[Sidenote: After the school was closed, he published his views.]
Nevertheless, his wider purpose of social reform by means of education was not allowed to languish altogether, for a friend shortly persuaded him to publish his views. His first production, _The Evening Hour of a Hermit_, embodied most of the educational principles he afterward made famous, but he was advised to put his thought into more popular form, and soon wrote his highly successful story of _Leonard and Gertrude_ (1781). This work, with subsequent additions, gives an account of the degraded social conditions in the Swiss village of ‘Bonnal’ and the changes wrought in them by one simple peasant woman. ‘Gertrude’ reforms her drunkard husband, educates her children, and causes the whole community to feel her influence and adopt her methods. When finally a wise schoolmaster comes to the village, he learns from Gertrude the proper conduct of the school and begs for her continued coöperation. Then the government becomes interested, studies the improvements that have taken place, and concludes that the whole country can be reformed in no better way than by imitating Bonnal.
[Sidenote: Having no other facilities, he instructed through ‘observation’ in]
[Sidenote: number, language, and other subjects,]
=His School at Stanz and Beginning of His Observational Methods.=--In 1798 he was given an opportunity to carry on his philanthropic and industrial ideals in education through the orphan home and school at Stanz, of which he was put in charge. Here he found it impossible to obtain any assistants, books, and materials, but he felt that none of these conventional aids could be of service in the work he desired to do. Hence he sought to instruct the children rather by experience and observation than by abstract statements and words (Fig. 33). This was the real beginning of his teaching through ‘observation,’ and, while at Stanz he further developed his correlation of intellectual with manual training, his observational methods were thereafter destined to be more stressed. Religion and morals, for example, were never taught by precepts, but through instances that arose in the lives of the children he showed them the value of self-control, charity, sympathy, and gratitude. In a similarly concrete way the pupils were instructed in number and language work by means of objects, and in geography and history by conversation rather than by books. While they did not learn their natural history primarily from nature, they were taught to corroborate what they had learned by their own observation. About this method he said: “According to my experience, success depends upon whether what is taught to children commends itself to them as true through being closely connected with their own observation. As a general rule, I attached little importance to the study of words, even when explanations of the ideas they represented were given.”