An estate purchased in 1799 with the intention to make agriculture the basis of a new system of education .
Returning to Berne from Paris in 1791, Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg resolved to create a school for pupils of all social classes to learn skills and personal integrity. By fostering enterprise, Christianity and understanding, he hoped to prevent French style Revolutions and violent uprisings.
Working with Pestalozzi, their intention was elevating the lower and rightly training the higher orders of the state, and welding them together in a closer union than had previously been deemed attainable.
The school at first excited a large amount of ridicule, but gradually it began to attract the notice of foreign countries; and pupils, some of them of the highest rank, began to flock to him from every country in Europe, both for the purpose of studying agriculture and to profit by the high moral training associated with his educational system.
For forty five years Fellenberg, assisted by his wife, continued his educational labours, and finally raised his institution to the highest point of prosperity and usefulness. He died on the 21st of November 1844.
See Hamm, Fellenberg’s Leben und Wirken (Bern, 1845); and Schoni, Der Stifter von Hofwyl, Leben und Wirken Fellenberg’s.