Swiss Man of the Year

Teaching had hardly changed since Ptolemy's day. Education was by rote and rod. A young, ugly, runty, sad-eyed Swiss scholar wanted to do something about it. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi had already thought of preaching as a career--and his first sermon was so bad, the tale goes, that he laughed out loud in the middle of it. He tried law, and flopped again. At 22, in the year 1768, he bought a farm--and failed at that, too. But while his crops went to ruin, he filled his house with waifs, strays and farm kids, and began to teach them in a novel way: so that they liked to learn.

He set them to spinning, and taught them arithmetic by letting them count the strands. He showed them nature on long walks in the neighboring valleys, and they brought back clay to make crude relief maps for their geography lessons. There was no memorizing and no flogging.

History's first progressive school, which at one time had 50 pupils, lasted until Pestalozzi's farm finally went broke in 1780.

Eighteen years later, when Switzerland had been invaded by the French, and hundreds of half-starved, ignorant, homeless children roamed the country, Pestalozzi gathered together as many as he could, and started an orphan school in Stans. "We wept and smiled together," he wrote. "They forgot the world . . . and only knew they were with me and I with them. ... I sought less to teach [them] to spell, read and write than to make use of these exercises for the purpose of giving their minds as full and as varied a development as possible." In the end he succeeded. Talleyrand, Mme. de Stael and Robert Owen came to learn from Pestalozzi. Philosopher Fichte introduced Pestalozzi's progressive education to Germany, and there Horace Mann and Calvin Stowe picked it up, to bring to the U.S.

This week, to mark Pestalozzi's 200th birthday, the Swiss Government officially designated Heinrich Pestalozzi as Switzerland's Man of the Year.

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