“Best Practice” Around 1800. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s Educational Enterprise in Switzerland and the Establishment of Private Pestalozzi Schools Abroad

Abstract

In the wake of the first PISA-survey, experts in education encouraged educational policy to take the successful Finnish school-system as a model. But the temptation to copy successful attempts in education is even older and leads us back right to the beginning of the heated public discourses about the importance of education in the context of the emerging national states. In the midst of this transnational discourse around 1800 was the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827). In his private institutes he tried to apply his pedagogical “method,” promising to teach the children the elementary knowledge easily, quickly, and effectively and at the same time to develop these cognitive competencies in harmony with the physical and moral capacities of the young human, leading eventually to a fully developed intelligent moral person. These promises were very attractive for governments, teachers, and parents from all over Europe and even from the United States.