A POINT TO PONDER
Blessings as you read a note a colleague left me this week...
In the French Revolution protesters were demanding the head of Dr. Guillotine. In that same year, 1798, a different type of revolutionary lived on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Johann Pestalozzi, an educator, assumed the responsibility for eighty orphans destitute when French troops destroyed their Swiss village. These children were covered with lice, sores, and were malnourished. Emotional scaring of the children was the greatest problem of all.
Pestalozzi and a housekeeper took on the task to enfold these children. His motto, “Learning by head, hand and heart”. It was his love for them that would lead the way.
After Pestalozzi had spent years of demonstrating the principle of love in the education of children his countrymen gave him the epitaph “ The savior of the poor,… father of the orphans,… He did everything for others, nothing for himself. Bless his name!”
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi name lives on in Switzerland. Since his time over 321,000 children have been educated by the principles of his educational methods. Even Albert Einstein benefited from his educational method.
In these uncharted times, we could take a lesson from the quiet teacher of the Alps who whispered “Love”!