Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 1746-1827
Swiss educationist

Born in Zurich, he devoted his life to the children of the very poor. Believing, like Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the moralizing virtue of agricultural occupations and rural environment, he set up a residential farm school for his collected waifs and strays on his estate at Neuhof in 1774; but owing to faulty domestic organization it had to be abandoned after a five-year struggle (1780), and he wrote his Evening Hours of a Hermit (1780). In 1798 he opened his orphan school at Stanz, but at the end of eight months it had to close. In partnership with others, and under the patronage of the Swiss government, he opened a school of his own at Berthoud. While there he published How Gertrude Educates her Children (1801), the recognized exposition of the Pestalozzian method. In 1805 he moved his school to Yverdon, and applied his method in a large secondary school, but his incapacity in practical affairs resulted in the school's closure in 1825. He wrote Schwanengesang ('Swan Song'), a last educational prayer, in 1826.

Bibliography: Kate Silber, Pestalozzi: The Man and His Work (4th edn, 1976)