Hofwyl School was a progressive, Swiss boarding school and teaching college in the village of Hofwil, founded by Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg at the start of the 19th century.
Fellenberg took over the estate of Hofwyl in 1799 from his father [1] and transformed it into several schools to educate all levels of society. He established a school for the poor, a secondary school for local students and an institute for the sons of wealthy families throughout Europe. [2] The Hofwil Institution building was constructed between 1817 and 1821 as a centerpiece of Emanuel von Fellenberg's educational vision. The outbuildings were completed in 1818, followed by a teacher's house in 1819 and another school building around 1820. [3]
The school, which Fellenberg ran for 45 years, was the first agricultural school. The sons of farmers and others would live at the boarding school, and their work in the fields would sustain the school, so most of them did not have to pay tuition, ensuring the school remained financially stable. It was well known in the 19th century for its innovative pedagogy. A 1857 article in The Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education wrote that the system "proved that pupils, who enter such an institution at ten years of age, and remain there ten years, can, by their labor alone, defray their expenses for board, clothing, and instruction, besides having learned a useful occupation". [4] The school also accepted students from wealthy families who would pay tuition. Fellenberg has thus been described as "endorsing a stratified society" where people are not seen as equal. [5] The combination of academic and agricultural training also included the development of innovative techniques in agriculture, such as the use of sowing and reaping machines, the introduction of new seeds and plants, and the improvement of existing species. [4]
The pedagogy was radical for the time in that it did not allow corporal punishment or rewards and incentives. [5]
Hofwyl inspired many schools around the world. [6] Often, these schools were established to train children from poor families to be productive members of society. In the United Kingdom, Lady Byron established Ealing Grove School, which was directly inspired by Hofwyl School. She also published a pamphlet titled The History of Industrial Schools (republished as an appendix in Ethel Mayne's biography of Lady Byron) and was probably the author of the book What De Fellenberg has Done for Education, published anonymously in 1839. [7] [8] In Australia, in the 1840s, James Bonwick named his boarding school Hofwyl House and was called "the de Fellenberg of Tasmania." [9]
After Fellenberg's death in 1844, the schools struggled, and eventually, each one closed. The Canton of Bern bought the building in 1884 to house the expansion of the teachers' college, which had been founded in 1833 in Münchenbuchsee. Over the following decades, it became just a preparatory school that fed into the main teacher's college in Bern. However, in 1973, it once again became a full college. In 1997, it changed again, this time into a music institute for students in grades 10 through 12. The building also houses an optional boarding school for students. [2]
Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg was a Swiss educationalist and agronomist.
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Hofwil is a village in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, part of the municipality of Münchenbuchsee.
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Münchenbuchsee is a municipality in the Bern-Mittelland administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. It is famous as the birthplace of the painter Paul Klee.
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Christoph Merian was a banker and businessman. He was the owner of a large estate, agriculturist and rentier. He was one of the richest Swiss men of that time. He was an honorary citizen of Münchenstein (1854) and the canton of Basel-Country (1855) and the founder of the Christoph Merian Stiftung.
William Henry Herford (1820–1908) was an English Unitarian minister, writer and educator. He was interested in education and married a school head mistress, Louisa Carbutt.
Louisa Mary Barwell (1800–1885) was an English musician and educational writer.
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Karl Friedrich Vollrath Hoffmann was a German geographer.
Friedrich Konrad Griepenkerl, sometimes known as Friedrich Konrad Griepenkerl, was a German Germanist, pedagogue, musicologist and conductor.
Marie Therese Forster was a German educator, writer, correspondent and editor. Born in Vilnius in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth to Georg Forster and his wife Therese, she spent her early childhood in Mainz. Her father was active in the revolutionary Republic of Mainz, and she and her mother fled the city in late 1792. After her father's death, she was raised by her mother and stepfather Ludwig Ferdinand Huber. From 1801 to 1805, Forster lived with Dutch-Swiss writer Isabelle de Charrière and collaborated with her on an epistolary novel. Until 1826, she worked as a teacher and educator, first at Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg's school in Hofwil and then for several upper-class families. After her mother's 1829 death, she lived with family and educated her nieces and nephews. From 1840, she collaborated with Georg Gottfried Gervinus on the first complete edition of her father's works, which were published by Brockhaus in 1843. Therese Forster spent her later years with her niece and died in Albisheim aged 75.
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Ealing Grove School was a school located in the West London district of Ealing. It was founded in by Annabella Noel Byron in 1834 as England's first co-operative school, following Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg's progressive pedagogy. Students combined academic subjects with three hours of gardening each day, and corporal punishment was not allowed. The school was renamed Byron House School in 1857, and Ealing Grammar School in 1896. It was shut down in 1917.
Markus Getsch Dreyfus also Markus Götsch Dreifus(s), was a Jewish teacher and publicist involved in the struggle for Jewish emancipation in Switzerland.
Lady Noel Byron, widow of the poet, visited Hofwyl in 1828 and sent a representative to learn the ideas before placing two young cousins there for education. She opened a school for vagrants at Ealing Grove in 1834 where gardening, carpentry and masonry were amongst the subjects of instruction. She condemned the violence, drinking and gambling of the public schools, composed a history of the Fellenbergian schools, and was probably the author of What De Fellenberg has Done for Education (1839).