Pestalozzi Fellenberg and British Nineteenth

Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 752e774
www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Pestalozzi, Fellenberg and British nineteenth-century

geographical education
Paul Elliott* and Stephen Daniels
School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Abstract
The impact that Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746e1827) and Philipp Emanuel Fellenberg (1771e1844)
had upon nineteenth-century European geographical education and ideas has long been recognised. Their
influence upon British geography teaching has, however, been little explored, despite the work already done
on the general impact of Pestalozzianism and Fellenbergianism on British education. Using the arguments
of nineteenth-century educational theorists such as Compayre and Spencer, this study argues that
Pestalozzian educationists such as Phillip Pullen and Charles Mayo in England helped to change the
way that geography was taught to middle-class children. A case study of teaching practices at a Pestalozzian
institution in Worksop, Nottinghamshire shows how changes in geographical education were encouraged
by Pestalozzian ideas on the teaching of geography and the relationship of the subject to other disciplines
including topography, natural history and geology.
Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Pestalozzi; Fellenberg; Switzerland; England; Nineteenth century; Geographical education
Introduction
It has been argued that Pestalozzi and his followers ‘completely revolutionised’ the teaching of
geography in Europe and originated its ‘modern treatment . as a school subject’.1 Further, ‘Pes-
talozzi and Fellenberg were the two continental reformers whose theories made the greatest im-
pact on post-war British education’, and that ‘between the 1820s and the 1850s the influence of
[Pestalozzi] . played a major part in the transformation of classroom teaching’. Progressive
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: paul.elliott@nottingham.ac.uk (P. Elliott), stephen.daniels@nottingham.ac.uk (S. Daniels).
0305-7488/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.08.002
P. Elliott, S. Daniels / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 752e774 753
nineteenth-century educationists such as Gabriel Compayré credited the introduction of Rous-

