He founded several educational institutions both in German- and French-speaking regions of Switzerland and wrote many works explaining his revolutionary modern principles of education. His motto was "Learning by head, hand and heart".
Thanks to Pestalozzi, illiteracy in 18th-century Switzerland was overcome almost completely by His father was a surgeon and oculist who died at age 33 when Pestalozzi, the second of three children, was five years old; he belonged to a family who had fled the area around Locarno due to its Protestant faith. After the death of Pestalozzi's father it was only through the help of Babeli that Pestalozzi's mother could financially support the family. In , Pestalozzi attended the Gymnasium Collegium Humanitatis and received instruction from educators Johann Jakob Bodmer , who taught history and politics, and Johann Jakob Breitinger , who taught Greek and Hebrew.
It was through these visits that Pestalozzi learned the poverty of country peasants. He saw the consequences of putting children to work in factories at an early age and he saw how little the Catechism schools did for them. Their ignorance, suffering and inability to help themselves left an impression on Pestalozzi, an impression that would guide his future educational ideas.
Pestalozzi was educated to become a clergyman. As a clergyman, he expected to have ample opportunity to carry out his educational ideas; however, the failure of his first sermon and influence from philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau led him to pursue a career in law and political justice.
The ideal system of liberty, also, to which Rousseau imparted fresh animation, increased in me the visionary desire for a more extended sphere of activity, in which I might promote the welfare and happiness of the people. Juvenile ideas as to what it was necessary and possible to do in this respect in my native town, induced me to abandon the clerical profession, to which I had formerly leaned, and for which I had been destined, and caused the thought to spring up within me, that it might be possible, by the study of the law, to find a career that would be likely to procure for me, sooner or later, the opportunity and means of exercising an active influence on the civil condition of my native town, and even of my native land.
