Pestalozzi and the Foundation of the Modern Elementary School #265130

When we consider the importance that is attached to popular education in all civilised countries at the present time, we experience a certain difficulty in remembering that it was not always thus, and only a study of history convinces us that this anxiety to raise the lower classes intellectually and morally to a higher level does not date farther back than a century. It is a curious thing that, while France realised the political enfranchisement of citizens at the price of the most frightful of revolutions, in a neighbouring country, Switzerland, which was also to profit largely by this revolution, a man of genius, as earnest as he was modest, worked almost single-handed at the intellectual and moral enfranchisement of the lower classes, and, completing the work of France, immortalised himself by creating, at the price of his repose and happiness, what was until then almost unknown, the education of the lower classes. This man was Pestalozzi.<br><br>We may indeed declare, without fear of exaggeration, that before Pestalozzi popular education did not exist at all. Even in the country where statesmen paid the greatest attention to the subject, in Germany, it was far from existing in reality.