American pestalozzianism in Greek mathematical education 1830–1836

Abstract

The American missionaries, who came to the newly established Greece around 1830, developed a prolific educational and publishing activity. Within this context, they translated and disseminated six schoolbooks of elementary arithmetic, imbued by the pedagogical ideas of Pestalozzi. This venture was far from random, but echoed the progressive current of pestalozzianism, which prevailed in North America in the 1820s, and which they wished to embed into the then existing Greek mathematical culture. However, due to its incompatibility with the Greek religious tradition, the project of the missionaries largely failed.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank D M Panteki for her useful comments and for her help in English.

Notes

¹A Greek philologist, primarily schoolteacher, and later professor of Philology at the University of Athens.

²This was known as Printing from America. The press was transferred to Smyrna in 1833, to which the American missionary committees turned their attention after 1832, when a treaty was signed between the Americans and the Turks concerning the rights of the use of Smyrna harbour by American ships.

³Until the end of the eighteenth century, the child was treated as a little adult, see Miller, 1.

⁴See Elliott and Daniels 2005. Pestalozzianism in England did not leave mathematical education there untouched, see Delve 2003, 159, 171. (Special thanks to my colleague Maria Panteki, who made this clarification.)

⁵Its second publication in 1822 was entitled First lessons in arithmetic on the plan of Pestalozzi, with some improvements, and the enlarged edition of 1826 was entitled Intellectual arithmetic, upon the inductive method of instruction. See Karpinski 1940, 236–237.

⁶It is worth mentioning that there were three primary textbooks: First lessons in arithmetic on the plan of Pestalozzi, with some Improvements (1821/1822); Arithmetic; being a sequel to first lessons in arithmetic (1822); An introduction to algebra upon the inductive method of instruction (1825); see Karpinski 1940, 236, 242, 262.

⁷See Cohen 2003, 56f, also Richeson 1935, Sleight 1937, Sztajn 1995, Bidwell and Clason 1970, 13f.

⁸See Cohen 2003, 58, and Sztajn 1995, 379. On allusions to the ‘mental’ approach to Arithmetic see Nikolakaki 2003, 104, 119.

⁹It is hard to support the American missionaries' religious and political neutrality because new national regions, as for example Bulgaria or in the Middle East, developed the same interventionist zeal during that time; see R L Daniel, ref 14. The interweaving of the American missions with official American politics should also be noted. It is characteristic that Frances Hill was the daughter of John Mulligan, the United States' ambassador in Athens during the period 1845–49. Note also the American navy's mobilization, in 1852 to defend the high ranking protestant missionary Jonas King, who was convicted by the Greek justiciary.