THE INSTITUTE AT YVERDUN.

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perience in a work which has obtained great celebrity-How Gertrude Teaches her Children.’

In 1802 Pestalozzi, for once in his life a successful and popular man, was elected a member of a deputation sent by the Swiss people to Paris.

On the restoration of the Cantons in 1804, the Castle of Burgdorf was again occupied by one of the chief magistrates, and Pestalozzi and his establishment were moved to the Monastery of Buchsee. Here the teachers gave the principal direction to another, the since celebrated Fellenberg, 'not without my consent,' says Pestalozzi, but to my profound mortification.' He therefore soon accepted an invitation from the inhabitants of Yverdun to open an institution there, and within a twelvemonth he was followed by his old assistants, who had found government by Fellenberg less to their taste than nogovernment by Pestalozzi.

The Yverdun Institute had soon a wide-world reputation. Pestalozzian teachers went from it to Madrid, to Naples, to St. Petersburg. Kings and philosophers joined in doing it honour. But, as Pestalozzi himself has testified, these praises were but as a laurel-wreath encircling a skull. The life of the Pestalozzian institutions had been the love which the old man had infused into all the members, teachers as well as children; but this life was wanting at Yverdun. The establishment was much too large to be carried on successfully without more method and discipline than Pestalozzi, remarkable, as he himself says, for his 'unrivalled incapacity to govern,' was master of. The assistants began each

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to take his own line, and even the outward show of unity was soon at an end. Nothing is less interesting or profitable than the details of bygone quarrels, so I will not go into the great feud between Niederer and Schmid, which in its day made a good deal of noise in the scholastic world, as even less important disputes have done and will do in the world at large. There were, too, many mistakes made at Yverdun. Pestalozzi was mad with enthusiasm to improve elementary education, especially for the poor, throughout Europe. His zeal led him to announce his schemes and methods before he had given them a fair trial; hence many foolish things came abroad as Pestalozzianism, and hindered the reception of principles and practices which better deserved the name. Pestalozzi, too, unfortunately thought that his influence depended on the opinion which was formed of his institution; so he published a highly-coloured account of it, and tried to conceal its defects from the strangers by whom he was constantly visited (see Appendix, p. 311). His highly active imagination,' says Raumer, himself for some time an inmate of the institution, led him to see and describe as actually existing whatever he hoped sooner or later to realise.' The enemies of change made the most of these discrepancies, and this, joined with financial difficulties consequent on Pestalozzi's mismanagement, and with the scandals which arose out of the dissensions of the Pestalozzians, brought his institution to a speedy and unhonoured close.

Thus the sun went down in clouds, and the old

EARLY EDUCATION.

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man, when he died at the age of eighty in 1827, had seen the apparent failure of all his toils. He had not, however, failed in reality. It has been said of him that his true function was to educate ideas, not children, and when twenty years later the centenary of his birth was celebrated by schoolmasters, not only in his native country, but throughout Germany, it was found that Pestalozzian ideas had been sown, and were bearing fruit, over the greater part of central Europe.

PESTALOZZIANISM.

As it seems to the present writer, the worst part of our educational course-the part which is wrong in theory and pernicious in practice-is our instruction of children, say between the ages of seven and twelve. Before seven years old, there is often no formal instruction, and perhaps there should be none. Pestalozzi would have children systematically taught from the cradle; but I cannot help doubting the wisdom, or at least the necessity of this. Nature offers the succession of impressions to the child's senses without any regular order. Art should come to her assistance, says Pestalozzi, and organise a connected series of such impressions. It may well be questioned, however, if the child will be benefited by being put through any course of the kind. Lord Lytton wittily, and in my opinion wisely, applies to this subject the story of the man who thought his bees would make honey faster if, instead of going in

search of flowers, they were shut up and had the flowers brought to them. The way in which children turn from object to object, like the bees from flower to flower, is surely an indication to us that Nature herself teaches at this age by an infinite variety of impressions which we should no more attempt to throw into what we call regular order than we should employ a drill-sergeant to teach infants to walk. Of course I do not mean that there is no education for children, however young; but the school is the mother's knee, and the lessons learnt there are other and more valuable than objectlessons.*

The time for teaching, technically so called, comes at last, and what is to be done then? Let us consider briefly what is done.

There are in education few maxims which are so universally accepted as this-that education is, if not wholly, at least in a great measure, the development of faculties rather than the imparting of knowledge. On this principle alone is it possible to justify the amount of time given by the higher forms in schools and by undergraduates at the Universities to the study of classics and mathematics. In all the attempts which have been made to depreciate these studies no one of any authority has disputed that, if they are indeed the best means of training the mind, they should be maintained in their present monopoly, even though the knowledge acquired were sure to drop off, like the tadpole's tail,' when the scholars

* See, however, some observations of Mr. Herbert Spencer on the other side.-Education, pp. 81 ff.

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entered on the business of life. We are agreed, then, that in youth the faculties are to be trained, not the knowledge given, for adult age. But when we come to childhood we forget this principle entirely, and think not so much of cultivating the faculties for youth as of communicating the knowledge which will then come in useful. We see clearly enough that it would be absurd to cram the mind of a youth with laws of science or art or commerce which he could not understand, on the ground that the getting-up of these things might save him trouble in after-life. But we do not hesitate to sacrifice childhood to the learning by heart of grammar-rules, Latin declensions, historical dates, and the like, with no thought whatever of the child's faculties, but simply with a view of giving him knowledge (if knowledge it can be called) that will come in useful five or six years afterwards. We do not treat youths thus, probably because we have more sympathy with them, or at least understand them better. The intellectual life to which the senses and the imagination are subordinated in the man has already begun in the youth. In an inferior degree he can do what the man can do, and understand what the man can understand. He has already some notion of reasoning, and abstraction, and generalisation. But with the child it is very different. His active faculties may be said almost to differ in kind from a man's. He has a feeling for the sensuous world which he will lose as he grows up. His strong imagination, under no control of the reason, is constantly at work building castles in the air, and investing the doll or