ruction in the common school, beyond which few students went, consisted of the material in a relatively small number of books: assorted arithmetic, history, and geography texts, Webster's American Spelling Book, and two new books that appeared in 1836 the "First" and "Second" in the series of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers. Whereas The New England Primer admonished children against sin, the stories and poems in the readers pressed for the moral virtues. Countless children were required to memorize such admonitions as "Work while you work, play while you play. One thing each time, that is the way." In the early days, the common schools consisted of one room where one teacher taught pupils ranging in age from 6 to about 13 and sometimes older. The teacher instructed the children separately, not as a group. The good teacher had a strong right arm and an unshakable determination to cram information into his pupils. Once the fight to provide free education for all children had been won, educators turned their attention to the quality of that education. To find out more about learning and the learning process, American schools looked to Europe. In the 1860s, they discovered, and for about 20 years were influenced, by Pestalozzi. His belief was 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 memorization of subject matter that he or she 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. The general effect on the common schools was to shift the emphasis from memorization of abstract facts to the firsthand observa...
