When I entered at once into the closest direct relations with those forty tiny peasants that formed my school (I call them tiny peasants because I found in them the same characteristics of perspicacity, the same immense store of information from practical life, of jocularity, simplicity, and loathing for everything false, which distinguish the Russian peasant), when I saw that susceptibility, that readiness to acquire the information which they needed, I felt at once that the antiquated church method of instruction had outlived its usefulness and was not good for them. I began to experiment on other proposed methods of instruction; but, because compulsion in education, both by my conviction and by my character, are repulsive to me, I did not exercise any pressure, and, the moment I noticed that something was not readily received, I did not compel them, and looked for something else. From these experiments it appeared to me and to those teachers who instructed with me at Yásnaya Polyána and in other schools on the same principle of freedom, that nearly everything which in the pedagogical world was written about schools was separated by an immeasurable abyss from reality, and that many of the proposed methods, such as object-lessons, the natural sciences, the sound method, and others, called forth contempt and ridicule, and were not accepted by the pupils. We began to look for those contents and those methods which were readily taken up by the pupils, and struck that which forms my method of instruction.