Lessons from Yverdon

On their way through Switzerland in the early 1800s, many a notable--among them Talleyrand and Madame de Stael--made a point of stopping at Yverdon. There, in an old castle, lived scores of waifs and orphans under the care of a gentle old man they all called "Father." His real name: Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

The Pestalozzi method of teaching eventually found its way into every public school, became one of the foundations of modern "progressive" teaching. A new collection of his aphorisms called The Education of Man (Philosophical Library; $2.75) summarizes the lessons Pestalozzi taught.

Courage & Joy. Pestalozzi gave a lifetime to learning the lessons that he taught, and many of them he learned from children in the first place. He began taking youngsters into his home even before he had a real school, gathering them, Pied-Piper fashion, every time he went out for a stroll. He bathed and fed them, taught them to spin and weave, read and write, sing and draw. He never flogged or goaded them, taught as much with his heart as with his head. "Learning," said Pestalozzi, "is not worth a penny when courage and joy are lost along the way."

Unlike most other schoolmasters of his day, he saw each child as a person, with a nature and bent of his own; he denned the teacher's job as developing each personality to the fullest. There could be little developing of any sort, he thought, from the formalized sort of education then in vogue.

The prevailing education, he held, was "glutted with words," crammed with names and numbers learned by rote, whether children understood what they meant or not. "There are two ways of instructing," Pestalozzi said. "Either we go from words to things, or from things to words." Pestalozzi started with things.

Pupils learned their first geography and geology on long walks at Pestalozzi's side. They learned their numbers by counting stones, their letters from alphabet blocks, their fractions from squares cut up into halves, thirds and quarters. "Let [the pupil] see for himself, hear, find out, fall, pick himself up, make mistakes," said Pestalozzi. "What he can do for himself, let him do; let him be always occupied, always active."

God & Love. At Yverdon, he also taught other things, some of them not so obvious in the modern pedagogical scheme. In caring for his children, he soon made himself almost as poor as they, living "like a beggar in order to learn how to make beggars live like men." He could not pass a poorer man without giving something away, even if all he had to give was a buckle from his shoes. A Christian who had been influenced by the teachings of the Swiss reformer, Huldreich Zwingli, Pestalozzi had learned that lesson from the New Testament.

"Without love," he told his children, "a man is without God; and without both God and love, what is man?"

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