Pestalozzi and the Educationalization of the World

D. Tröhler

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137371829
• eBook ISBN: 9781137346858
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi transformed education theory and practice worldwide. Daniel Tröhler connects Pestalozzi's work to its context in Europe's late 18th- and early 19th-century republican movement, offering readers a way to understand the sociopolitical significance of education and its central role in the development of modern societies.

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The Educationalization of Social Problems Around 1800

Abstract: Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi is the star of a specific cultural shift that occurred around 1800 and that can be labeled an “educational turn.” This educational turn describes a development that occurred in Northern and Western Europe as well as in the United States of America, when variously perceived problems came to be interpreted as educational problems. This phenomenon, the educationalization of social problems, became discursively established towards the end of the eighteenth century and then led to the foundation of the modern school in the context of the nation-states during the nineteenth century. Today, it continues unabated and finds expression in the framework of the World Bank, the United Nations, UNESCO, and the OECD. It is based on the premise that the central problems of the present and planning for the future are educational concerns.

Tröhler, Daniel. Pestalozzi and the Educationalization of the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137346858.

For more than 150 years, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) was held to be the founding father of the modern school. Even if this conviction is no longer shared as often and as unreservedly today, it has persisted largely unscathed in our collective memory. In this collective memory there is in addition to Pestalozzi a forerunner, also from Switzerland: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) of Geneva. Rousseau is seen as responsible, in his novel Emile (Rousseau, 1762/1979), for revolutionizing educational thinking through an extensive orientation toward the child and the child’s needs, whereas Pestalozzi is thought to have channeled this previously untamed revolution into modern schooling and to have disseminated it throughout Europe.

Starting in the late nineteenth century, this genesis of modern education and the modern school was told to many generations of teachers all over the world, and it was repeated in various forms in the textbooks used in teacher education. The narrative is incorrect, however, as more recent research has amply documented. In the case of Rousseau, the question has been raised again and again (and as early as in 1766; see Cajot, 1766)—and even more often in Rousseau’s anniversary year of 2012—as to how revolutionary the Genevan actually was or whether he was not (also) a great compiler and plagiarist. As for Pestalozzi, it is now well-documented that he did not develop any theory of the modern school and did not head any educational institution resembling the modern school, that he did not play any crucial role in the development of the modern curriculum, and that he did not develop any learning method that proved to be practically implementable. And particularly important: Pestalozzi’s central focus was certainly not on professional teachers but instead on mothers, in their loving relationship with the small child. Is it not then a paradox that the discipline “education,” developed for teacher education since the mid-nineteenth century, was based so strongly on Pestalozzi? This book will deal with this question by narrating an intellectual biography of Pestalozzi against the background of a dramatically changing political, social, economic, and intellectual context that caused the need for an educational turn. Hence, the biography will not start with the birth of the hero but with an interpretation of a time that is (too) often simplified using the label “Enlightenment.”

1.1 Pestalozzi and the educational turn

This book is about the paradox that education was developed as a discipline for teacher education starting in the mid-nineteenth century and was based strongly on Pestalozzi and his educational theory that focused on mothers. It defends the results of more recent research showing that Pestalozzi should not be called the founder of the modern school, at least not in the way that the great narrative would have us believe. It is true that the modern schools in Europe were established during Pestalozzi’s lifetime or shortly thereafter: in the Netherlands and in Denmark there was a new, pioneering school law in 1814, in Norway in 1827, in Switzerland from 1831 on, in France in 1833, in Belgium and Sweden in 1842, and in Luxembourg in 1843, and the other European countries followed over the next decades. These modern schools were very different from the schools of the Ancien Régime; they were state-run, public, and much more secular than the old schools of the eighteenth century. They tried to reach all children to educate them to become citizens, and they had teachers that had been trained for their occupation by the state. The transition from the old to the new school did not take place from one day to the next, of course, but towards the end of the nineteenth century, the public school was a firmly established part and an important pillar of the nation-states. General compulsory school attendance was known, the school was usually free of cost, and its actors, the teachers, were prepared for their occupation systematically and certified accordingly. In their teacher training they acquired knowledge of the school subjects and the art of teaching them and dealt with pedagogy and education, and as appointed teachers they possessed a growing self-awareness with which they put forward their interests in institutions, associations, and labor unions. This successful development was accompanied by an incontestable revered figure to whom one could always successfully refer: Pestalozzi.

