Thirty-Fourth Meeting

I certainly have reason to complain about things. It is not possible for you to prepare in the way you should. We first need to develop what can be fruitful in our methodology, otherwise we would slowly come to teach language such that what we fail to achieve by a better method is much worse than what we could partially achieve by a lesser method. We could easily slip into the calamity that because we do what is better poorly, we cannot keep up with what other schools achieve. In spite of that, I want to be perfectly clear that it is possible within the normal school day to achieve the ideal through rational work so that the children are spared tiring homework. Unfortunately, that is not of interest everywhere. In practice, certain things are still missing, and for that reason, I believe we must initiate a kind of modified homework. We do not want the children doing pages of arithmetic at home. However, we can give them literature and art history problems to solve at home. We should also encourage those who are more industrious and want to do something at home, but we should be clear that we do not want to overburden them. They should not feel they are groaning under the weight of their homework. They need to do it happily, in which case assigning them a task has a genuinely good influence. For instance, you could have them create an equation in the form of a short story, “A lady is asked.…”