United States or Faroe Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Educational concern with the early years of life as distinct from inculcation of useful arts dates almost entirely from the time of the emphasis by Pestalozzi and Froebel, following Rousseau, of natural principles of growth. The irregularity of growth and its significance is indicated in the following passage of a student of the growth of the nervous system.
Such teachers seem to be immune to the teachings of psychology and pedagogy; they continue to travel the way their grandparents trod, spurning the practices of Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Francis Parker. They seem not to know that their pupils are predatory beings who are quite capable of ransacking creation to get the food for which they feel a craving.
Pestalozzi, so I imagined, must be the heart, the life-source, the spiritual guide of this life and work; from his central point he must watch over the boy's life in all its bearings, see it in all its stages of development, or at all events sympathise with it and feel with it, whether as the life of the individual, of the family, of the community, of the nation, of mankind at large.
Pestalozzi even held intellectual training by itself to be pernicious; insisting that the roots of all knowledge must strike and feed in the soil of the rightly-governed will. The acquisition of knowledge may, it is true, protect a man against the meaner felonies of life; but not in any degree against its selfish vices, unless fortified by sound principles and habits.
This excellent woman first made him familiar with the maternal feminine solicitude, closer observation of which afterwards led him, as well as Pestalozzi, to a reform of the system of educating youth. In his sixteenth year he went to a forester for instruction, but did not remain long. Meantime he had gained some mathematical knowledge, and devoted himself to surveying.
His questions roused their faculties, and sent a glow through their feelings; and their improvement transcended all precedent. Reports of his conversation and his achievements set others to work; and there was such an interrogation of children as was never dreamed of before. One question which Pestalozzi asked of this set of pupils is memorable. They had seen Altdorf in flames.
After completing the usual course of education, Pestalozzi continued his studies, with a view to engaging in the ministry of the gospel, to which the wishes of his friends, as well as his own deep religious feelings, had early destined him. This course, however, was soon abandoned.
Soon after the breaking up of his establishment at Neuhof, the country began to be agitated with the excesses of the French Revolution, and Pestalozzi, disappointed in the sanguine hopes which he had formed at the commencement of that event, and disgusted with the scenes of brutality and lawlessness which it had occasioned, wrote his Inquiry into the Course of Nature in the Developement of the Human Species.
But at the large institution at Yverdon, of which he was master in his later years, the method broke down badly. Hence there were not wanting in his own times critics who pronounced him a failure. They did not see that beside his insistence on love as the "way," the reformer had an even more important message for the world. "The grand change advocated by Pestalozzi," says Mr.
Browning's poems which lay among his books on the table, opened it at the fly-leaf, and pointed to his name. "'Walter'?" read Tillie. "But I thought " "It was Pestalozzi? That was only my little joke. My name's Walter." On the approach of Sunday, Fairchilds questioned her one evening about Absalom. "Will that lad be taking up your whole Sunday evening again?" he demanded.
Word Of The Day