seauism and Pestalozzianism as having changed ‘the general spirit of geographical teaching’ in
Britain.2 Yet no investigation has been undertaken into the impact of Pestalozzian ideas on the
teaching of geography in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. This paper seeks to
remedy this by examining developments in English geographical teaching that were stimulated
by Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian ideas using case studies of individual educationists and educa-
tional institutions.3 With its emphasis upon naturalistic and experiential methods closely related
to the work of Humboldt and Ritter, Pestalozzianism was applied to specific subjects such as
mathematics, geometry, language teaching and geography in textbooks. European educationists
each had their own British champions vying for public recognition and government support
with different groups selecting and adapting different aspects for their own purposes. As British
educationists such as Herbert Spencer noticed, reformers tended to abstract parts of the Pestaloz-
zian system to suit their own purposes without appreciating the overall context, a difficulty rein-
forced by problems of translation.4 Nevertheless, Pestalozzianism and Fellenbergian ideas helped
to transform the teaching of geography in British middle-class institutions by the mid-nineteenth
century.5
English geographical education
Recent studies of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geographical teaching have tended
to emphasise its conservative aspects although there is now more awareness of the multiplicity of
sites and contexts of geographical learning and its relationship to other aspects of Georgian cul-
ture and society.6 Following eighteenth-century practice, a distinction is usually drawn between
the humanistic and mathematical aspects of geographical education, although there was, of course,
much interaction between the two aspects. Deriving from Renaissance practices, humanist geog-
raphy utilised descriptive information concerning nature and society, whilst mathematical geog-
raphy focussed upon the lines and co-ordinates of the sphere. Vaughan has argued that during
the eighteenth century ‘geography was taught as an adjunct of other disciplines’ and that in the
early part of this period ‘when the stress was on mathematical and astronomical aspects of
geography’, it was ‘taught in the commercial and private academies rather than in the public
or grammar schools’. Similarly, Mayhew contends that the humanist framework of geography
‘was at its most powerful’ in the grammar schools and universities. In his view, ‘most of the met-
ropolitan governing classes, to the extent that they learned geography at all in their formal ed-
ucation, did so in sites and in ways which reflected the values of an ancien regime’. Geography
teaching tended to follow rote learning with textbooks such as Gordon’s Geography consisting of
definitions, problems, theorems, paradoxes and basic factual information usually arranged ac-
cording to political divisions.7 By the early nineteenth century many textbooks had become vol-
uminous and expensive compendiums combining astronomical and humanistic information
composed by authors such as William Guthrie and Alexander Adam.8
Social and cultural pressures impacted upon Georgian geographical education encouraging
changes in content, teaching methods and equipment. The European enlightenment public sphere
fostered the development of the autonomous educated individual and emphasised the importance
of scientific, mathematical, geographical and other forms of learning for theological, utilitarian,
754 P. Elliott, S. Daniels / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 752e774
aesthetic, entertainment and other reasons. Aspects of mathematical and humanistic geography
were taught and discussed in many private and public contexts including the many sites associated
with public culture such as coffee houses, taverns, libraries, public lectures, universities and liter-
ary and philosophical institutions stimulated by the naval, military and commercial demands of
the British economy and empire.9 The commercial and cultural demand for geographical educa-
tion was also manifested in the growth of private and domestic education and evident in the de-
mand for geographical textbooks and games. It is also evident in many dissenting academies and
grammar schools which tried to respond to the demand by following the example of commercial
schools in teaching geographical subjects within a biblical and classical framework despite the
curriculum restrictions they faced due to the nature of endowments.10 Different strands of
dialectically dependent enlightenment thought were reflected in various aspects of Georgian
geography, especially the emphases upon both place and particularity and upon progressive univer-
salism inspired by natural philosophy. Guthrie, for instance, considered that geography should
embrace the ‘situation, extent, soil and productions of kingdoms; the genius, manners, religion, gov-
ernment, commerce, sciences and arts’ of all the earth’s inhabitants. Yet he also emphasised that the
subject could not be completely understood without ‘considering the earth as a planet’ and acknowl-
edged the importance of such geographical factors in shaping the character of nations.11
Notwithstanding these important developments in eighteenth-century geographical education,
the subject retained many of its traditional features such as the emphasis upon descriptive
data and rote learning. Following Locke, geographical education tended to begin with the uni-
verse and celestial geography, thereby reinforcing the association between geography, mathemat-
ics and the sciences, especially astronomy. This is evident in textbooks such as Rev. J. Goldsmith’s
(Richard Phillips’) Grammar of General Geography which began with the universe and the solar
system before proceeding to the terraqueous globe. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
another structure for geographical education was beginning to be employed, as Vaughan, Blyth,
Buttimer, and Stoddart have contended. Drawing upon Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Humboldt and
Fellenberg, this emphasised the importance of physical geography and the role of ‘familiarising
the child with its own environment’, based upon distinctive childhood perceptions rather than
those of a notional proto-adult, before ‘considering successively larger areas’.12 It hastened
changes in geographical teaching that were already occurring, as aspects of these philosophies
were interpreted and appropriated by British educational reformers. Inspired by Rousseau, David
Williams, for example, encouraged his pupils to survey their own home and locality before begin-
ning to explore the neighbourhood, district and country so that they proceeded from the local en-
vironment to global and cosmological levels of understanding.13 Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian
methods were innovative in geographical education because of the naturalistic and experiential
methods that they introduced, closely related to the work of philosophers such as Humboldt
and Ritter in re-casting the nature of geography and its relationship with other disciplines.14
Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian educational philosophy
After periods farming, teaching and writing and an ultimately unsuccessful collaboration with
Fellenberg, Pestalozzi settled at Yverdun in 1805. The educational institute he founded there
lasted twenty years, trained many teachers in his methods, and achieved European-wide fame
despite Pestalozzi’s failings as an administrator.15 Fellenberg came from a more patrician back-
ground and was able to use his inherited wealth to support his own agricultural and educational
experiments. His father was an enthusiast for Rousseau’s ideas and encouraged his son in his rev-
olutionary sympathies and interest in the German idealist philosophers, which, however, cooled
considerably as the French threatened Switzerland.16 Neither Pestalozzi nor Fellenberg were iso-
lated figures both being aware of European intellectual culture. Pestalozzi joined the Helvetisch-
Vaterlandische Gesellschaft savant society at Zurich in 1764 whilst Fellenberg was supported by
Genevan intellectuals such as Bonstetten and Pictet. Fellenberg and Pestalozzi were influenced by
Rousseau and developments in agricultural science such as the adoption of new technology, which
were at the heart of enlightenment ideas of improvement and which were to be, along with natural
theology, the most important influences on their work. In Meine Nachforschungen uber Hang der
Natur in der, for instance, Pestalozzi distinguished between natural, social and moral states in
which, under the force of social needs, animal instincts were curbed and controlled, whilst in
reaching the full moral state, partly through the application of the individual will, humans could
rise above the needs and restrictions of the social state.17
The Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian schools forced them to question accepted forms of educa-
tion offered to the poor and devise a practical system driven by utility and the requirements of in-
dustry and agriculture. Essentially, Pestalozzian educational philosophy was underpinned by the
principles of spontaneity, method, harmony, concreteness and sociability. According to the prin-
ciple of spontaneity, mental development allowed the child to move naturally towards self regula-
tion rule driven by its own practical, moral and intellectual imperatives, the psychology of which
could be studied. According to the principle of method pedagogical practices could be designed to
facilitate this process whilst according to that of harmony, intellectual, moral and physical powers
must develop simultaneously fostered by practical and sociable activity. This is evident in Pestaloz-
zi’s concept of Anschauung, often held to be the key to his philosophy and variously translated as
‘intuition’, ‘observation’, ‘concreteness’, or the equivalent of Kant’s synthetic reasoning, by which
the whole of the child’s mind was present even in elementary sensory action, so that perception was
not a discrete function such as it appeared in Lockean or Humean psychology.18
Although there were differences in interpretation, these principles tended to result in an empha-
sis upon two aspects of pedagogy. The first, inspired by Rousseau, was that the early years with
the mother in a loving environment were the most important educational period, the most success-
