“The greatest evil of our time, and the greatest and almost insurmountable obstacle to the operation of any thorough means is this, that the fathers and mothers of our time have almost universally lost the consciousness that they can do anything--everything--for the education of their children. This great falling away from their faith, of fathers and mothers, is the universal source of the superficial character of our means of education.... Fathers and mothers must, above all, learn to feel vividly how great an advantage--as intrusted by God and their own conscience with the duty of educating their own children--they enjoy over any others to be employed as assistants therein. And, for like reasons, it is indispensable that there should be a general public recognition of the fact that a child who has lost father and mother is still a poor, unfortunate orphan, even though his guardian can employ the first among all masters of education in the world to teach him” (1: p. 716). Then, where lies the source of the peculiar educative power of the home? We have seen before that the art of education consists in ministering an intelligent, loving help to the natural unfolding of the child’s powers. But this term “loving help” is really too weak, prosaic, and conventionalized to express its deep meaning. It is more than mere kindness, mere effort of good will, or sentimental affection that is meant. It is giving one’s whole self, giving one’s essence over into another’s to be absorbed there, and to become a new power. To use Pestalozzi’s own metaphor, it is like the sun whose light and warmth silently penetrate to the soil, and in whose light and warmth the plants grow, bud, and blossom, unconscious of its influence. This kind of loving help can the mother alone supply to her own children, by virtue of the natural endowment of a maternal heart, “the most gentle and the most intrepid power in the whole system of Nature” (1: p. 735). Love is understanding: a dutiful mother will easily “learn to distinguish and direct each faculty before it appears in a state of development sufficient to evidence its own existence” (1: p. 736)--the principal qualification for an educator. Love is _educative_ in the etymological sense of the word: it brings out what there is in the child into self-expression. A loving mother is able “to open children’s hearts, and their mouths, and to draw forth their understandings, as it were, from the hindermost corner” (1: p. 667)--the true tact of education. Pestalozzi compares the method of the ordinary schoolmaster with what he believes to be the method of maternal instinct in the following words: