Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
History
Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Biography
the room, or to hide behind the window curtains, when spoken to, we may
refer that image back to the days of the "Pestalozzian system," as it
was fashionably understood in this country.
It was a cruel injustice to Pestalozzi to render him responsible for all
this mischief. His mission was, not to craze children's brains and break
their hearts, but the very contrary. We, in fact, gave his name to a
mere reaction from a mistake of our own--to one kind of ignorance into
which we fell in our escape from another.
In our desire for popular education, early in the century, we had
supposed the thing to be done was to put certain facts into the
learner's mind--to lay them upon his memory, as it were. To quicken and
spread the process, we set children who had learned a thing one minute
to teach it to other children the next. This did not answer. We called
it "the Lancasterian system," and supposed the nation would be educated
in a trice. When we found, at the end of ten or twenty years, that boys
and girls left school after sitting nine years on the benches, unable to
do any good with book or pen, while they had lost their home-training in
the workshop, the field, or the dairy, we were ready for a reaction; and
to that reaction we most unjustly gave the name of "Pestalozzian
system."
The notion was that we had been all wrong in putting knowledge into
children's heads; and that the right way was to get ideas out of them.
Henceforth we were to develop faculties, and not impose knowledge. It
was a great day for us when the conception was formed, and began to
spread. Without it, education would never have advanced even as far as
it has. But we blundered over it sadly at first; and among our mistakes,
it was not the least that we christened our follies after Pestalozzi.
Every great step in social progress is taken in the name of some
representative man. It is the business of those who come after to
absolve those representatives from the disrepute of mistakes which were
none of theirs; and we may hope that Pestalozzi's memory has long been
clear from the charge of torturing on the rack of cross-examination the
generation of children whom he loved so well. What it was that he did
propose is best seen by looking at his life; for, if he was not a very
practical man in the sense of wisely conducted affairs, he was still
less of a theorist. He knew very well what he meant and what he wanted;
but he had no compact system to propose, grounded on any new theory of
the human faculties. The foremost man in the educational revolution of
modern times, he obeyed his instincts, and left it for incompetent
followers to make a scheme of doctrine out of what he said and did.
What were those instincts? And how did he use them?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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