ful institutions being those able to recreate this atmosphere most closely. Learning had to be child-
centred, the child being regarded not merely as a proto-adult that could absorb information by
rote learning and exposure to facts divorced from discovery, reasoning and experience. Schools
were criticised for their dependence on texts and verbal instruction when education required ex-
perience of objects and practical activity following the stages of childhood development. Children
should not be prematurely forced to learn languages and other information by rote from books
divorced from their everyday experience. Teaching methods had to accord with psychological de-
velopment otherwise they would be ineffective and, at worst, detrimental to future development.
In the Pestalozzian system, the teacher was a guide or facilitator allowing the child to develop
from within rather than forcing it to imbibe decontextualised and abstract facts. Overall, the im-
portance of each child’s individual development was emphasised, with the requirements and meth-
ods of schooling for the wider society e the acquisition of moral and learning qualities, skills and
abilities essential for citizenship e being of paramount importance.19
Fellenberg accepted most of Pestalozzi’s educational philosophy and methods, whilst placing
less emphasis on the development of personal familial bonds. He had no desire to remove social
distinctions and placed greater emphasis upon discipline and control running his school as a busi-
ness and becoming much more successful and better known. Fellenberg shared Pestalozzi’s regard
for Rousseau, the Philanthropists and other educational reformers. Both Pestalozzi and
Fellenberg emphasised the importance of sensory perception and the role of the family in educa-
tion, the latter placing an even greater emphasis on knowledge of local geography and natural
history. Surrounded by idyllic woodland and hills, Fellenberg’s agricultural school at Hofwyl
functioned as a community with a farm and large numbers of artisan staff.20 There was agricul-
tural training for the poor and for the landed gentry and aristocracy partly modelled on the Pes-
talozzian school at Yverdun. The programme consisted of three, three year periods of study, the
first including Greek, animals, plants and minerals; the second, Latin, Roman history, Roman
geography; and the third, modern languages, literature, modern history, geography, the physical
sciences, and chemistry. Mathematics, drawing, music, and gymnastic exercises were taught con-
tinuously.21 Agricultural implements were manufactured such as a horse hoe, a scarifier or
extirpator, straw cutters and a seed drill which impressed the British Board of Agriculture.22
Pestalozzi, Fellenberg and geographical education
For Pestalozzi, geography and natural history were the foundation subjects of history, politics,
the wider sciences and a range of other subjects. From the beginning, the child was led ‘into the
whole circle of Nature surrounding him’. Collecting ‘natural products’ helped him to talk and ‘not
until after the foundation of human Knowledge, (sense impressions of Nature)’ had been fairly
laid did Pestalozzi ‘begin the dull, abstract work of studying from books’.23 Books and newspa-
pers were a rare commodity at Yverdun with history and related subjects being left until pupils
reached the age of eighteen. According to the Pestalozzian method, practical study of the imme-
diate home environment laid the foundations for future geographical study. Although globes, at-
lases and gazetteers had an important function, particularly for older children, observation of the
local environment through drawing, collecting samples of rocks and plants, and agricultural work
was the starting point for geography. Having observed the surrounding country the child would
draw maps and other representations correcting his own mistakes by returning to the places them-
selves: ‘from the very first day’ geography was ‘connected with other sciences, such as natural his-
tory, agriculture, local geology’. By 1808, Pestalozzi taught descriptive geography which began by
‘directing the attention of the boys to the things they can see, and to their geographical relations’
and proceeded to elementary geography and topography. The former was ‘treated from the phys-
ical, mathematical, climatological, and political point of view’. The latter explored systematically
the ‘geographical features of the environment’ and developed ‘their mutual relations’. This pre-
pared the boys for history and politics, ‘the interconnections of states and of peoples, the history
of human culture, and finally for natural science in its wider outlines’. Some of this was learnt
from books whilst ‘statistical geography’, which concerned ‘productions, modes of government
and population’ was learnt from tables.24
One of Pestalozzi’s pupils, the Swiss historian and geographer Louis Vulliemin who was in-
spired by the teaching he received, described how sense impressions and local fieldwork formed
the basis for topographical and descriptive geography as the pupils captured the genius or essence
of a three-dimensional spacial locality before transforming it into two dimensions:
For the first elements of geography we were taken into the open air. They began by turning
our steps to an out of the way valley near Yverdun, through which the Buron flows. This
valley we had to look at as a whole and in its different parts, until we had a correct and com-
plete impression of it. Then we were told . to dig out a certain quantity of the clay, which
was embedded in layers on one side of the valley, and with this we filled large sheets of
paper . When we got back to school, we were placed at large tables which were divided
up, and each child had to build with the clay. On the spot assigned to him, a model of the valley
where we had just made our observations. Then came fresh excursions with more observa-
tions. Thus we continued, until we had worked through from the heights of Montela which
command it entirely, and had made of it a model in relief. Then, and only then, did we turn
to the map, which we had now gained the power of correctly interpreting.25
Fellenberg’s approach was similar and he observed that ‘the geometrical representation of near
objects e the house, the garden, the course of the river, the surrounding country, the mountains
beyond it, taken by approximation in the shape of a map’ was ‘the natural introduction to geog-
raphy’. When the pupils felt sufficiently curious to know more of the world beyond, maps were laid
before them, and the globe and its uses explained. They were made to ‘delineate correctly, from
memory, the shape of continents and seas; and to place and name the principal chains of moun-
tains, the course of rivers, the boundaries of states, their provinces and capitals’, which, in turn,
led to an inquiry into their individual histories and natural productions. Pupils paid ‘about £70
per year’ and lived at chateau about half a mile from residence of Fellenberg and the boys ‘where
the laboratory, cabinets of natural history, and apparatus of natural philosophy, are also fixed’.26
In addition to writing, they applied themselves to ‘geography and history, and to the different
branches of natural history, particularly mineralogy and botany’ in which they took ‘a singular de-
light’. The connection of these with agriculture rendered them ‘most appropriate studies for those
poor children . [being] constantly into contact with the objects of these sciences’. Agricultural
labour and walks around the vicinity provided opportunities for the children to study natural his-
tory. As Brougham found, the children would sometimes step ‘aside from the furrow’ where they
worked ‘to deposit a specimen, or a plant, for his little hortus siccus, or cabinet’. Fellenberg rarely
went ‘into the field where any of them are labouring, without being called upon to decide some con-
troversy that has arisen upon matters relating to mineralogy or botany, or the parts of the chemical
science which have most immediate relation to agriculture’. At the School of Industry, pupils for-
mulated their own questions as well as answering those posed by the masters, ‘sometimes . with
considerable ingenuity’. They drew ‘outlines of maps from memory, exhibiting the principal towns,
rivers, and chains of mountains . correctly from nature, and in perspective, all sorts of machines
for agriculture’ and were ‘very fond of trying chemically the different sorts of soil’ and arranging
them in chemical tables. When employed in digging trenches to irrigate a meadow and whilst ‘di-
recting the water long artificial ridges, and round hills, so as to regulate the fall and distribute the
moisture equally’ they discussed ‘the laws of hydraulics’. When clearing a field of the stones turned
up by the plough, they separated ‘those which are calcareous, in order to be burned into lime’ using
the different geological and chemical tests that they had learned, and were able to ‘point out in the
horizon the particular mountains which have furnished these various fragments’.27
As part of the educational reforms designed to transform the Prussian state in the face of the
Napoleonic threat, attempts were made to introduce Pestalozzian methods including the study of
geography into state politics. The idealist philosopher Ludwig Nicolovius (1767e1839), a disciple
of Kant, friend of Pestalozzi and Councillor of State under Wilhem von Humboldt at the Ministry
of Education in Berlin, introduced Pestalozzian methods into the new teacher training colleges
and elementary schools. Fichte was impressed enough to advise Pestalozzi on his writings and
make the Pestalozzian system the basis of the scheme of national education he detailed in his Dis-
courses to the German Nation.28 Geographical education was reformed along Pestalozzian lines
and associated with changing perspectives of the environment stimulated by agricultural improve-
ment and changing aesthetic values. This is shown by the career of Carl Ritter, one of nineteenth-
century’s most influential geographers, and holder of Germany’s first modern university chair of
geography at Berlin University from 1820.29
Ritter received his early education from one of the Philanthropinists who, following Basedow,
adopted the naturalistic and experiential teaching methods inspired by Rousseau’s Emile. Later,
working as a tutor for the Bethmann-Hollweg family, Ritter visited Pestalozzi’s school at Yver-
don, where he gained direct experience of the geographical teaching methods. On his first visit
