Pestalozzi saw education as a means of social reform but not solely as an aijel't-orating influence. His plea was, in truth, an appeal for equality - it was a duty of society to develop each man's abilities to the full. This could only be accomplished by equipped schools, high moral standards, and sound teaching methods. Moreover, the education itself should be such as would prepare the individual for his future place in life, not in the sense of class distinction but in the sense that he should be able to find satisfaction in his occupation and in his domestic life. Pestalozzi envisaged early education as vocational. He let the school reflect the best of family atmosphere to which its pupils belong. Presumably if the child gains a good general education closely related in pleasures, duties, responsibilities, and activities to a good home training and based on association with the social environment, not on segregation from it, then he will become a fully developed, balanced, disciplined adult who will easily move out from his native society should his skills and abilities make it possible.
In On Infants' Education Pestalozzi describes the object of education as:
"not a perfection in the accomplishments of the school, but fitness for life; not the acquirement of habits of blind obedience and of prescribed diligence, but a preparation for interdependent action" and, moreover, he emphasises in the same work:
"We have no right to shut out the child from the development of those faculties also, which we may not for the present conceive to be very essential for his future calling or station in life".
His own repeated efforts to draw to him under the same four walls children of all classes, indicate that his various statements on this topic were not mere rhetoric. He truly believed that the rich child missed much of the best of family education by being excused family chores and responsibilities, and also by being so often put in the charge of unimaginative nurses and tutors instead of receiving the best kind of maternal training. In his school-family he aimed to reproduce those conditions of precept and practice, example and experience, which he considered to be the most likely to fulfil the right of all people to:
"a general diffusion of useful knowledge, a careful development of the intellect and judicious attention to all the faculties of man, physical, intellectual and moral".
This emphasis on physical education is reminiscent of Locke and perhaps came to Pestalozzi through Rousseau, but it cannot be doubted that his own health problem and his experience with the orphans of Netthof and Stanz taught him far more than any writings. He was not content to let Nature educate at her own speed in any sphere of development, so that although he accepted Rousseau's standards of simplicity in dress and living conditions, he included in his scheme a very considerable element of physical exercises allied to modern gymnastics, and in addition allowed much time for free out-of-door activities. Specialists accept his ideas as penetrating deeply into the nature of physical education. He aimed to develop strength and control of the limbs through exercises and, in addition, grace through rhythmic movement.
"Exercises may be devised for every age and for every degree of bodily strength, however reduced,"
he wrote, and although this viewpoint has not always been fashionable, it is not disdained today by the boxer, the ballet dancer, the typist and many other specialists in arts and occupations demanding some physical dexterity.
Not the least among his educational aims in physical training, in addition to the remedial and preventive aspects, is its contribution to moral education comparable to that he attributes to music, indicating, perhaps, that he was not entirely forgetful of his early reading of Plato. He writes of gymnastics as promoting cheerfulness, comradely spirit, frankness, courage and perseverance, and he describes music as striking at the root of "every bad or narrow feeling, of every ungenerous or mean propensity, of every emotion unworthy of humanity".
He emphasised the role of the mother - she awakens in her child feelings of love, confidence, gratitude and obedience. Her constant loving care, her firmness, her consistency and her simple teaching about God. The child gains feelings of security and confidence combined with habits of obedience both to her and to the father. The great task of the educator is to preserve these virtuous feelings and habits:
"Here you must not trust nature; you must do all in your power to supply the place of her guidance by the wisdom of experience".
Thus life itself forms the beginning of moral education, and its continuation, through the development of the will to goodness, should also be based on real experience and not on mere homilies and sermons, for
"words alone cannot give a real knowledge of things . . . will cannot be aroused by mere words".
Children need to have noble sentiments "engrafted on their hearts" by example and by experience. This is clearly an adaptation of Plato's method of habituation to goodness, but there is a greater emphasis on the need to give love and kindness to children to make unceasing efforts to broaden their sympathies, and to develop their good judgement and tactfulness. Pestalozzi emphasises the nature of moral control and the formation of personal standards.
The basic elements of intellectual education are comparable to those of physical and moral education although Pestalozzi suggests that the natural laws for the development of human powers are not the same for the heart, the mind and the body. In fact, the different needs of each side of man's nature account for the basic principle of Pestalozzi's method, best indicated by an extract from an address he gave on his seventy-second birthday:
"Each of our moral, mental, and bodily powers must have its development based upon its own nature and not based upon artificial and outside influences. Faith must be developed by exercises in believing and cannot be developed from the knowledge and understanding only of what is to be believed; thought must grow from thinking, for it cannot come simply from the knowledge and understanding of what is to be thought or the laws of thought; love must be developed by loving, for it does not arise merely from a knowledge and understanding of what love is and of what ought to be loved; art also, can only be cultivated through doing artistic work and acquiring skill, for unending discussion of art and skill will not develop them. Such a return to the true method of Nature in the method of the development of our powers necessitates the subordination of education to the knowledge of the various laws which govern those powers".
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