Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Swiss pedagogue, 1746-1827

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer who exemplified Romanticism in his approach. Pestalozzi 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 a child's life contributed to the formation of their personality, character, and capacity to reason. His motto was "Learning by head, hand and heart". He founded several educational institutions and wrote many works explaining his revolutionary modern principles of education. Thanks to Pestalozzi, illiteracy in 18th-century Switzerland was overcome almost completely by 1830.