Education History: Thinking Through Chapter 1

Been reading about about Pestalozzi – specifically, The Educational Ideas of Pestalozzi by John Alfred Green, W.B. Clive, University tutorial press, ltd. 1905. Following my own rules, I did read a bunch of Pestalozzi before reading about him (other than basic biographical details, which I think it’s always good to know when approaching an unfamiliar writer from an unfamiliar time and place). As I mentioned in my reviews of How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, Pestalozzi is all but incomprehensible, as even his most famous followers acknowledged more or less accidentally, when they said that you’ve got to work with Pestalozzi for a while before you start to understand what he’s up to. Certainly, based on my reading, it would be impossible to set up a Pestalozzian school base solely on what he’s written about his approach. Or rather, one could set up pretty much any school and find something in Pestalozzi that justifies slapping the Pestalozzian label on it.

That said, what does come through in what I’ve read of his so far:

• the centrality of the teacher;
• the primacy of ‘sense experiences’;
• the need for constant management of the student;
• the need for predigestion of the materials to be taught, so that they can be presented in a teacher-approved manner;
• distrust of the student’s initiative: a student who thinks he’s mastered material without the mediation of a teacher will become stuck up and unmanageable.

Fichte looks to Pestalozzi as the inspiration of his proposed universal reform of education, although, in his Addresses he is very vague about the details. The only specifics: Fichte rejects Pestalozzi’s goal of helping the student find an appropriate place in society as quickly as possible by focusing on reading, writing, math, and completing tasks under supervision, and instead substitutes his famous goal of rendering the student incapable of thinking anything the (state trained and certified) teacher doesn’t want him to think. Further, Pestalozzi specifically favored children at least initially learning from their own mothers in the home – he titles his magnum opus ‘How Gertrude Teaches He Children’ after all – while Fichte wants the child completely removed from home for the duration of his education, in order to prevent entirely parental education of children.

But are these really so different? In each case, the teacher is directing the student toward a goal, managing his experiences so that, for example, he is prohibited from thinking he’s achieved anything outside the mediation of his teacher. Both Fichte and Pestalozzi believe the child’s fulfillment lies in filling a role in society; Fichte simply believes the state is the authority that decides what the state needs the child to do. It’s unclear – a recurring theme – how much influence Pestalozzi expected his teachers to exert on the career choices of his students, buty given the level of control his teachers are expected to impose, one could argue ‘a lot’. One could also argue ‘none’ – that’s the Pestalozzian Rorschach test in operation.

What remains, and remains so far undiscussed in the sources I’ve read, is the age-segregated classroom. Nothing I’ve read in Pestalozzi suggests this is essential to him, although there’s a lot of stuff that might be called ‘age-appropriate’ activities today. But for Fichte, the first order of business is to find some means of establishing the teacher as the sole authority in the kid’s life, replacing family, village and any god other than the state. The age-segregated classroom is a work of evil genius in this regard.

In a modern school, certain lessons, certain rules must be mastered before the putative instruction can begin:

• You will be assigned a group. You have no input on this assignment.
• You will stay with your assigned group at all times.
• You will do whatever the teacher tells you to do as part of that group.
• Your success at school will be judged by how well you stay with your assigned group.
• Any activities undertaken as an individual, e.g., going to the bathroom at non-specified times, must be pre-approved by the teacher.
• Mere mastery of the putative materials being taught does not exempt you from the group.

As John Taylor Gatto says, the real success of modern schooling is that we can’t even imagine doing it any other way. But of course, before 1800, rigid age-segregation was not the norm anywhere outside a military school. An ancient Greek boy attended the local ephebia at about age 16, because part of the original purpose of the ephebia was to prepare boy to be soldiers. The Greeks, not being insane, wanted close approximations of adult males in their armies. Boys tend to get in the way. But in this case, it was more the physical realities of battle than age itself which lead to this division. And so on – what a kid already knew and could do determined how he was educated going forward, not his age in and of itself.

So: Chapter One of the book will have to deal with the insanity of graded classroom instruction. I will lead with stories of people teaching children in all sorts of non-age segregated ways, among family, friends, and neighbors, which is the natural, obvious way to do it. St. Jerome’s advice to Paula; one room schools, choir schools of the Middle Ages. Off the top of my head.

I must try to undo what Gatto mentioned. I must try to get people to understand that there is nothing natural or good about graded classrooms, and much unnatural and evils.

Should be fun.