http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Heinrich_Pestalozzi Wikipedia

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (January 12, 1746 – February 17, 1827) was a Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer who exemplified Romanticism in his approach.

Extracts:

After the failure of his farming venture, Pestalozzi wanted to help the poor. He had been poor himself most of his life and he had observed orphans who gained apprenticeship as farmers only to be overworked and underfed. He desired to teach them how to live self-respecting lives. This led him to the conception of converting Neuhof into an industrial school.

Pestalozzi’s purpose in these letters was to show that, by reducing knowledge to its elements and by constructing a series of psychologically ordered exercises, anybody could teach their children effectively.

Pestalozzi was a Romantic who felt that education must be broken down to its elements in order to have a complete understanding of it. He emphasized that every aspect of the child’s life contributed to the formation of personality, character, and reason based on what he learned by operating schools at Neuhof, Stans, Burgdorf and Yverdon. The success of the Yverdon school attracted the interest of European and American educators. Pestalozzi’s educational methods were child-centered and based on individual differences, sense perception, and the student’s self-activity.