Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

(1746 - 1827)

In 1774 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi established his first school, where he trained impoverished students in reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as in spinning and weaving. In 1799 he began teaching in Burgdorf, where a year later he opened a boarding school and teacher-training institute in a castle provided by the Helvetian government. “Seeing popular education lying before me like an immeasurable swamp, I plunged into its slime,” he wrote afterward, “till I at last discovered the sources of its waters, the reason of their stagnation.”