal forces that a child possesses from birth are characterized by a desire for development. He identified three forces of human nature: 1) the forces of knowledge, consisting in a predisposition to external and internal contemplation; 2) the powers of skill, growing from the inclinations to the all-round development of the body; 3) the strength of the soul, growing from the inclinations to love, shame and self-control (Channing, 2019). According to these forces, Pestalozzi divided the initial training into mental, physical, and moral. He considered one of the leading tasks of early training to develop a balance of such forces.
The theory of education for young children, suggested by Pestalozzi, as a whole, exerted noticeable effect on the future of pedagogical theory and practice development, which was reflected in the expansion of the content of instruction in elementary school: elements of geometry and drawing, gymnastics, singing, as well as basic information on geography, history, natural science were introduced there. Pestalozzi became one of the founders of the concept of developmental education: he considered school subjects more as a means of developing children’s abilities than as a means of acquiring knowledge. Thus, he developed the position of progressive pedagogy on the factors of personality formation and the harmonious development of all the forces and abilities of a person. His undoubted merit lies in the assertion of the decisive role of education – it encourages self-activity and self-development of the natural forces and inclinations inherent in man.
References
Aubrey, K., & Riley, A. (2015). Understanding and using educational theories. Sage Publications.
Channing, E. (2019). Pestalozzi’s Leonard and Gertrude. Wentworth Press.
Horlacher, R. (2011). Schooling as a means of popular Education. Pestalozzi’s method as a popular education experiment. Paedogogica Historica, 47(1-2), 65-75.
Horlacher, R. (2019). Vocational and liberal education in Pestalozzi’s educational theory. Pedagogía y Saberes, 50, 109-120.
Jedan, D. (1981). Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and the Pestalozzian method of language teaching. Peter Lang International Academic Publishers.
Pestalozzi, J., & Cooke, E. (2013). How Gertrude teaches her children: an attempt to help mothers to teach their own children. Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
Trohler, D. (2008). Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. UTB.