International Review of Educational Cinematography (Jan-Dec 1932)

— 536 cho-mechanical laws, according to which our minds receive and retain more or less easily the impressions that come from outside. I based my explanations mainly on what appeals to the senses. From the moment that a child's senses are capable of receiving impressions from nature, nature educates it. " It was evident to me that it is unreasonable to make a child spell without having previously communicated many notions of things and words to it ; and the conviction persuaded me that the child has need betimes of a sound psychological guidance in order to accustom itself to a proper intuition of things. But as such guidance cannot be expected from the men of our day without the aid of art, I was necessarily brought to feel the need of books of intuition to precede the alphabet and make clear in the child's mind, by means of well carried out drawings, the ideas that we now attempt to communicate by word . Like Basedow in his Philanthropinwn, Pestalozzi endeavoured, in the schools that he managed, to make Rousseau's theories positive and concrete, in order the better to carry out the intimate aims of the new education, which the innovators placed not so much in the acquisition of a greater or lesser amount of knowledge as in the harmonious development of the intellectual, moral and physical faculties of the pupil. He made use to some extent of the principles laid down in Emile in the educationof his own son, observing his every tendency with loving care and giving a first example, in his Diary of a Father, of the critical inquiry to which the infant mind must be subjected in order to gam an intimate understanding of its needs, its aptitudes and its deficiencies, if we wish to satisfy the former and direct or repress the latter, and so obtain that harmonious development which alone can reasonably be expected to give the best results The educational problem has changed, become more intimate ; the teacher no longei treats the pupil as an adult in miniature, but, eliminating his own personality in order to identify himself more closely with the mind of the little one who is looking to him for enlightenment, he follows the latter's slow, progressive development, and uses it as his guide for the assimilation of the new notions with which he daily feeds it. The method, as we have seen, is strictly intuitive ; each new experiment strengthened Pestalozzi 's faith. One of the most interesting was the experiment carried out on a boy of three, in whose case it was necessary to use, instead of the letters of the alphabet, objects and pictures that enabled the child to express itself with exactitude in regard to the things that came within the circle of its knowledge. Pestalozzi made a list of the requirements of the new method, in various precepts : 1) Gradually enlarge the circle of the child's intuitions; 2) impress on its memory, in clear, precise and distinct characters, the intuitions which it already understands ; 3) teach it a language that embraces all the notions it has received from nature or art, or that it will receive from them in future ; " While these rules were being definitely formulated, I became by degrees convinced : 1) "of the necessity of books of intuition for children ; 2) " of the need that the explanations of such books should be clear and precise ; 3) " of the necessity of giving children, by means of these books, a familiar knowledge of rules and words before starting them on spelling. " It is an immense advantage for children, to have an extensive nomenclature at an early age. They never forget objects whose names they know and of which they have a clear idea, and a nomenclature founded on exactitude and truth strengthens and preserves a feeling of the relationship existing between different objects (1) ". (1) J. H. Pestalozzi : How Gertrud Taught her Children.