in 1807, Ritter saw Johann Georg Tobler (1769e1843) conduct geography lessons which he
praised enthusiastically.30 On his second visit in 1809, Ritter was even more enthusiastic coming
‘once more to my dear Yverdun, where I was received like an old friend of the family’. He was
particularly inspired by Pestalozzi’s piety and the importance of religious ideas in his educational
philosophy. Ritter’s geography was partly inspired by Pestalozzian ideas. Certainly, Ritter
claimed after seeing Pestalozzi that never had he been ‘so filled with a sense of the sacredness
of my vocation, and the dignity of human nature, as in the days that I spent with this noble
man’ from whom he had ‘learned to understand this ‘‘method’’, which, based upon the nature
of the child, develops so naturally and so freely.’ It was now his duty to ‘apply it in the domain
of geography, where Nature has been too long neglected’, and he left Yverdun ‘fully determined’
to keep the promise he made to Pestalozzi to ‘introduce his method into the study of geography’
and reduce ‘the chaos to order’. Pestalozzi provided him with ‘the clue to such a knowledge of the
globe as will satisfy both the mind and heart, reveal the laws of a higher wisdom, and contribute
not a little to the science of physico-theology’. This was despite the fact that in Ritter’s view ex-
pressed decades later, ‘Pestalozzi knew less geography than a child in one of our primary schools’
yet it was from him that he ‘gained my chief knowledge of this science, for it was in listening to
him that I first conceived the idea of the natural method’. Pestalozzi ‘opened the way to me, and I
take pleasure in attributing whatever value my work may possess entirely to him’.31
This inspiration is clear from Ritter’s nineteen-volume Erdkunde or general comparative geog-
raphy, the first volume of which was dedicated to Pestalozzi. Ritter contended that geography as
a discipline could not be studied in isolation from natural or human history and was the founda-
tion for education in the physical and historical sciences. Just as Pestalozzian geography aimed to
liberate the teaching of the subject through experiential methods from its dependency on rote
learning and the dry repetition of material culled from gazetteers and atlases, so Ritter tried to
construct a ‘scientific geography’ that liberated the subject from its enslavement to a ‘lifeless sum-
mary of facts about countries and cities’. Both philosophers were inspired by natural theology and
engagement with scientific empiricism to recast the subject. Ritter’s teleological geography was
grounded in a living picture of the whole land with its natural and human features, recognising
the essential intercourse of culture and nature, history and geography.32 This gave his geography
an emphasis on regional differentiation that was clearly inspired by the theological and localised
experiential aspects of the Pestalozzian system.
Ritter’s championing of Pestalozzian geography coupled with the activities of Pestalozzian tutors
such as Tobler, facilitated its dissemination in German schools. Ritter’s second visit to Yverdun
included discussions with Tobler’s successor Johannes Wilhelm Henning, who had refined the meth-
ods of teaching the subject. At Ritter’s suggestion, Henning published Leitfaden beim methodischen
Unterricht in der Geographie, which is generally considered to be a seminal text in modern geograph-
ical education. It was ‘the forerunner of an ever-increasing number of books upon what the Germans
call Heimatskunde, in the course of which the child not only acquires direct acquaintance with the
methods of the geographer, but also, through his directed observation of natural phenomena . as
well as of the animals and plants of his neighbourhood, is provided with a stock of experiences which
constitute a broad foundation for any future specialised work in science’.33
Pestalozzi, Fellenberg and British geographical education
In the early nineteenth century, especially after the end of war in 1815, Pestalozzian and Fell-
enbergian educational ideas began to exert a significant influence on British teaching with many
British travellers visiting Yverdun ‘to see the system which is so much spoken of’.34 Pestalozzi
familiarised himself with English constitutional and industrial developments and considered the
English ‘most competent to appreciate and execute’ as England was where ‘my views will be even-
tually realised’.35 There were, of course, important enlightenment reciprocal cultural interchanges
between Switzerland and Britain, as the Biblioteque Britannique established by the Picet brothers,
suggests. Travellers on the grand tour often included Switzerland in their itineraries, whilst ro-
manticism encouraged experience and idealisation of the Swiss countryside. British writers who
promoted Pestalozzian methods included Elizabeth Hamilton the Scottish novelist and education-
ist whose Hints Addressed to Patrons and Directors of Schools (1815) recommended the adoption
of a Pestalozzian-inspired plan.36 It tended to be reformers, dissenters and evangelicals who sup-
ported Pestalozzi and Fellenberg with the greatest enthusiasm. Fellenberg’s institution was exam-
ined in William Allen’s journal The Philanthropist in 1813.37 Richard Lovell and Maria
Edgeworth met Pestalozzi at Paris in 1802 and expressed support for his ideas in their Essays
on Professional Education, Maria seeing him again in 1820. The Unitarian divine William Turner
delivered John Bruce’s paper on ‘Pestalozzi’s System of Education’ to the Newcastle Literary and
Philosophical Society in 1813, whilst various French expositions of Pestalozzianism also aroused
interest.38 Unitarians and Quakers were amongst the most enthusiastic proponents of Pestaloz-
zian and Fellenbergian methods. Attracted by the tenets of German Protestantism, many Unitar-
ians went to Germany to study enlightenment biblical scholarship and other subjects such as
natural science. Unitarians such as William Turner, Lady Byron, the Hills, the Carpenters,
John Beard and William Herford publicised, promoted and utilised Pestalozzian methods in pe-
riodicals such as the Monthly Repository.39
Whig reformers such as Henry Brougham championed Fellenberg and Pestalozzi as did evan-
gelicals such as James Pierrepoint Greaves (1777e1842). Brougham praised both men in the
Edinburgh Review and in evidence before the Parliamentary Education Committee in 1818.40
Greaves, who had stayed at Yverdun for four years from 1818, urged the case for Pestalozzian
schools to be established in Britain to the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool in 1818, arguing that
the Pestalozzian method was ‘altogether different to any thing we have in England, at least [so]
I judge from the schools that are call’d Grammar, or national’.41 Lady Noel Byron, widow of
the poet, visited Hofwyl in 1828 and sent a representative to learn the ideas before placing two
young cousins there for education. She opened a school for vagrants at Ealing Grove in 1834
where gardening, carpentry and masonry were amongst the subjects of instruction. She con-
demned the violence, drinking and gambling of the public schools, composed a history of the Fell-
enbergian schools, and was probably the author of What De Fellenberg has Done for Education
(1839).42 Baldwin Francis Duppa, associated like Brougham with the Society for the Diffusion
of Useful Knowledge, was a keen exponent of the Fellenbergian system and supporter of working
class education and rational recreation, urging the foundation of a series of agricultural schools
following the plan. He agitated for the introduction of schools for farmers based upon the Hofwyl
model and contributed to the publications of the Central Society of Education, for which he was
secretary and editor.43 A more influential educational writer and advocate of the Swiss education-
ists was the Norwich musician and author Louisa Mary Barwell (1800e1885), who sent her sons
to Hofwyl and was a prolific author of children’s books and educational studies of childhood. Her
description of Hofwyl, published at Lady Byron’s suggestion, emphasised the value of the external
environment in Fellenberg’s experiential learning of methods and featured an account of the
school by the American enthusiast William Channing Woodbridge (1794e1845).44 With her hus-
band, she converted a charity-day school in Norwich into a girl’s industrial training school on the
Fellenbergian model.
Following the work of Henning, Schacht and others in Switzerland and Germany in devising
a Pestalozzian system of geography, British Pestalozzians soon began to apply his methods to geo-
graphical education.45 The introduction of Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian methods of teaching
geography and related subjects were also encouraged by romanticism in the arts, post-enlighten-
ment conceptions of nature, topographical studies and tourism which idealised the beauties of the
British highland landscape, antiquities and culture. Studies of the British countryside were stim-
ulated by aesthetics, patriotism, local identities and the tenets of the discourse of rational
recreation.
Phillip Pullen was one of the first English educationists to embrace Pestalozzianism and at-
tempt to apply aspects of it to geographical education. He offered private lessons to ladies and
gentlemen on the Pestalozzian plan in London on subjects including mental calculation, geometry,
geography, drawing, English, grammar and writing arguing that it was eminently suitable for the
youngest of children.46 His summary of Pestalozzian geography was presented in two works, The
Mother’s Book (1820) and Pestalozzi’s System of Practical Geography (1822) which closely fol-
lowed their German models.47 Pullen argued that the Pestalozzian system emphasised the impor-
tance of basic sensory impressions and experiences and the insights these gave into natural
theology, which were the basis for children’s geography. Education aimed at producing ‘by a series
of intuitive experiences’ the ‘cultivation of all reasoning faculties and dispositions of children’ to
awaken their understanding and ‘implant in the soul perfect and correct ideas of religion, virtue,
and happiness’ which were ‘the most important and principal objects which are marked out to us
by nature and by the great Creator of the Universe’. In his teleological system, Pullen claimed to
show mothers and teachers how to ‘open ‘‘THE BOOK OF NATURE’’ to children’ giving them
‘power and comprehension . to enlighten their understanding’ to provide sensory demonstra-

