§ 83. The grand change advocated by Pestalozzi was a change of _object_. The main object of the school should not be to _teach_ but to _develop_. § 84. This change of object naturally brings many changes with it. Measured by their capacity for acquiring school knowledge and skill young children may be considered, as one of H.M. Inspectors considered them, “the fag-end of the school.” But if the school exists not to teach but to develop, young children, instead of being the “fag-end,” become the most important part of all. In the development of all organisms more depends on the earlier than on the later stages; and there is no reason to doubt that this law holds in the case of human beings. On this account, from the days of Pestalozzi educational science has been greatly, I may say mainly, concerned with young children. For the dominating thought has been that the young human being is an undeveloped organism, and that in education that organism is developed. So the essence of Pestalozzianism lies not so much in its method as in its aim, not more in what it does than in what it endeavours to do. § 85. And thus it was that Pestalozzi (in Raumer’s words) “compelled the scholastic world to revise the whole of their task, to reflect on the nature and destiny of man, and also on the proper way of leading him from his youth towards that destiny.” And it was his love of his fellow-creatures that raised him to this standpoint. He was moved by “the enthusiasm of humanity.” Consumed with grief for the degradation of the Swiss peasantry, he never lost faith in their true dignity as men, and in the possibility of raising them to a condition worthy of it. He cast about for the best means of thus raising them, and decided that it could be effected, not by any improvement in their outward circumstances, but by an education which should make them what their Creator intended them to be, and should give them the use and the consciousness of all their inborn faculties. “From my youth up,” he says, “I felt what a high and indispensable human duty it is to labour for the poor and miserable; ... that he may attain to a consciousness of his own dignity through his feeling of the universal powers and endowments which he possesses awakened within him; that he may not only learn to gabble over by rote the religious maxim that ‘man is created in the image of God, and is bound to live and die as a child of God,’ but may himself experience its truth by virtue of the Divine power within him, so that he may be raised, not only above the ploughing oxen, but also above the man in purple and silk who lives unworthily of his high destiny” (Quoted in Barnard, p. 13).