§ 73. After Pestalozzi’s gloomy speech, the masters, with the exception of Schmid, urged Pestalozzi to apply for a Government inquiry into the state of the Institution. This Pestalozzi did, and Commissioners were appointed, among them an educationist, Père Girard of Freiburg, by whom the Report was drawn up. The Report was not favourable. Père Girard was by no means inclined to sit at the feet of Pestalozzi, as he had principles of his own. Pestalozzi, he thought, laid far too much stress on mathematics, and he drew from him a statement that everything taught to a child should seem as certain as that two and two made four. “Then,” said Girard, “if I had thirty children I would not intrust you with one of them. You could not teach him that I was his father.” Thus the Report, though very friendly in tone, was by no means friendly in spirit. The Commissioners simply compared the performances of the scholars with what pupils of the same age could do in good schools of the ordinary type, and Père Girard stated, though not in the Report, that the Institution was inferior to the Cantonal School of Aargau. But the comparison of these incommensurables only shews that Girard was not capable of understanding what was going on at Yverdun. Indeed, he asserts “not only that the mother-tongue was neglected,” but also that the children, “though they had reached a high pitch of excellence in abstract mathematics, were inconceivably weak in all ordinary practical calculations.” This is absurd. In Pestalozzian teaching the abstract never went before ordinary practical calculations. The good Father evidently blunders, and takes “head-reckoning” for abstract, and pen or pencil arithmetic for practical work. Reckoning with slate or paper is no doubt “ordinary,” but a distinction has often to be drawn between what is ordinary and what is practical.