I was on the point of bringing out an extensive plan of education in Aargau when the orphan home at Stans was burned down, and I was at once offered that unfortunate place for my residence. The number of children increased gradually to eighty, all of different ages; some full of pretensions, others wayside beggars; all, except a few, wholly ignorant. What a task! To form and develop these children!
As I was obliged to give the children instruction, alone and without help, I learned the art of teaching many together; and since I had no other means but loud speaking, the idea of making the learners draw, write, and work at the same time was naturally developed. The utter ignorance of all made me stay long over the beginnings; and this led me to realize the high degree of inner power to be obtained by perfecting the first beginnings, and the result of a feeling of completeness and perfection in the lowest stage. The result of attending to this perfecting of the early stages far outran my expectations. It quickly developed in the children a consciousness of hitherto-unknown power, and particularly a general sense of beauty and order. They felt their own power, and the tediousness of the ordinary school tone vanished like a ghost from my rooms. They wished—tried—persevered—succeeded, and they laughed. Their tone was not that of learners; it was the tone of unknown powers awakened from sleep, of a heart and mind exalted with the feeling of what these powers could and would lead them to do.
Children taught children. They tried to put into practice what I told them to do and often came themselves on the track of the means of its execution, from many sides. This self-activity, which had developed itself in many ways in the beginning of learning, worked with great force on the birth and growth of the conviction in me that all true, all educative instruction must be drawn out of the children themselves, and be born within them. To this I was led chiefly by necessity. Since I had no fellow helpers, I put a capable child between two less capable ones; he embraced them with both arms, he told them what he knew, and they learned to repeat after him what they knew not.
I am now thoroughly convinced; it was a long time before I was; but I had children in Stans whose powers, not deadened by the weariness of unpsychological home and school discipline, developed more quickly. It was another race. Even the paupers were different from the town paupers and the weaklings of our corn and vine lands. I saw the capacity of human nature and its peculiarities in many ways, and in most open play. Its defects were the defects of healthy nature, immeasurably different from the defects caused by bad and artificial teaching—hopeless flagging and complete crippling of the mind. I saw in this combination of unschooled ignorance a power of seeing and a firm conception of the known and the seen of which our ABC puppets have no notion.
I felt my Stans experiment had decided that it was possible to found popular instruction on psychological grounds, to lay true knowledge, gained by sense impression at its foundation, and to tear away the mask of its superficial bombast. I felt I could solve the problem to men of penetration and unprejudiced mind; but the prejudiced crowd, like geese that, ever since they cracked the shell, have been shut up in the coop and shed, and so have lost all power of flying and swimming, I could never make wise, as I well knew.
From How Gertrude Teaches Her Children. In 1774 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.”
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