Pessos, a small black stone which held the place of a statue in the temiile of Ci/bele, the great goddess of the Phrygians. It was probably an aerolite, having been represented as falling from heaven. See Gardner, Faiths of the World, ii, 651.
Pestalozzi, Joii.vnn Heinrich, the father of mod- ern educational ideas, or, as he has been aptly called, "the schoolmaster of the human race," was one of the greatest philanthropists of the world. He was born at Zurich, Switzerland, Jan. 12, 1746. His father, a phy- sician, died when Pestalozzi was about six years old; but his mother, with the assistance of some relatives, procured him a good education. He studied divinity, but soon tired of it, and turned aside to fit himself for the profession of law ; but, instead of entering either the clerical or legal ranks, he married, at the age of twenty- three, the daughter of a merchant of Zurich, purchased a small landed property which he named Neuhof, and went to reside upon it and cultivate it. AV'hy this man of scholarh' tastes and pious life should so suddenly turn his attention to farming was a njystery to many of his friends. But Pestalozzi himself had afar-reaching pur- pose in this step. The reading of Kousseau's Entile had drawn his attention to the subject of education. He had long noticed the degraded and unhappy condition of the laboring classes, the great mass of tlie population, and he was seeking — led by motives of Christian be- nevolence and sympathy — to provide means best suited to promote tlieir elevation. He finally became con- vinced that by means of a sound education a remedy might be found for the many evils by which society was infected. He regarded their ignorance as the prin- cipal cause of their misery, and thought tliat b}- a prop- er and advantageous use of their political rights they could be raised from the state of stupidity and brutality into which they had sunk, and given devoted hearts and manly intellects. He proposed to effect this result not
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simply by instruction, but by a judicious blending of industrial, intellectual, and moral training. He right- ly saw that it was not enough to impart instruction to children, but that their moral nature should be partic- ularly cared for, and habits of activity instilled into them through agricultural and industrial labors. To his way of thinking, the great drawback on tlie side of industry was the weakening of the natural affections and the development of the mercantile spirit, without having the moral resources and consolations afforded by rural occupations. For this reason he preferred to withdraw to a farm, there to gather about him the chil- dren of the poor, and to foster in the coming men and women the taste for domestic life and the sentiment of human dignity. He began in 1775 to carry his views into practice by turning his farm into a farm-school for instructing the children of the poorer classes of the vi- cinity in industrial pursuits, as well as in reading and writing. He was, however, unsuccessful in his opera- tions, and at the end of two years his school was broken up, and he became involved in debt. In order to relieve himself from his encumbrances, and to procure the means of subsistence, he produced his popular novel of Lienkanlt unci Gertrud (Basle, 1781, 4 vols.), in which, under guise of depicting actual peasant life, he sought to show the neglected condition of the peasantry, and how by better teaching they might be improved both morally and physically. It was read with general interest, and the Agricultural Society of Berne awarded him for it a gold medal, which, however, his necessities compelled him at once to sell. It was followed by Christoph und Else (Zurich, 1782). During 1782-83 he editeil a periodical entitled Das Schweizer-Blatt fur das Volk, which was collected in 2 vols, and published as Nachforschungen iiber den Gang der Natur in der Entiuickelung des Men- sckengeschleckts (Zurich, 1797). He wrote also other works of less importance. Not until 1798 did Pesta- lozzi's opportunity come again to test his theories by practice. In this year he established, with the assist- ance of the Swiss Director}', a school for orphan chil- dren in a convent which had belonged to the Ursuline nuns at Stanz, in the canton of Unterwalden. Stanz had been sacked by a French army, and the children were such as were left without protectors to wander about the country. In the bare and deserted con- vent he had, without assistance and without books, to teach about eighty children of from four to ten years of age. He was thus driven Jjy necessity to set the elder and better-taught children to teach the j'ounger and more ignorant ; and thus struck out the monitorial or mutual-instruction system of teaching which, just about the same time, Lancaster was under somewhat similar circumstances led to adopt in England. In less than a year Pestalozzi's benevolent labors were sudden- ly interrupted by the Austrians, who converted his or- phan-house into a military hospital. But the feasibil- ity of his theory had become so evident that he could no longer be discouraged or turned back by any obsta- cle. He promptly removed to Burgdorf, eleven miles north-east from Berne, and there founded another school of a somewhat higher grade, and produced his educa- tional works, Wie Gertrud Hire Kinder lehrt (Berne, 1801) -.—Buch der Miitler (ibid. 1803), and some others. In 1802 the people of the canton of Berne sent him as their deputy to an educational conference summoned by Bonaparte, then first consul, at Paris. His establishment at Burgdorf was prosperous, became celebrated, and was resorted to from all i)arts of Europe by persons interest- ed in education ; some came for instruction, others for inspection. In 180-1 he removed his establishment to Munchen-Buchsee, near Hofvvyl, in order to operate in conjunction with Fellenberg, who had a similar estab- lishment at the latter place; but the two educational reformers disagreed, and in the same year Pestalozzi removed to Yverdun, in the canton of Vaud, where the government appropriated to his use an unoccupied cas- tle. This establishment became even more prosperous