Windows and Ladders

This chapter introduces the intellectual and cultural history of the continental theories and theorists that led to the development of object lessons. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and his followers developed classroom practices premised on the notion that information was to be drawn out of children, not crammed into them. Physical engagement with the world was a way to draw that information from children through sense training exercises, or Anschauungunterricht. From Pestalozzi’s famed (but only marginally successful) Swiss schoolrooms, his student Charles Mayo transplanted the ideas that became the basis of object lessons to England. There, through the work of Charles’s sister Elizabeth Mayo, they became the highly regimented foundation for the Home and Colonial Schools teacher training programs and were employed in England, Scotland, India, and Canada, among other places.