“The child,” he said, “wishes nothing to intervene between nature and himself.”
Ramsauer, a pupil at Burgdorf, has described, not without some inaccuracy perhaps, the intuitive exercises which Pestalozzi offered to his pupils:—
“The exercises in language were the best we had, especially those which had reference to the wainscoting of the school-room. He spent whole hours before that wainscoting, very old and torn, busy in examining the holes and rents, with respect to number, form, position, and color, and in formulating our observations in sentences more or less developed. Then Pestalozzi would ask us, Boys, what do you see? (He never mentioned the girls.)
Pupil: I see a hole in the wainscoting.
Pestalozzi: Very well; repeat after me:—
I see a hole in the wainscoting.
I see a large hole in the wainscoting.
Through the hole I see the wall, etc., etc.”
505. The Book for Mothers.—In 1803 Pestalozzi published a work on elementary instruction, which remained unfinished, entitled The Book for Mothers. This was another Orbis Pictus without pictures. Pestalozzi’s intention was to introduce the child to a knowledge of the objects of nature or of art which fall under his observation. In this he tarried too long over the description of the organs of the body and of their functions. A French critic, Dussault, said, with reference to this:—
“Pestalozzi gives himself much trouble to teach children that their nose is in the middle of their face.” In his anxiety to be simple and elementary, Pestalozzi often succeeds in reality in making instruction puerile. On the other hand, the Père Girard complains that the exercises in language which compose The Book for Mothers, “really very well arranged, are also very dry and monotonous.”
506. A Swiss Teacher in 1793.—To form a just estimate of the efforts of Pestalozzi and his assistants, we must take into account the wretched state of instruction at the period when they attempted to reform the methods of teaching. Krüsi, Pestalozzi’s first assistant, one of those who were perhaps the nearest his heart, has himself related how he became a teacher. He was eighteen, and till then his only employment had been that of a peddler for his father. One day, as he was going about his business with a heavy load of merchandise on his shoulders, he meets on the road a revenue officer of the State, and they enter into conversation. “Do you know,” said the officer, “that the teacher of Gais is about to leave his school? Would you not like to succeed him?—It is not a question of what I would like; a school-master should have knowledge, in which I am absolutely lacking.—What a school-master can and should know with us, you might easily learn at your age.”—Krüsi reflected, went to work, and copied more than a hundred times a specimen of writing which he had procured; and he declares that this was his only preparation. He registered for examination. The day for the trial arrived.