When people talk of Einstein's high school years, it is either to propagate the myth that, as a school pupil, he was a failure, or to point out that his teachers failed to recognise his talent. In this clip from Carl Sagan's awesome 1980 Cosmos television series, Sagan points out that "His teachers had said that he would never amount to anything; that he 'destroyed classroom morale.'" By all accounts, he hated the rote learning and military discipline of his German high school, and he did drop out. He left Germany and instead spent a year in Italy with his parents, studying maths and physics on his own.
This is about as much as I had learnt about Einstein's schooling: he was yet another example of a great historical figure who succeeded in spite of the destructive influence of schools and formal education on human creativity. It was therefore with surprise and fascination that I read this panel in the Einsteinmuseum during my recent visit to Bern. Not only was Einstein the youngest and top graduate in his year level, he seems to have loved attending this school. How had I missed this?I photographed the panel and made a note to look up the school and its philosophy upon returning to the wi-fi lounge of the backpackers. How was this school different to the one he attended and hated in Munich? In Einstein's words:
It made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.After a little bit of digging, I found that the school had by then adopted the progressive approach of education reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. I had never heard of him, but found this article by Mark K. Smith on infed.org which gives a brief intro to his philosophy. Einstein's reflection on his own education at Aarau seems a remarkably clear echo of the ideas of Pestalozzi as summed up in the article:
[Pestalozzi] wanted to establish a ‘psychological method of instruction’ that was in line with the ‘laws of human nature.' As a result he placed a special emphasis on spontaneity and self-activity. Children should not be given ready-made answers but should arrive at answers themselves. To do this their own powers of seeing, judging and reasoning should be cultivated, their self-activity encouraged.As a science teacher it is easy to see the merit in a student-centred, curiosity-driven approach, based on practical experience of phenomena to be studied, rather than the lecture and note-taking model. The tension between these approaches existed when Pestalozzi was teaching and reforming education over two hundred years ago, and they still exist today.
The reason I missed this interesting fact about Einstein is, of course, that it is never really talked about. There is romance in the notion of the great creative mind having to overcome the oppressive institutions and conventions of formal schooling in order to realise its potential. As a teacher, however, an even more inspiring notion is that a well-conceived, student-centred approach towards teaching and learning can nurture and develop creative thinking.
Einstein in the year of his graduation in Aarau, 1896
