Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) and the ‘Plan of Pestalozzi’

Abstract

Elizabeth Hamilton was a late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Scottish educationist, who was one of the earliest propagators of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s work in Britain. Elizabeth had a fascination with the ‘science of the human mind2019, central to much work of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers in whose Edinburgh circles she moved. Elizabeth’s contemporaries thought she possessed the ability to relate abstract philosophical theory to pedagogical practice and to write about both in ways that were useful for mothers educating their children. Maria Edgeworth noted that Elizabeth had:

thrown open to all classes of readers, those metaphysical discoveries or observations which had been confined chiefly to the learned. To a sort of knowledge that had been considered rather as a matter of curiosity than of use, she has given real value and actual currency. She has shown how the knowledge of metaphysics can be made serviceable to the art of education. She has shown for instance how the doctrine of the association of ideas may be applied in early education to the formation of the habits of temper, and of the principles of taste and of morals. She has considered how all that metaphysicians know of sensation and abstraction can be applied to the cultivation of the attention, the judgement, and the imagination of children (Edgeworth, 1816)

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