Tre studi su Pestalozzi I. Pedagogia e rivoluzione

Three Essays on Pestalozzi. I - Pedagogy and revolution. The Revolution exported from France to Europe generated everywhere a political demand for educational reform. The issue of educational reform arises no longer only in relation to the literacy of the working classes and the peasantry in particular, as was the case until the second half of the eighteenth century. With the Revolution the reform of education appears, according to the lesson of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in relation to the problem of the “salvation of nations”. It is against this renewed background of themes that Pestalozzi’s pedagogical experiment arises. Young radical in the Zurich of the 1760s and 1770s, at the end of the century Pestalozzi is swept up in the whirlwind of the Revolution. Awarded the title of honorary citizen of the French Republic, he is engaged in redefining some of the central categories of radical discourse: the people; sanculotism; and liberty. In relation to this new political constellation, Pestalozzi’s pedagogy proposed a vast project for the reform of peasant life, thus laying the foundations for an idea of the popular school as the institute of a renewed community life.