Replying to LO28689 --
Dear Organlearners,
In my last reply to Dan Chay < chay@alaska.com >
i promised him:
>Is this not a die-off too? No, it is a creative collapse
>in the full knowing (learning is creating!) what deeds
>like the beneficial, altruistic and even sacraficial it will
>take. Next time I will give an example from history
>(which I do not now have with me) which illustrates
>what I mean.
Greetings dear Dan,
Pestalozzi (1746-1827) was born in Zurich and died in Neuhof. His father
died when he was young and he was brought up by his mother. Already in his
youth he contemplated schemes how to improve the lives of people worse off
than him. He bought in 1769 a piece of waste land and set up a school in
its farmhouse. It was a failure because he knew not enough of farming,
business or schooling. He had to give it up in 1780. But he kept on
pondering how he could uplift the poor from their misery.
He turned to writing. His first novel Leonard and Gertrude was a success.
It told how a devoted woman first reformed her own home out of misery and
then gradually a whole village. It was read avidly through the whole of
the Germanic world. His later novels were all failures. He would have sank
into obscurity once again were it not for the French forces invading
Zwitserland in 1798 after the French Revolution. Conditions were already
miserable for poor people. But the conditions became far worse with the
invasion. (Think of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan when the
Americans invaded them.) Suddenly thousands of young children became
destitute at a scale beyond imagination. It is in such conditions that the
heroic character of Pestalozzi emerged.
He gathered a few dozen of children at the lake of Lucerne, without
parents, a home, food or clothes and began reclaiming them. He found an
abandoned convent where he cared for them. He was their only anchor in
life and nobody even dared to help him. Here he began to teach them for a
better life. Here is what he did it in his own words.
"I was from morning till evening the only one in their midst. Everything
which was done for their body or soul came from me. Every assistance,
every help in need, every teaching which they received cam immediately
from me. My hand lay in their hands, my eye rested in their eyes, my tears
flowed with theirs and my laughter accomplished theirs. They were out of
the world and I was with them. Their soup was mine and I drank with them.
I had no housekeeping, no friend and no servants around me; I had them
alone. Were they well, I stood in their midst; were they ill I were at
their side. I slept in the middle of them. I was the last in night to go
to bed and the first to rise up in morning. Even in bed I taught them and
prayed until they were fast asleep. They wanted it to be so."
Here was a man who gave everything up to care for the body and souls of
those who could not do it self. It lasted for a year. But then the
victorious French reclaimed the building for their own needs. What
Pestalozzi did meant nothing for them. They evicted him and the children
under his care.
In 1801 Pestalozzi put to writing what he had learned in that period in
the book How Gertrude teaches her Children. It gripped the whole Germanic
world once again. He advised teachers to move from the simple to the
complex. Do not deny sensations for they lead to consciousness.
Consciousness then led to speech in the mother tongue, best exposed by
dialogue. The next step is to commit that speech to writing. Thereafter
follows drawing, numbering, measuring, reasoning and then imagination.
In 1805 he moved to Yverdun and at the school there worked steadily at his
task. What Faraday did for the material sciences, he did for the abstract
sciences. He uncovered what no one deemed possible -- how to learn
authentically. Most of those who were interested in education came to
visit him. They were astounded. The great Wilhelm von Humboldt said of him
that never before there was a teacher like him.
Pestalozzi knew through self doing in love much what involves heroism -- a
creative collapse. Let us bow to the greatness of Pestalozzi walking in
the footsteps of his Master.
Dan, it may seem that i have made a preposterous claim about Pestalozzi.
But i am writing an essay called "History of uncovering the act of
learning" in which it hopefully it will become clear just how remarkable
Pestalozzi's accomplishment was.
With care and best wishes,
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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