THE SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.
DR. BIBER has published a very valuable work on the Life of PESTAL!)ZZI, and the System pursued by thin. The materials of information respecting PESTALOZZCS plans lay very wide apart, and were scattered in works by no means remarkable for their practical application or their clearness. Very high-sounding words and :very vague phrases were used for describing the simplest and plain eseview s. •
PESTALOZZI, under the influence which a severe fit of illness had worked on his feelings, combined with some disappointments • in the church and the law, deserted his books, his profession, and the busier haunts of civilized- men. He grew enamoured of a simple and unsophisticated state of nature, and retired to a barren tract of land in the Canton of Berne, which he bought with his slender patrimony and cultivated. With farming he combined some general ideas of education: he felt the spirit of a reformer strong within him, and collected a great number of orphans and 'other poor children from the lowest classes, whom their parents "were glad enough to commit to his care. To these children he gave a sort of practical education—they were taught the arts of manual labour on his farm, and in a cotton manufactory which PESTALOZZI had procured as his wife's dower. The deviser of these benevolent schemes had made bad calculations ; the ex- penses of his establishment greatly exceeded the income, and he was ruined. During the French Revolution, Stanz, the capital of Unterwalden, was pillaged and laid waste. PESTALOZZI was com- missioned by the Government to collect the wandering children and orphan§ in the neighbourhood, and assemble them in a school. He did so : a patriarch amidst a tribe of infants of all ages, but chiefly -of one class, those made destitute by the ravages of war, he was ap- pointed to teach—without books, without assistance, and almost without authority. Obedience he procured by cultivating the af- fections—learning by opening the book of Nature. He taught the hildren's minds by his own, and used any such means of commu- nication as Nature suggested—writing and reading by means of sand, arithmetic by pebbles (calculi), spelling and grammar by repetition,—in short, he taught scholastic subjects as a botanist would teach botany, in the fields ; and here is all the mystery of his .system. Walk into a troop of forty or fifty children, and without other aid than your head and your hands, instruct them—this is the Pestalozzian scheme. Talk with them, play at marbles with them, draw letters in the sand or on the wall, set up a stave .and sing, and make them all join chorus—this is the Pestalozzian system.
The following passage of Dr. BruErt's confirms our views of this much-bepuzzled plan of education.
"While Pestalozzi was thus in matters of discipline reduced to the -primary motive of all virtue, he learned, in the attempt of instructing his children, the art of returning to the simplest elements of all know- ledge. He was entirely unprovided with books or any other means of instruction; and in the absence of both material and machinery, he could not even have recourse to the pursuits of industry for filling up part of the time. The whole of his school apparatus consisted'of himself mand his pupils; and he was, therefore, compelled to investigate what means these would afford him for the accomplishment of his end. The .result was, that he abstracted entirely from those artificial elements of instruction which are contained in books ; and directed his whole atten- tion towards the natural elements, which are deposited in the child's mind. lie taught numbers instead of ciphers, living soimds instead of dead characters, deeds of faith and love instead of abstruse creeds, sub- stances instead of shadows, realities instead of signs. He led the intellect of his children to the discovery of truths which, m the nature of things, they could never forget, instead of burdening their memory with the recollection of words Which, likewise, in the nature of things, they could never understand. Instead of building up a dead mind and -a dead heart, on the ground of the dead letter, he drew forth life to the mind and life to the heart, from time fountain of life within ; and thus established a new art of education, in which to follow him requires, on thepart of the teacher, not a change of system, but a change of state."
The latter part of this sentence is far too fine ; and is a specimen of the manner in which people have been mystified concerning -poor, dear, miserable, old PESTALOZZI, with his simplicity, igno- rance, good-will, fanaticism, and absurdity.
