Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, the most important educational thinker of the Enlightenment, was born in Zurich on 12 January 1746 to Johann Baptist Pestalozzi, a surgeon, and Susanne Pestalozzi, née Hotz. He was descended from an Italian family that had settled in Zurich in the sixteenth century. After his father died in 1751, Pestalozzi experienced a sheltered childhood; he remembered that he was guarded like a sheep that was not allowed to leave the barn; he never met boys of his own age on the street; he knew none of their games or their secrets; he felt awkward among them.

After graduation from the Collegium Humanitas, a Zurich secondary school, Pestalozzi studied theology and then law at the University of Zurich. Influenced by the ideas of Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he became a member of the Helvetic Society, a reformist Swiss political organization. After learning how to run a farm...