Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: biography of this Swiss educator

Throughout history there have been different people who have made important contributions in the field of education.

One of the most prominent personalities is that of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, an influential Swiss pedagogue and educator. From the values ​​of the Enlightenment, this researcher proposed that education could be used to improve the quality of life of society in general, also in terms of living conditions materials.

We are going to review the life of this magnificent Swiss educator and learn more about what his contributions in the field of pedagogy consisted of, through a biography of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.

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Brief biography of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, also known as Enrique Pestalozzi, was born in Zurich, the capital of Switzerland, in the year 1746. His father was a doctor, and died when Pestalozzi was still very young (he was only 6 years old when the tragic event took place).

Being 15 years old, he enters the Gymnasium, or Collegium Humanitatis, a prestigious center in which he received a complete education. which included political, historical knowledge and languages ​​such as Hebrew and Greek.

His maternal grandfather, who was a religious pastor, exerted a great influence on him. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi he habitually accompanied his grandfather to visit peasant parishioners, and it was during these activities that he became truly aware of poverty, its effects, and its relationship with education. He realized that children were abandoned by both political and ecclesiastical powers, and it was common for them to start working at very early ages.

Originally, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was also going to become a clergyman, as was his grandfather. But through his experiences and with the influence of the philosopher Rousseau, he finally decided to direct his career towards law and politics, having as a horizon to achieve a social change in childhood and the education. He also began to relate to the world of Freemasonry.

Youth and activism

The works of rousseau They were banned by the Swiss government, which feared that the population would begin to doubt the authority of political power or the Church, and an order was even issued to imprison the author. One of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's former teachers, along with another group of philosophers, founded the Helvetic Society. The objective was to defend the values ​​of freedom that championed the work of Rousseau and to achieve changes in the Constitution.

Pestalozzi became involved in this new group, writing for the newspaper Der Erinnerer, associated with said group. Through his articles, Johann Heinrich made public different cases of corruption and prevarication. They accused him of helping one of the members of the Helvetic Society to escape, and this earned him being imprisoned for several days. The newspaper was closed down for being considered radical and dangerous.

Thanks to these performances, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi began to earn enmities between very important personalities of the political scene, which cut short his plans to carve out a career in the legal world. This made him draw up a new plan, totally different.

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farm creation

Pestalozzi decided to follow in the footsteps of a fellow member of the association and get hold of an apparently worthless farm to work on as a farmer. The idea was to acquire vacant land and follow the methodology that his friend, Johann Rudolf Tschiffeli would teach him, to turn that land into fully operational farms. He got funding and got his plan rolling.

He took advantage of his land to build a house, called Neuhof. Unfortunately, he would soon realize that farming was impossible on the land, and he lost the funding. As an alternative, he thought it would be a good idea to raise sheep to get into the wool business. During this time he also married Anna Schultthess, with whom he would have his only child, Jean-Jacques, who suffered from epilepsy.

Financial problems were drowning Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and in this situation he was an idea occurred that could solve both his situation and that of many children who suffered from the poverty. He transformed his property, Neuhof, into an industrial school. The project seemed to start off on the right foot, even obtaining financing, but after a few years it had to close, because it was financially unfeasible to continue.

literary projects

Completely ruined, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi he went on to focus on his literary career. He began with a work of aphorisms called "The Night Hours of a Hermit", which he published anonymously in the magazine Die Ephemerides, by his friend Isaac Iselin. It was not very successful, initially. But then he thought of using all the knowledge about peasant life that he had known together with his grandfather, and he captured them in a series of four volumes of the work entitled "Leonardo and Gertrudis".

In these books, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi represents a teacher, a clergyman, a housewife and a politician in four characters, as representatives of society, and deals with the moral values ​​that the housewife instills in her children and how the rest of the characters try to emulate them in their respective fields. The first volume had a great impact, but this was not the case with the rest of the publications.

He continued with that line, publishing "Christopher and Elizabeth", a work in which these characters had a series of dialogues in which the theme revolved around corruption. He also worked as an editor in a weekly, but unfortunately it closed its doors shortly after starting the collaboration.

Already in the year 1794, on a trip to Germany in which Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was going to visit his sister, he had the opportunity to interact with a series of personalities such as the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who saw great value in Pestalozzi's ideas regarding education and proposed to write about it. This project took him three years, and materialized in the work "My investigation", on the course of nature in the development of the human race. It was not widely disseminated and marked the end of his literary career.

Career as an educator

After this new failure, the situation of poverty devastated Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and his family. But in the year 1798, an event was going to change the course of his luck. The French Revolution spread his ideas throughout Europe, and this caused the end of serfdom in Switzerland. As a result, Pestalozzi he decided to propose an educational project to the ministry, which after a while materialized into a position as an educator in an orphanage in the city of Stans.

Stans had been invaded by France, and many children had been orphaned, so the creation of this orphanage became necessary and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi took over his role as teacher. It was there that he was finally able to materialize all his great ideas about education in a real project. The quick and satisfactory results from him led to Pestalozzi's promotion to a position of educator of older children.

Since his methodology was undoubtedly good, he found himself in a position to open a new school, this time in Burgdorf, oriented to the children of middle-class families. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was standardizing a methodology that would be highly successful. He took advantage of the occasion to publish How Gertrudis teaches her children, which had a spectacular acceptance. His new work made him so popular that the institute received visits from people from all over the country.

The success was such that the government itself made the Burgdorf school its own, providing Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and his employees a salary paid by the state, and facilitating the publication of textbooks, which resulted in three new works of him However, the political changes that were advancing through Europe through Napoleon, endangered the school. He wrote a document to make the emperor see the importance of this institution, but to no avail.

Transfers from the institute

The new government that was established in Switzerland withdrew his right to use the castle of Burgdorf where the institute was located, offering him in exchange the use of a monastery in Münchenbuchsee. This new institution would have a very short run, since Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi had a bad relationship from the beginning with the director assigned to the school, so he decided to transfer his Institute.

The new location was in Yverdon. Here he decided to establish not one, but several schools, two of them to be able to segregate students based on sex, another to be able to offer an education to deaf-mute students and one more thought for poor children whose families could not afford a high-quality education quality. At this time, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi is appointed president of the Helvetic Society in which he was so active in his youth.

For said society he writes his last two works, where he synthesizes the principles that have moved his educational system. In them he talks about dealing with concrete concepts before abstract ones, working with what is close before what is far away, start with simple exercises before delving into complex ones or always work in a gradual. They are simple principles, but extremely important and their importance reaches our days. Finally, Pestalozzi died in Brugg in February of the year 1827.

Thanks to the immense work of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Switzerland achieved the virtual eradication of illiteracy by the year 1830, long before most developed nations.

Bibliographic references:

• Bowers, F.B., Gehring, T. (2004). Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: 18th century Swiss educator and correctional reformer. Journal of Correctional Education.
• Silber, K. (1974). Pestalozzi: The man and his work of him. Shocken Books Inc.
• Trohler, D. (2014). Pestalozzi and the educationalization of the world. Octahedron.