The fruits of my short stay with Pestalozzi were as follows:—­

In the first place, I saw the whole training of a great educational institution, worked upon a clear and firmly-settled plan of teaching.  I still possess the “teaching-plan” of Pestalozzi’s institution in use at that time.  This teaching-plan contains, in my opinion, much that is excellent, somewhat also that is prejudicial.  Excellent, I thought, was the contrivance of the so-called “exchange classes."[44] In each subject the instruction was always given through the entire establishment at the same time.  Thus the subjects for teaching were settled for every class, but the pupils were distributed amongst the various classes according to their proficiency in the subject in hand, so that the whole body of pupils was redistributed in quite a distinct division for each subject.  The advantage of this contrivance struck me as so undeniable and so forcible that I have never since relinquished it in my educational work, nor could I now bring myself to do so.  The prejudicial side of the teaching-plan, against which I intuitively rebelled, although my own tendencies on the subject were as yet so vague and dim, lay, in my opinion, in its incompleteness and its onesidedness.  Several subjects of teaching and education highly important to the all-round harmonious development of a man seemed to me thrust far too much into the background, treated in step-motherly fashion, and superficially worked out.

The results of the arithmetical teaching astounded me, yet I could not follow it into its larger applications and wider extent.  The mechanical rules of this branch of instruction seemed to whirl me round and round as in a whirlpool.  The teacher was Kruesi.  The teaching, in spite of the brilliant results within its own circle, and in spite of the sharpness of the quickened powers of perception and comprehension in the children by which it attained those results, yet, to my personal taste, had something too positive in its setting forth, too mechanical in its reception.  And Josias Schmid[45] had already, even at that time, felt the imperfection of this branch of instruction.  He imparted to me the first ground-principles of his later work on the subject, and his ideas at once commanded my approval, for I saw they possessed two important properties, manysidedness and an exhaustive scientific basis.

The teaching of drawing was also very incomplete, especially in its first commencement; but drawing from right-angled prisms with equal sides, in various lengths, which was one of the exercises required at a later stage, and drawing other mathematical figures by means of which the comprehension of the forms of actual objects of every-day life might be facilitated were much more to my mind.  Schmid’s method of drawing had not yet appeared.