oj Edinburgh , Session 1870 - 71 . 
321 
people’s school when you have got it established? On this point 
the experience of Prussia is not uninteresting. The elementary 
school in Prussia was, in its origin, a catechetical instruction ; it 
was a repetition by some subordinate ecclesiastic of the Sunday 
catechising of the pastor. Gradually the teaching of reading and 
singing was added, but only as a means to a religious end, namely, 
reading the Bible and singing in church. By the middle of the 
eighteenth century more secular elements of instruction were grafted 
on ; and Frederick II., in 1763, orders that “the people shall be 
Christianly brought up in reading, praying, chanting, writing and 
arithmetic, catechism, and Bible history. The Prussian code of 
1794 lays down that schools and universities are “ institutions of 
the State.” It prescribes the teaching of religion as a part of 
useful knowledge, and as tending to make good and obedient 
citizens. At the end of the last century the Prussian elementary 
schools appear to have been easy-going mechanical institutions, 
with nothing about them specially to call for remark. But an 
immense ferment in relation to them was preparing, a passionate 
upstirring of the whole question of popular education, endless 
theory and counter theory, action and reaction, the history of 
which constitutes a whole literature, and the effects of which have 
all been felt upon the character of the Prussian Volksschulen , 
which now remain like the fossilised result and record of the 
storms of the past. 
All this commotion rose from the fervid brain and heart of one 
man, Henry Pestalozzi, a Swiss, who was born at Zurich in 1746. 
Pestalozzi was a loving enthusiast; of a most unpractical turn of 
mind ; always embarking in visionary schemes for the good of 
others; of a large and noble heart, living a life of poverty and 
struggle himself, but always spending his whole strength in efforts 
for the welfare of the poor. He lived to be eighty-one years old, 
and long before his death he had been publicly visited and 
honoured by emperors, kings, and statesmen, and had seen his 
ideas warmly received and widely spread over the continent of 
Europe. Pestalozzi was much influenced in early youth by reading 
the “Emile” of Rousseau. In 1780 and subsequent years, after 
many failures in life, he began to bring out books on education. 
The chief of these were, “ The Evening Hour of a Hermit,” con- 
