"This book provides a brief and authoritative introduction to the extraordinary career of Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi, the Swiss educator who was the rock star of educational reform at the turn of the 19th century. Its strengths are many. It is based on a rich array of new materials that were discovered, analyzed, and published by scholars at the Pestalozzian Institute in Zurich, which was long headed by the author. It takes an appreciative but critical view of Pestalozzi, noting that his skills as a self-promoter were even greater than his skills as an educator. It connects the Pestalozzi phenomenon with the new literature on the way in which the rise of schooling in the 19th century has led to the educationalization of modern society. And
its author, Daniel Tröhler as the leading expert on Pestalozzi and a major scholar of the history of schooling is the only person who could write it with clarity, interpretive depth, and academic authority." - David F. Labaree, Professor of Education, Stanford University, USA
"A European historian of American education once expressed to me that while much attention is given to Dewey, Thorndike and Horace Mann as the heroes of the school, the Swiss Pestalozzi deserves much greater attention. Daniel Tröhler, one of the pre-eminent historians of education, makes this importance evident. Woven into cultural, religious, political and social histories, Pestalozzi's biography is read comparatively and in a manner that offers aninnovative approach to the history of education. Tröhler elegantly explores how Pestalozzi's giving childhood a 'nature' tied to methods of teaching made possible the role of the modern school that continues today; that is, the site for solving social questions and pedagogy as the expression of political and moral principles." - Thomas S. Popkewitz, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