tions, ‘that they may learn to contemplate’, and to classify and examine and mentally compare
‘all the objects of nature . and apply them properly in search of TRUTH’.48 Education had to
follow the ‘natural’ lines of childish intuition defined as the intuition of basic outward senses,
the role of the imagination, in memory for instance, the intuitions of the inward sense (by which
he meant the soul or self), mathematical intuitions (which revealed the properties of numbers,
forms and extents), and religious intuitions (which gave a sense of morality and of the sublime).
Through the gradual experiential unfolding of the united mental faculties, the child was ‘imper-
ceptibly led to the augmentation of all its powers’, perceiving ‘its progress in every branch of
knowledge’ without experiencing ‘the least degree of lassitude or exertion’. The child would rejoice
at its improvement and feel ‘encouraged to proceed to a further increase of knowledge’, with the
‘formation of the faculties’ becoming ‘the free self-activity of the mind’.49 Children were ‘naturally
curious and observing’, wishing ‘to see, to know, and to analyse every thing’. The system would
strengthen and encourage the ‘natural spirit of observation’, ‘awaken the dormant faculties’, and
allow ‘sensitive and intellectual powers’ to be brought into play, development of which was ‘the
chief object of education’. Following one of Pestalozzi’s most important tenets, Pullen recommen-
ded that mothers could never ‘begin to instruct their children at too early an age’.50
Notwithstanding these heuristic pronouncements, aspects of Pullen’s geographical teaching re-
mained conventional such as his recommendation that young children be ‘‘seated at a black
painted table, or a table inlaid with slate; with a large slate, or board painted black, placed imme-
diately opposite on which should be communicated the first principles of grammar.’’51 Like many
other British Pestalozzians, Pullen only selected aspects of Pestalozzian rhetoric and ideas though
his texts reveal that he recognised that the nature of child psychology had important implications
for geographical teaching. Large sections of the Practical Geography were devoted in conventional
manner to sacred and classical geography giving details of political divisions, forms of govern-
ment and religious beliefs, and a lengthy index of classical and Biblical geography. Pullen emphas-
ised the importance of maps for the teaching of geography prefacing his textbook with
a supportive quotation from the Encyclopaedia Britannica but this was hardly original to the Pes-
talozzian system nor was Pullen’s use of equipment or conception of geography as the basis for
other subjects.52
Pullen offered for sale from his house in Bryanstone Square ‘meridians of longitude, and par-
allels of latitude of any dimensions, or projection for general or particular maps, drawn on paper,
slates, boards, or painted canvas, with appropriate scales for marking the situation of places on
maps, for the use of private families and schools’.53 He utilised very large globes and maps consid-
ering it ‘essential to exercise the attention of the children on large globular as well as a polar pro-
jection, at least sixty inches diameter, on a board or canvass, painted back with white meridians
and parallels’. From this children could be directed to recollect and draw with chalk ‘certain coun-
tries, islands or continents in straight lines . and name every object as they delineate them on the
map, relating such circumstances or particular anecdotes concerning each place as may be worthy
of observation’.54 For these reasons, maps were not included in the Practical Geography because it
was claimed that small maps as generally published in school geography books, impeded rather
than accelerated the study of geography because as ‘twenty years experience as a teacher of that
science’ had proved to him, they did not give students a ‘correct idea of the natural boundaries
of the earth, or division of countries’. He professed himself astonished ‘in this age of improvement’
that the ‘important science’ of geography had received so little attention when it concerned ‘every
human being’, no person being able to ‘read the scriptures, ancient or modern history, or even
a newspaper with satisfaction without a previous knowledge of Geography’.55
Pullen’s procedures were rather conventional, mechanical and repetitive and did not accord
well with the Pestalozzian theory outlined in The Mother’s Book, nor even the requirement to un-
dertake field observations recommended in the introduction. He recommended that children be-
gan with John Arrowsmith’s eighteen-inch sheet map of England, or either Arrowsmith’s or John
Cary’s four-inch sheet version placed in front of them, with which parents or teachers should em-
bark upon a ‘voyage of discovery round Great Britain’ travelling from one location to another
whilst observing the features and recording their co-ordinates. From this, the boundaries of the
hemisphere would be shown on a large canvas, slate, or skeleton map and then ruled onto a globe
once again by giving the pupils the co-ordinates of the principal features to be traced on and re-
corded in notebooks.56 After covering the globe in this manner, the pupils had to make a larger
world map on eight sheets of atlas drawing paper with the meridians and parallels ruled according
to Mercator’s projection so that it could be finished on canvas like Arrowsmith’s eight-sheet chart.
Pullen reassured reading parents and teachers that this would ‘not prove a tedious task, but on the
contrary, an interesting as well as a truly instructive amusement’. The full-sized physical map was
recommended to consist of ‘a large canvas board made of a few deal boards framed, four feet
eight inches square, and painted black’, on which a globular projection, fifty four inches in diam-
eter, was to be drawn on one side, and on the other, a ‘Mercator’s projection, the degrees on
which may be increased or decreased at pleasure.’57
In the fourth part of the book the principles of geometry were laid out with core details con-
cerning the drawing of meridian and parallel lines on maps and the construction of large maps.
The characteristics of the Mercator chart were delineated and a catalogue of recommended
maps given, with conventional lists of compass point delineations for noteworthy features of
each continent such as lakes.58 Although geographical information was recycled in the conven-
tional manner, there were more original aspects. Pullen followed Pestalozzian geography in rec-
ommending that political divisions be ‘completely set aside as belonging rather to history than
geography’ to be examined at a later stage rather than from the outset as was conventional.59 Fur-
thermore, the importance of sensory perceptions preceding the use of gazetteers and atlases was
underlined, whilst the need to undertake drawing of maps beginning with the natural features ex-
plored in the local vicinity through observation was emphasised. He suggested that children be
taken to the summit of a hill to view the surrounding country it being ‘essential to point out
and illustrate the geographical definitions and denominations of land and water’ so that on re-
turning they could ‘draw a sketch of the survey they have taken’. They could be demonstrated
the points of the compass and be ‘assisted in taking a survey of the surrounding country, and
by questions led to declare the form of hills, valleys’ by following the basic Pestalozzian categories
of shape and resemblance. The form of the plains should be described and the nature and category
of other topographical features such as water and valleys and ‘their form and relative situation to
hills and mountains, by which they are formed’.60 Likewise, in order to illustrate the ‘natural’ di-
visions of the earth, when the boundary lines of an island or continent had been drawn he recom-
mended that a local river be studied so that ‘some idea of the Pestalozzian system may be acquired
by tracing’ it and then maps could be used to reveal the tributaries, rivulets and other water chan-
nels that flowed into it and attendant settlements. As the perspective moved upwards and
outwards from the locality to the global and celestial, Pullen recommended that this could be used
as an introduction to the great world rivers, whilst on the globe pupils could begin to trace and
name all the continents and islands, chains of mountains continuing to enlarging their ‘sphere of
observation’. The chains of mountains would then be filled up ‘so as to give them their natural
appearance’ and ‘the coast subtended by each straight line, should next be traced, with its impor-
tant capes, bays, and harbours, registering the latitude and longitude of each’.61
Pullen’s Practical Geography represents a transitional stage in the application of Pestalozzian
methods to the teaching of geography. Although in many respects it was conventional, following
the pattern of many Georgian gazetteers, it provides evidence that Pullen was trying to re-think
aspects of geographical teaching. Part of the originality came from the order in which geography
was studied relative to other subjects, with physical geography and local knowledge, as Pestalozzi
recommended, preceding political and human geography (although this was not always adhered
to in the cartographic sections), and local geography serving as a microcosm to approach teaching
of global geography. The pupils gradually completed a skeleton map of their own workmanship
as they identified physical and human features before moving on to identify similar features across
the world. From that stage, the knowledge was tested and developed using a system of interrog-
ative questions and answers similar to those of contemporary textbook writers such as Richmal
Magnall, whose works were recommended by Pullen, in which pupils questioned each other
and were interrogated by the teacher. Only when the basic physical geographical features had
been identified and understood did pupils proceed to complete similar maps of ancient geography
and to a separate map of modern geography and political divisions using history books to intro-
duce the ‘twin’ subject of history.62
Other pedagogues who claimed to espouse Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian methods accorded
geography an important status and claimed to teach it in a distinctive manner. The Derby educa-
tionist William George Spencer took to Pestalozzian ideas enthusiastically from the 1830s and
used them in teaching geometry, surveying, human and physical geography and the sciences to
hundreds of pupils of both sexes both privately and in schools.63 A school at South Lambeth,
whose founder had lived at Yverdun, followed an explicitly Pestalozzian scheme. The curriculum
was very broad including the teaching of at least nine foreign languages including Hindustani and
Persian. Natural history and geography were closely intertwined with an understanding of the im-
mediate locality forming the basis for both physical and political geography.64 At Cheam school
where William Gilpin and his curate Rev. J. Wilding had already introduced teaching innovations,
the evangelical clergyman Charles Mayo and his wife Elizabeth applied their interpretation of Pes-
tallozzian methods. Boys attended from the age of five or six until thirteen or fourteen, when
about half left for public schools, the other half staying on until the age of seventeen or eighteen.
Charles Reiner, a former assistant to Pestalozzi, taught natural history, the sciences and mathe-
matics, with the method being to cultivate the powers of observation in the study of nature and
natural forms from a basis of familiarisation with the local neighbourhood, the collection of speci-
mens and a process of questioning and discovery.65 Alongside the expected classical education, the
school taught chemistry, mechanics and physics, with electrical experiments being demonstrated
to pupils, along with human and physical geography. At the London teacher training establish-
ment later founded by the Mayos in 1836, which attracted worldwide interest, geography was re-
garded as the third most essential component of a successful curriculum after English language
and the basic Pestalozzian concepts of number and form. Geography, it was contended, must
embrace ‘a general view of the earth, especially in its physical characters, together with a more
particular study of England and the Holy Land’.66
Elsewhere, Kay-Shuttleworth, campaigning for a national system of government-funded educa-
tion from the 1830s, argued that even pauper schools needed to be well equipped for the teaching of
geography with blackboards, maps, globes, drawings and objects on the Dutch model.67 Instru-
mental in the activities of the Committee of Council on Education, he helped to establish a teaching
college at Battersea which was run as a community, the educational theories being partly inspired
by the Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian systems. The importance of geography was emphasised on
the basis that it furnished information relevant for an understanding of the growth of British po-
litical and industrial power. Students were taken on long walks or excursions to cultivate their hab-
its of observation to study ‘the great truths of Nature left on record in the features of the
landscape’, the basis for natural history, physical and human geography.68 An explicitly Fellenber-
gian emphasis on geography and natural history is also evident at the institutions inspired by Lady
Noel Byron. At Ealing Grove School established in 1834 by her under the Owenite phrenologist
Edward T. Craig, besides the usual subjects such as grammar, mathematics and accounting, gym-
nastics were taught in the senior school whilst the pupils worked at gardening and agriculture.
Apparatus was essential, geography being taught using maps, globes, diagrams, models of farms
and buildings, engravings of objects and local specimens.69 The geographical knowledge gained
by the pupils was so detailed, especially in relation to practical commercial matters, that a govern-
ment inspector visiting in the early 1840s found that the class had an extensive knowledge of the
staple manufactures of Britain and Europe and of trade along the Baltic, Atlantic and Mediterra-
nean. Ealing Grove school served as a model for other establishments such as the agricultural
school founded by the wealthy Quaker landowner James Cropper at Fearnhead near Warrington
in 1835.70
Another influential Pestalozzian school was established at Worksop in Nottinghamshire
around 1831 (see Fig. 1). The method of teaching geography there was judged by Charles Leigh
Fig. 1. The Pestalozzian Institution, Worksop, drawn by Charles F. A. Trachsel.

