Curiously enough most of these points of similarity are found in the views advocated by Rousseau, though it is only very recently that they have begun to enjoy anything more than a theoretical respect. The first point of similarity is the importance that is accorded to the physical welfare of the pupils. The necessity of insuring the health of all young people as the foundation on which to build other qualities and abilities, and the hopelessness of trying to build where the body is weak, ill-nourished, or uncontrolled, is now so well recognized that it has become a commonplace and needs only a passing mention here. Health is as important from the social point of view as from the individual, so that attention to it is doubly necessary to a successful community.
While all schools realize the importance of healthy pupils, the possibilities of using the activities of the child that are employed in giving him a strong healthy body, for general educational purposes, are not so well understood. As yet it is the pioneer in education who realizes the extent to which young children learn through the use of their bodies, and the impossibility of insuring general intelligence through a system which does not use the body to teach the mind and the mind to teach the body. This is simply a restatement of Rousseau’s proposition that the education of the young child rests largely on whether he is allowed to “develop naturally” or not. It has already been pointed out to what an extent Mrs. Johnson depends on the physical growth of her pupils as a tool for developing their intellectual ability, as well as the important part that muscular skill plays in the educational system of Madame Montessori. This seems not only reasonable but necessary when we think of the mere amount of movement, handling, and feeling of things that a baby must indulge in to understand the most familiar objects in its environment, and remember that the child and the adult learn with the same mental machinery as the very small child. There is no difference in the way the organism works after it is able to talk and walk; the difference lies in the greater complexity of activities which is made possible by the preliminary exercises. Modern psychology has pointed out the fact that the native instincts of a human being are his tools for learning. Instincts all express themselves through the body; therefore education which stifles bodily activities, stifles instincts, and so prevents the natural method of learning. To the extent of making an educational application of this fact, all the schools described are using the physical activities of their pupils, and so the means of their physical development, as instruments for training powers of judgment and right thinking. That is to say the pupils are learning by doing. Aside from the psychological reasons for teaching by this method, it is the logical consequence of a realization of the importance of the physical welfare of the child, and necessarily brings changes in the material of the schoolroom.