Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss educator whose views profoundly affected the history and philosophy of education. Pestalozzi's father, a clergyman in Zürich, then the most lively center of awakening German culture and literature, died when his son was six years old. Pestalozzi's profound piety, the desire to love and to be loved, his compassion for suffering—and his extreme sensitivity and awkwardness in dealing with the practical affairs of life—were due largely to the exclusive upbringing of his pious mother.

After graduating from the Collegium Humanitatis (a secondary school), he turned to agriculture and experimented at his newly acquired farm, the Neuhof, with a school for the children of the neighboring farmers that was to combine elementary education with practical work. The Neuhof enterprise was a failure, financially as well as educationally, but it brought him the insights that...