Pemberton to be ‘the most fascinating and advantageous’ of any that he had witnessed. The
school attained a national reputation, George Holyoake considered it reached a status ‘unrivalled
among English schools for the industrial, social and classical education it imparted’, whilst
Herbert Spencer described it as ‘an English Hofwyl’ and was inspired in the development of his
educational philosophy by its practices.71 The founder, Beatus Heldenmaier, a native of Yverdun,
was educated at the Pestalozzian school until the age of twelve, before becoming master and sub-
sequently studying at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Berlin between 1820 and 1829. Here he
was educated in logic and metaphysics by Hegel and in botany, natural history and geography
by Ritter.72 Heldenmaier and his wife Adele Trachsel (b.1811) founded the Worksop Institution
in a large Georgian mansion where hundreds of boys, and from 1849 girls, were educated. These
included various members of manufacturing, Liberal and nonconformist families from Birming-
ham, Manchester, Liverpool and elsewhere such as Richard Cobden’s son, John Edward Taylor
the journalist and son of the founder of the Manchester Guardian, Edward Knowles Muspratt, the
industrial chemist, William Forwood and members of the Hornby, Langton, Elkington and Marl-
ing families.73 There were also some sons of the aristocracy and pupils from abroad such as the
sons of Ibrahim Pasha, Khedive of Egypt. The surviving correspondence of two pupils, the Marl-
ing brothers, William and Charles, sons of a wealthy Gloucestershire clothier, who wrote weekly
letters to their parents during the 1840s, provides a wealth of detail on the curriculum and meth-
ods of the school from the children’s perspective.74
Heldenmaier’s experience of Yverdun was reflected in the organisation of the Worksop institu-
tion. According to Charles Leigh Pemberton who stayed there for a fortnight in 1837, it was run
like a family and he claimed to have seldom seen ‘any domestic circle for that length of time, which
was so . delightfully free from all the harshness of feeling in gesture and word, glance and tone’.
The unselfish ‘bounding glee and elastic spirit and frankness of a community of children in asso-
ciation with their elders, guides and instructors’ was unique. The masters were ‘honestly affection-
ate, sympathising and frank in exchange’ whilst the pupils returned the affection with ‘fullness and
freedom’ which encouraged a ‘vivacity of intellect, readiness of perception, eagerness to know .
willingness to learn, and pleasure in being taught’. Pemberton noted that the pedagogy of the
school succeeded without rewarding or chastising pupils, the most severe and effective sanction
consisting of excluding children from lessons.75 Languages, mathematics, the classics and the sci-
ences formed an important part of teaching with the methods employed being recollected with
some nostalgia by former pupils.76 Academic education was supplemented by a Pestalozzian atten-
tion to music, the theatre, physical pursuits, gymnastics, sports and other outdoor activities which
blurred the boundaries between learning and play and enhanced health and muscular development.
Having been educated in philosophy by Hegel and geography and natural history at the Pes-
talozzi school and later at Berlin University under Karl Ritter, Heldenmaier was at the forefront
of the innovations in geographical education. This is evident in the importance given to geography
and natural history, and the teaching methods employed at Worksop which were judged by Pem-
berton to be ‘the most fascinating and advantageous of any’ that he had ever seen. Most of the
school rooms were hung with maps and lectures were given to the boys by eminent speakers
such as Thomas Rhymer Jones, Professor of Natural History at Kings College.77 Observers
were impressed with the way that the local environment was used as a learning resource with
the pupils undertaking daily walks into the surrounding countryside to collect specimens which
they placed in the museum. There was a small farm attached to the school and three cows
were kept near to where the boys exercised and played. The boys were each given garden plots to
cultivate. Pemberton noted how ‘happy, indeed, are these boys in the fortunate position for ram-
bles among the charming, rich, and varied scenery which the immediate neighbourhood of Work-
sop presents’. According to Muspratt, they were allowed during walks ‘to gather wild flowers and
to catch butterflies’ which gave them ‘a practical instruction in botany and entomology’. He also
recollected the ‘good natural history museum and chemical laboratory’. The scientific instruction
in general was ‘of a practical character . more interesting than in most schools, where science was
ignored and the classical languages taught in a way which is now admitted to be faulty’. Book
learning was only resorted to on a secondary basis. Pemberton observed that he had seen the
boys from ‘day after day, hour after hour; now with the mathematical class, or Greek and Latin,
French and German; not leaping to satisfactory conclusions because memory has laid hold of
words’, things were taught and understood through sensory impressions and experiences gained
from activities. These took place ‘in the anatomical museum, now at botany, geography . draw-
ing, music, gymnastics, dancing; and in the chemical laboratory’. He witnessed ‘how philosophic
and scientific’ the school was with its ‘substantial building containing a furnace, forge, retorts, el-
embics, etc’.78 The extent of this equipment is also evident from the fifty-three-page catalogue pro-
duced by the auctioneers in 1878 when it was up for sale, which listed the extensive scientific
apparatus, collection of specimens in the museum and 2000 volume library.79
Following the Pestalozzian plan in which physical and topographical geography associated
with natural history was pivotal to the introduction of subjects such as history and the sciences,
the pupils were offered direct experience of the surrounding countryside. Surveying, topography
and cartography were taught by Ellenberger and involved drawing plans of the surrounding coun-
tryside using theodolites and other instruments.80 The site for the school had been chosen for its
beauty and the proximity of the wooded parkland of the Dukeries and Sherwood Forest and the
rugged moorland of the Peak and local gentry and aristocracy patronised the school allowing the
boys to play on their estates (Figure 2). The ancient vestiges of Sherwood, as Muspratt remem-
bered, still contained ‘magnificent trees, particularly old oaks . most of the parks were within
two to four miles of the school, and formed the object of our afternoon walks once or twice
a week’.81 A similar emphasis upon the delights of ramblings and directed excursions is evinced
by Forwood in his recollections who took ‘long walks in the lovely parks that surround Worksop’
and collected botanical specimens which fostered a love of nature that stayed with him through-
out his life. These provided a ‘practical instruction in botany and entomology’ whilst also being,
as the Marling correspondence indicates, sources of competition and emulation amongst the
boys.82 Excursions were also made to manufacturing towns and cities in the region the boys being
taken to see the new docks at Grimsby, Sheffield iron foundries, the silk works and Midland rail-
way works at Derby and other industrial sites.83
In tandem with this experiential knowledge of the local towns and countryside, coloured at-
lases, globes and gazetteers were used to teach geography in the French, German and English lan-
guages, including scriptural, classical and modern political (human) and physical geography. In
examination, pupils were expected to be able to identify and describe important physical geo-
graphical features through their own drawings of maps, features and objects or through pointing
these out on atlases and globes. They had, for instance, to explain the causes of tides and draw
diagrams illustrating the semi-diurnal and the spring and Neap tides, mention the causes of cli-
mate modification, illustrating with examples, and define the five zones and their distinctive
Fig. 2. Part of the Dukeries and Sherwood Forest south of Worksop. Detail from Sanderson’s map of twenty miles around Mansfield
(1835).
peculiarities. Cartographic skills were examined in a separate paper, pupils being expected to draw
maps of certain European countries, rivers, the coast and chief towns and rivers of Britain and to
be able to describe the stereographic projection of the sphere on the plane of a meridian and to
demonstrate how the angles were set off by means of a sector. Related skills including drawing,
perspective, surveying, mensuration and engineering were treated in other parts of the papers.
The questions that were intended to investigate the influences of physical upon human geogra-
phy and of geology upon physical geography demonstrate that the curriculum was shaped accord-
ing to the concerns of contemporary geographical science with race, climate, place, particularity
and its intertwining with culture, nature and history. Ritter’s teleological ‘scientific geography’
was a seminal example of this and Heldenmaier’s knowledge of Ritter and Pestalozzi probably
