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.
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