Oh, why is it that man knows so ill and prizes so little the blessings that he possesses for the first time?

When I now seek to make myself clear as to the proper life and work of an educator, my notes of that time rise fresh and fair to meet me.  I look back from now into that childhood of my teacher’s life, and learn from it; just as I look back into the childhood of my man’s life, and survey that, and learn from that, too.  Why is all childhood and youth so full of wealth and so unconscious of it, and why does it lose it without knowing it only to learn what it possessed when it is for ever lost?  Ought this always to be so?  Ought it to be so for every child, for every youth?  Will not a time come at last, come perhaps soon, when the experience, the insight, the knowledge of age, and wisdom herself, shall build up a defence, a shelter, a protection for the childhood of youth?  Of what use to mankind is the old man’s experience and the greybeard’s wisdom when they sink into the grave with their possessors?

At first my life and my work with my pupils was confined within narrow limits.  It consisted in merely living, lounging, and strolling in the open air, and going for walks.  Although I was disgusted with the methods of town education, I did not yet venture to convert life amidst Nature into an educational course.  That was taught me by my young pupils themselves; and as from the circumstances of my own culture I eagerly fostered to my utmost every budding sense for Nature that showed itself, there soon developed amongst them a life-encompassing, life-giving, and life-raising enjoyment of natural objects.  In the following year[62] this way of life was further enhanced by the father giving his sons a piece of meadowland for a garden, at the cultivation of which we accordingly worked in common.  The greatest delight of my pupils was to make little presents of the produce of their garden to their parents and also to me.  How their eyes would gleam with pleasure when they were fortunate enough to be able to accomplish this.  Pretty plants and little shrubs from the fields, the great garden of God, were transplanted by us to the children’s gardens, and there carefully tended.  Great was the joy, especially of the two younger ones, when such a colonist frankly enrolled himself amongst the citizens of the state.  From this time forth my own childhood no longer seemed wasted.  I acknowledged how entirely different a thing is the cultivation of plants, to one who has watched them and studied them in all the stages of their own free development, from what it is to one who has always stood aloof from Nature.