helped to shape the Worksop curriculum in this way. Whilst being required to detail the physical
features, climate and soil of nations, pupils were asked to ‘illustrate the fact that the climate and
the configuration of a country affect the moral and intellectual condition of its inhabitants’, and to
consider whether the habitable zone of the earth might be reduced by changes in the earth’s ro-
tational axis. Geology included the study of strata, minerals, localised and general British topog-
raphy, the origin and classification of soils, drainage and fossils. In political geography, pupils
were expected to be able to provide information concerning the population of principal towns
and details of their commercial and industrial productions, not only in Europe but also in conti-
nents including Africa and Australasia. Pupils had to be able to draw maps of countries with
political and administrative divisions and chief towns, whilst conveying information concerning
the religion, populations and governments of principal countries, towns and regions. In 1858,
for example, no doubt stimulated by recent imperial difficulties, pupils had clearly been studying
India. They were required to demonstrate a knowledge of the principal towns, the manners, cus-
toms, castes and religion of the Hindus, the chief events in the history of their lands and the nature
and extent of British possessions on the sub-continent at a time when the Indian struggle had given
the subject renewed British public attention.84
The reputation of the Worksop school brought it much attention and its methods helped in-
spire the work of other educational reformers. The most influential of these were probably the
Spencers, William George and Herbert. Heldenmaier became friendly with the family coming
to meetings of the Derby Philosophical Society, of which George Spencer was secretary. Human
and physical geography were two of the most popular subjects taught by Spencer and his textbook
on experiential geometry was regarded by English Pestalozzians as one of the most important ex-
amples of the application of Pestalozzian methods in education.85 Herbert Spencer became, of
course, one of the most influential British philosophers and authorities on education and his
work also utilised his interpretations of Pestalozzianism.86 He intended to open a Pestalozzian
school with his father in 1848 partly modelled on Heldenmaier’s Worksop institution which he
described as ‘a kind of English Hofwyl’. As a practical realisation of the Pestalozzian system,
the school played an important role in the development of the Spencers’ educational theories. Al-
though geography was not one of Herbert Spencer’s primary concerns, the debt to Pestalozzian-
ism and the Worksop institution is evident in his exhortations concerning the way the subject was
taught in which he decried rote-learning employing gazetteers which ignored child psychological
development. Teachers were too ‘eager to give second hand facts in place of first hand facts’ by
excessive and premature reliance upon books. They were ‘possessed by a superstition which wor-
ships the symbols of knowledge instead of knowledge itself’ and could not see that only when
children had gained experience of the ‘objects and processes of the household, the streets, and the
fields’ should they be ‘introduced to the new sources of information which books supply’. Political
geography ‘dead and uninteresting to a child, and which should be an appendage of sociological
studies’ was ‘commenced betimes; while physical geography, comprehensible and comparatively
attractive to a child, is in great part passed over’. ‘Daily rambles in the countryside woods and
lanes, the fields and hedges, the quarry and the sea-shore’ such as those pursued at Worksop
were essential and psychologically sensitive object lessons where children could ‘collect and under-
stand specimens according to progressively complex knowledge criteria’.87
As a corrective to bookish education, Pestalozzian methods founded upon Heimatskunde were
increasingly considered as appropriate for geography and were encouraged by the Royal Geo-
graphical Society.88 Spencer’s friend Thomas Huxley questioned the emphasis still placed upon
classical education and urged that it should be replaced with physical geography by which he
meant ‘what the Germans call ‘‘Erdkunde’’ . a description of the earth, of its place and relation
to other bodies’. This instruction in the general views of nature or physiogeography needed to be
founded upon the simple questions that children asked. Huxley’s physiogeography began with the
Thames and proceeded outwards from the local and familiar to the unfamiliar using everyday ex-
amples linking this mode of explanation directly to children’s own experiences. It therefore, as
Stoddart has argued, inverted ‘the normal approach of physical geography texts of the day’.89
Like the Spencers, educationists such as Huxley and Kingsley contrasted learning founded
upon concrete objects and local experience with bookish education and developed teaching meth-
ods based upon Pestalozzian object lessons and the science of everyday materials. As Stoddart has
shown, until the 1870s, textbooks of physical geography such as those by Arnold Guyot, Mary
Somerville and David Ansted contained no illustrations or local studies, whilst topographical
texts were even more alien to the learner. Anstead’s began with the solar system and was organ-
ised around the themes of life and the four ancient elements.90 Reviewing a work on Northamp-
tonshire history and antiquities, the clergyman and antiquary Thomas James commented that
geographical studies ‘begin at the wrong end’ with the ‘equator instead of High-Street’. ‘Educated
men’ were therefore ‘strangers in their own country’, whilst there was ‘not a schoolroom in
England where a county map is to be found hung upon the wall’.91
A similar emphasis was adopted by another evolutionary theorist, the Scottish botanist, edu-
cationist and urban planner, Patrick Geddes, originally one of Huxley and Spencer’s strongest ad-
mirers. Geddes tried, as Spencer had done, to apply evolutionary ideas to society beginning with
the local environment. As Meller has argued, he embraced the organic analogy and Spencer’s law
of progress and applied the ‘concept of evolution to society’, using ‘a knowledge of how the pro-
cess took place in nature as a guide’ to opening up a new vista of possibilities.92 Geddes used local
and regional study to unite urban and rural environments attacking the bookishness of ‘past ed-
ucation’, whilst exclaiming that ‘happily’ the ‘regional outlook of science’ was ‘beginning to coun-
teract this artificial blindness’ as the activities of the field-naturalist demonstrated.93 As Geddes
and Thompson expressed it, the study of evolution had to entail ‘elements of observation and in-
terpretation day by day’ through ‘youthful travels and maturing researches’. These opened new
field of enquiry so that biological study was ‘by no means merely abstract, nor mainly in the
library’ as it ‘ever arises from and returns to living nature’. In Geddes’ view, knowledge was
founded upon the regional studies which embraced relief and climate, geological and botanical
survey, anthropology, archaeology and history with ‘our concrete science’ thus generalising
into ‘a comprehensive regional survey, natural and social, rural and urban: as our abstract scien-
ces advance and unite into a philosophy of evolution’. He argued that a clearer sociological ed-
ucation was gained from a ‘simple geographical method’ of education than from standard
textbooks. Geography became geogony developing ‘from mere empirical world description into
a rational vision of world development’.94
The ‘panoramic view of a definite geographic region’ such as that viewed from the top of
a mountain as Pestalozzi had advocated, allowed students to see how each mountain valley
had its ‘analogous terminal and initial village, upon its fertile fan-shaped slope’, its market,
slow meandering river, ‘prosperous market town’ and ‘road and railway junction upon which
all the various glen villages converge’.95 Using river valley sections such as those of the Tay or
Thames revealed how moving from relief and vegetation towards the economic and social systems
that flourished upon these environments could serve as a microcosm of the world. Citing Montes-
sorian sense education with its emphasis upon heart, hand and head instead of ‘the three Rs’,
Geddes contended that local nature study was ‘the beginnings of the natural sciences’. He argued
that children should be set to observe nature ‘not with labelled and codified lessons’ which had
hitherto stunted education but given garden plots, workshop bench and taken ‘on wider and wider
excursions’ increasingly of their own choice. He considered that his outlook tower in Edinburgh
embodied and united the essential outlooks ‘of the astronomer and geographer, of the mathema-
tician and the mechanic, the physicist and the chemist, the geologist and the mineralogist, the bot-
anist and the zoologist’. ‘The naturalist pupil’ set out for his education ‘by way of nature studies,
widening out to regional and general survey’, a process that grew and widened through life ‘in
personal evolution’.96
Conclusion
Reflecting developments in enlightenment thought and stimulated by major changes in Geor-