But why is the narrative of Pestalozzi as founding father of the modern school an untrue story? And if it is a false account, why is it worth dealing with Pestalozzi? Pestalozzi indeed had an important role in the founding of the modern school—however, not as founder and developer but instead as a figurehead within a sweeping cultural change that can be called the educational turn. This educational turn describes an evolution that occurred in Northern and Western Europe as well as in the United States of America between the middle of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth century, when variously perceived social problems came to be interpreted as educational problems. This phenomenon, the educationalization of social problems, became discursively established towards the end of the eighteenth century and then led to the foundation of the modern school in the context of the nation-states in the nineteenth century. Today, this phenomenon continues unabated and finds expression in the framework of the World Bank, the United Nations, UNESCO, and the OECD. It is based on the premise that the central problems of the present and planning for the future are in fact basically educational concerns.

Not only did Pestalozzi not found the modern school, but he also was not the initiator of this cultural transformation process that educationalized the world. He can be seen as a major intensifier or catalyst of this phenomenon in his time. As the result of a set of contextual conditions—dramatic economic, political, and ideological events such as the American Revolution and the French Revolution—and specific personal characteristics, Pestalozzi became the unsurpassed standard-bearer of this transformation, reinforcing its fundamental assumptions. Undoubtedly he is the star of this cultural upheaval; through charisma, propaganda, and great rhetoric he anticipated the latent needs of times that had become uncertain around 1800 and made educational promises that seemed to reassure people. These people were monarchs, aristocrats, senior officials, philanthropists, and ambitious parents in half of Europe and the New World. A short time later, when the modern elementary schools were in fact founded following the developments after the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), they did not rely on Pestalozzi’s educational model, but they followed the educational reflex that Pestalozzi had propagated and reinforced so incomparably—namely, the reflex of interpreting social problems as educational problems. In this sense—and in this sense only—they were all Pestalozzians, and the teachers who through the course of the nineteenth century advanced from a rather ostracized to a respected occupation were not afraid to praise Pestalozzi successfully as their patron saint. Pestalozzi was the discursive hinge that connected teachers with persons in positions of political and cultural power, and that successfully lent legitimacy to teachers’ demand for higher status and better working conditions.

1.2 The prehistory of the educational turn¹

Up to the mid-eighteenth century, it was not at all “normal” to interpret perceived problems educationally—that is, to assign the solving of the problems to educational practice. Of course, there had always been conceptions of the political or social organization of people in which education played an important role. For example, Plato’s Republic (Plato, 1966) can be read as the first great political model in which the achievement of social justice is tied to a detailed educational program. Still, up to the mid-eighteenth century there was no educationalized culture at all to speak of—that is, a culture that always viewed the big problems and challenges (also or even mainly) as educational problems and challenges. But what then made this educational turn possible?

This development had very specific requirements that had little to do with education; the increased educational reflexes were reactions to problems originally perceived as non-educational. What was decisive for the educational turn were changes in the way that people thought about two fundamental things in interpreting their lives: first, how people imagined history and development, and second, how they viewed the relation between money and politics. Both of these transformations, which remain important today, occurred around 1700 and replaced older perceptions and core notions that went back to the ancient world. They indicate the transformation of the early modern period in history to the modern period. The first of these transitions (history and development) was initiated in France, the second (money and politics) in England.

