YDS READING PASSAGES / TEST 5 13. Soru

-5. MINIATURE ADULTS

Perhaps the best description of the children who attended earlier schools is by the English novelist Charles Dickens: Pale and worn-outfaced, lank and bony figures, children with the expressions of old men. . . . There was childhood with the light of its eyes quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining. It is no wonder then that Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's (1746-1827) school at Yverdon, Switzerland, created international attention and attracted thousands of European and American visitors from the educational circles. What they saw was a school for children - for real children, not miniature adults. They saw physically active children — running, jumping and playing. They saw small children learning the names of numbers by counting real objects and preparing to learn reading by playing with letter blocks. They saw older children engaged in object lessons — progressing in their study of geography from observing the area around the school, measuring it, making their own relief maps of it, and finally seeing a professionally executed map of it. This was the school and these were the methods developed by Pestalozzi in accordance with his belief that the goal of education should be the natural development of the individual child, and that educators should focus on the development of the child rather than on memorisation of subject matter that he was unable to understand. Pestalozzi's school also mirrored the idea that learning begins with firsthand observation of an object and moves gradually toward the remote and abstract realm of words and ideas. The teacher's job was to guide, not distort, the natural growth of the child by selecting his experiences and then directing those experiences toward the realm of ideas.

From the details in the passage, Pestalozzi's teaching method could be described as ------ .