gian culture, economy and society, eighteenth-century geographical education was not static
and underwent changes reflected in the textbooks and teaching methods, practices and equipment
utilised in commercial and dissenting academies and other pedagogical sites. However, the empha-
sis was still on passive rote learning, the impartation of apparently loosely connected data and the
treatment of children as proto-adults in defiance of child psychology. From the early nineteenth
century however, Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian ideas helped to transform European geograph-
ical education by emphasising the importance of sensitivity towards the stages of childhood psy-
chology, the value of experiential learning, and the role of localised studies and field observations,
practical cartography and natural history prior to textbooks and abstract learning. Such methods
were promoted by educationists such as Pullen, Reiner, the Mayos, Heldenmaier and the Spencers
who regarded geography as the cornerstone of education and a gateway to other subjects. At the
Worksop school for instance, natural history, geography and the sciences were introduced
through familiarisation with the local landscape, flora, fauna and settlement as the accounts of
observers and pupils reveal. The adoption of such methods was, however, a gradual process
with textbooks of physical geography, for instance showing little evidence of the new approaches
until the 1870s, whilst the development of national education and endorsement by the Royal Geo-
graphical Society also hastened the process.
Notes
1. The research for this article was funded by a Research Grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board
(now Council). The authors are grateful to the editor and referees of JHG for their helpful criticisms and sugges-
tions and to Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire county councils for permission to publish a detail from their edition
of Sanderson’s map of twenty miles around Mansfield (2001); J.A. Green, Life and Work of Pestalozzi, London,
1913, 278.
2. W.A.C. Stewart and W.P. McCann, Educational Innovators, 136e137, 153; G. Compayré, Lectures on Pedagogy,
London, 1890, 363.
3. Marling correspondence (henceforth, MC), part of Marling family papers, Gloucestershire Record Office, D 873
C17, C19.
4. H. Spencer, Education; Intellectual, Moral and Physical (1861), F.A. Cavenagh (Ed.), Cambridge, 1932, 75e79.
5. G. Haines, German Influence Upon English Education and Science, 1800e1866, New London, 1957.
6. M. Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt, Cambridge,
1981; D. Stoddart, On Geography and its History, 1986; D.N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes
in the History of Contested Enterprise, Oxford, 1992; F. Driver, A.M.C. Maddrell, R. Walford, D. Matless,
T. Ploszajska, C. Nash and P. Gruffudd, Geographical education and citizenship, Journal of Historical Geography
22 (1996) 371e472; A.M.C. Maddrell, Discourses of race and gender and the comparative method in geography
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Pestalozzi Fellenberg and British Nineteenth

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Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 752e774

Pestalozzi, Fellenberg and British nineteenth-century

Keywords: Pestalozzi; Fellenberg; Switzerland; England; Nineteenth century; Geographical education

nineteenth-century educationists such as Gabriel Compayré credited the introduction of Rous-

English geographical education

Pestalozzian and Fellenbergian educational philosophy

Pestalozzi, Fellenberg and geographical education

Pestalozzi, Fellenberg and British geographical education

‘power and comprehension . to enlighten their understanding’ to provide sensory demonstra-

Fig. 1. The Pestalozzian Institution, Worksop, drawn by Charles F. A. Trachsel.

Reﬂecting developments in enlightenment thought and stimulated by major changes in Geor-

18. Green, Life and Work of Pestalozzi, 116e139.

80. MC, 20 April 1848, 17 May 1849.

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