.
To all who ever reflected upon education it must have occurred that facts and experiments were wanting in this department of knowledge, while assertions and theories abounded.

I claim for my father the merit of having been the first to recommend, both by example and precept, what Bacon would call the experimental method in education.
If I were obliged to rest on any single point my father's credit as a lover of truth, and his utility as a philanthropist and as a philosophical writer, it should be on his having made this first record of experiments in education.

...

In noting anecdotes of children, the greatest care must be taken that the pupils should not know that any such register is kept.

Want of care in this particular would totally defeat the object in view, and would lead to many and irremediable bad consequences, and would make the children affected and false, or would create a degree of embarrassment and constraint which must prevent the natural action of the understanding or the feelings.