The transformations in the perception of history and development were initiated in France at the court of the King Louis XIV in Versailles, when the ancients’ way of looking at things came under attack in the “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.”² Whereas up to the end of the seventeenth century, time and thus history had been seen, in analogy to the seasons, as an eternal cycle of events, in the eighteenth century a linear way of thinking (“progress”) came to prevail that was oriented towards the future and in which outcomes were open (DeJean, 1997). At first, around 1680, this optimism applied only to progress in the sciences, but soon after, progress was seen also as a social and political program: Humanity would develop progressively towards peace, justice, and bliss, and political conditions that impeded this progress had to be violently destroyed. This was the justification for the French Revolution of 1789. The most impressive interpretation of this rational thinking on progress is probably that in Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (Condorcet, 1795/1796) by Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who was a philosopher, mathematician, politician, and educational reformer.³ According to Condorcet’s interpretation, the French Revolution was the gateway to humanity’s final great developmental epoch.

The second transformation (and second condition of the educational turn) has to do with the relation of money to politics, which changed towards the end of the seventeenth century at first in England. Up to that time, an ideal had prevailed in Europe according to which dispassionate reason was supposed to guide politics. At the same time, the commercial economy had been considered to be something “lower” or “baser,” because it was accused of diverting attention and interest away from the common good and exposing people to the passionate pursuit of profit: in this ideology, calm, rational governing was seen as good and passion-driven money-making as bad. But around 1700 and to the present day, this system of reasoning is lost, not least because the commercial economy had become a social fact and actually important for politics. This ideological bias—the idea of dispassionate reason as a condition of good politics and the actual importance of the discredited commerce, connected to passions—had to be solved in order to legitimate the systems of political power, which depended more and more on money (for instance, for covering the rising costs of the massive expansion of administration or for the standing armies with their mercenaries).⁴

The problem to redefine the relation between money and politics was, in other words, the great financial difficulties of the European rulers, especially the English, who experienced a deep financial crisis towards 1700.⁵ If the Kingdom of Great Britain⁶ wanted to remain stable at home and be seen as a global power abroad, it had to obtain money. With no public funds (taxes) available, Scottish trader William Patterson (1658–1719)⁷ proposed that wealthy private citizens found an association of subscribers (creditors).⁸ Based on this initiative, the famous Bank of England was founded in 1694 and with it a successful and enduring system of public underwriting that from then on made it possible for individuals and companies to invest in the state (Dickson, 1970) and to meld money (private interest) and politics.⁹

The two transformations—first, notions of progress and the future replacing the theory of historical cycles, and second, the abolishing of the dividing line between politics and capital—did not only find enthusiastic supporters, they also gave rise to existential uncertainty, critique, and debates. One of these debates in the end led to the educational turn mentioned above in which Pestalozzi would play an impressive role.

1.3 Commercial progress vs. classical ideal of virtue

The most important reaction to the capitalization of politics, in a world that seemed all of a sudden to be driving progressively into an open and unknown future, was the revival of a political ideal that in research is called classical republicanism or civic humanism. This political ideal had roots in ancient political philosophy, was brought back to life in humanism in Florence around 1500, and formed the political background of the Reformation in Zurich after 1520. Later, this ideal shaped the founding of the Commonwealth of England (1649–1660)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Educationalization of Social Problems Around 1800
• 2  Zurich Around 1750: Economic and Cultural Boom and Revolutionary Activities
• 3  The Development and Early Fate of a Republican Revolutionary
• 4  The Christian Republic, Enlightenment, and Coercive Education
• 5  The American and the French Republics, German Idealism, and the Principle of Inwardness
• 6  The Helvetic Republic and the Discovery of the Method
• 7  Propaganda and Institutional Success
• 8  European Demands for New Education: Political, National, Private
• 9  Pestalozzis Charisma, a Guarantee of Success and a Problem
• 10  Public Critique, Restoration, Pestalozzis Lonesome End, and the Beginning of Modern Mass Education
• 11  The Educationalized World and the Internationalization of the Cult of Pestalozzi
• 12  Pestalozzi, or an Ambiguous Legacy in Education
• References
• Index