PESTALOZZI at one time joined FELLENBERG. The union could not endure, for PESTALOZZI was the simplest of God's creatures, and would educate his pupils fora comfortable residence in the back set- tlements; whereas FELLENBERG is a man of the world, whose entire views are .directed to the world as it is, with, all its vice and Jolly, wisdom and selfishness. When they separated, PESTALOZZI established himself at St. Yverdon, a place which has since shared the honour of being associated with his name. The site of the castle which was lent to him by the Government, and his manner of teaching geography, are thus loftily described by Dr. Binza- " Next to the mathematical branches., Pestalozzi and his discip!es were Most successful in the adaptation of their method to the knowledge of geography. The spot on whieh they lived was in this respect peculiarly
favourable, as the surrounding Country afforded a standing illustration of the principal outlines in which land and water present themselves on our globe. The town is situated in a valley of from six to eight miles breadth, between the extreme western terrace of the Alps and the first
or eastern ridge of the Jura. In its immediate vicinity there are Vast morasses, which have been laid dry by canals cut in every direction, so
as to render the soil fertile and the air salubriowe The well. cultivated plain is intersected by the river Orbe, which, issuing from time caverns of the Jura, at the distance of no more than a day's joarney from Yverdon, and descending through the romantic scenery of Valorbe, forms a superb cascade, about the middle of its rapid course ; wilure the whole river, swelled in the early part of the summer by the thaw of the mountain- snows into a majestic torrent, precipitates itself with a sudden fall of abbot twenty feet over a mass of steep rocks, and fills dee neighbouring forest with the echo of its never-ceasing thunders. From thence its tur- bulent waves roll on over their rough bed, now expanding over a verdant plain, closely surrounded by an amphitheatre of hills and woods, and now again narrowly hemmed in between crags, which descend perpendicu- lady upon the margin of the floods, and whose corresponding angles tes- tify that, united in one mountain in ages unrecorded, they v;:..re rent asunder on one of those days when 'the foundations of the hills moved and were shaken.' 'A gradual ascent of successive terraces leads from the plain of Yverdon to the eminence from which; at a terrific depth beneath, the Orbe is seen bathing with the foam of his mouth the foot of the im- moveable rocks, and at last working out his passage into the plain, through Which, as if conscious of his triumph, he proceeds in a slow and circuitous course to blend his pale wafers with the deep azure of time lake. This fine landscape in the background is beautifully contrasted by the pros- pect of a longitudinal sheet of water, of from six to ten miles breadth, extending in the direction of N.N.E. to a distance at which the oppo- site shore can only be distinguished in a perfectly clear state of the at- mosphere. The eastern border is formed by several chains of hills, covered with wood, which run parallel to each other, and whose pro- montories, projecting into the lake, break the uniformity of their gloomy aspect. Violent hurricanes, descending from time to time with a sudden gust from the opposite heights of the Jura, where they are generated by conflicting currents of air in the narrow mountain- passes, and stirring up the waters to time very depth, have heaped up the sands on this side, and created extensive shoals, which render navigation even in still weather impracticable. Time opposite shore, on the contrary, presents a fine coast rising in an easy slope from the water's edge, whose laughing vineyards, interrupted only by gay villages, are overshaded by the dark firs with which the Jura is girded round its breast ; while its broad front presents, in the region of the clouds, long tract S of rich pas- ture, with now and then a small hamlet boldly hanging on the brow. To complete the magnificence of this scene, one half of the horizon, from north-east to south-west, is crowned with the snowy pinnacles of the Alps, raised above one another ; and, towering above them all, the giant Mont Blanc, with his everlasting pillars of ice.
"Such was the school in which the pupils of Pestalozzi learned how the earth is fashioned, -and what is the appointed course of the waters. He taught them to watch the gathering up of the morning mists, and the shadows of the early clouds, which, passing over the glittering lake, hid for a moment, as with a veil of dark gauze, its streams of undulating gold; he directed their eyes to the flaming characters with which the sun writes the farewell of day on the traceless surface of eternal snow; he stood listening with them to the majestic voice of nature, when the autumnal gale, riowling on the floods, rolled billow after billow to the bleak shore; he guided their steps to the mountain caves from whose deep recesses the stately rivers draw their inexhaustible supplies. Wherever he found a leaf in the mysterious book of creation laid open, he . gave it them to read ; and thus, within the narrow sphere of their horizon, taught them more of earth and earthborn beings than they could have learned by travelling in the pages of a heavy volume all round the globe."
. Now, though we admire the enthusiasm with which the above pas- sage is written, and sympathize with Dr. BIDER in his description of so magnificent a spot, yet we must observe that this is but a very wild mode of teaching geography. It is the way in which many Swiss teachers instruct their pupils in geology, botany, and mineralogy ; but the subject of the Doctor's rapture seems rather meteorology than geography.
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