"It is abominable that even now our children have to read and sit and make the fundament the underpinning and base of their education. The book of _instruction_ does not make good to them the place of the instructor, nor the _amusing_ one that of more wholesome play. Poetry is for a _beardless_ age too unintelligible and unwholesome; the teacher who _reads a lecture_ must be a miserable one, if he does not far more emphatically _speak_. In short, no children's books!
"In a pedagogical album we should both write: Useless censure is worse than no censure at all. Faults which age takes away let not the teacher undertake to, who has more lasting ones to combat, etc. Let their catechism be Plutarch and Feddersen (only without his miserable style); _i. e_., no moralities, but narratives with a moral effect--and moreover, at no stated hour, but at the right one, so that the brains of my children may not be a _spelling-school_ of morals, but their heart may become an illuminated _Rotunda_[29] of virtue.
"Since a purblind, narrow, anxious propriety of behavior is the most stupid and unnatural, accordingly you teach the children the best by not enjoining upon them any: by nature they respect neither silver stars nor silver heads--do not wean them to any such.
"My greatest prayer is--which I have had printed many years beforehand--that you be the most jocose man in my house; merriment makes all fields of knowledge for children fields of sugar-cane. Mine must, while with you, have full liberty to jest, talk, sit at their _good pleasure_. We grown people, reasonable as we are, could not stand the abominable school-confinement of our offspring a week; and yet we expect it of them, with their brains and veins busy as swarming ant-hills. In brief: Is childhood, then, only the painful preparation-day for the _Sunday_ enjoyment of later age, or is it not rather itself a Sabbath eve, which brings its own joys? Ah, if we in this empty, drizzling life do not regard every _means as a nearer end_ (as well as every end a more distant means), what then do we find here below? Your principal (an abominable word) took as much pleasure in his betrothal as in his wedding.
"Playful instruction does not mean sparing and saving the child effort, but awakening in him a passion which shall compel and lighten for him the hardest. Now to this end no lugubrious passions are at all serviceable--_e. g_., fear of censure, of punishment, etc.--but only joyous ones; in play every girl in Scheerau would learn Arabic, if her lover wrote to her in no other language than in that synonymous one. Hope of praise (the praise of external distinctions alone excepted) is what harms children far less than censure, and something to which no child, least of all the best ones, can grow obdurate. I will tell you here what my own tutor made use of as an educational espalier: he stitched for himself a cipher-book; in this he gave each member of his lyceum (nineteen in all) for every task a large or small number; these numbers when they had reached a certain fixed sum, gained a letter of nobility or certificate of diligence, whereupon one took his praise home with him. Since rewards are ineffectual when they come _too often_ or only _from afar_, accordingly he, in this ingenious manner constructed the way to the remote reward out of daily little ones. We could, moreover, save up our numbers; and nothing so strongly holds children to diligence as a _growing property_ (or ciphers or of writing-books). The striking out of such numbers was a punishment. He thereby made us all so diligent, me particularly, that a few years after I was able to write a biography, which is even now being read.