Following the principle of nature means that education should follow the natural development process of human beings, that is, considering the age characteristics and personality characteristics of students. He called on teachers to carefully study the characteristics of children's attention, memory and thinking; He believes that psychology is the foundation of educational science and educational experience is the source of educational development.
Following the principle of culture means that in education, we must pay attention to the conditions of the place and time where a person was born or will live in the future, and … pay attention to all modern cultures in its broad and all-encompassing sense, especially to learn the culture of the motherland. On the one hand, he pointed out that we must attach importance to children's nature, and at the same time advocated raising children to the height of modern human culture, and education should adapt to the requirements of changing social life.
Stilwell attaches great importance to developing students' intelligence and talents. He advocated that in the primary school stage, we should mainly focus on cultivating various skills, developing all kinds of intelligence and the ability to study textbooks independently. To this end, he pointed out that teachers should pay special attention to developing children's senses with intuitive teaching methods. The principle of intuition requires: starting from perceptual things, from perceptual things to concepts, from individual to general, from concrete to abstract, not the other way around! Teaching should be from rules to regulations, from near to far, from simple to complex, from easy to difficult, from known to unknown. He advocates the use of heuristic teaching methods to stimulate students' intelligence and enable them to explore, think, judge and discover. If students are used to simple acceptance or passive work, any method is not good; Any method is good as long as it can stimulate students' initiative. A bad teacher will reveal the truth, while a good teacher will teach people to discover the truth.
Stilwell also believes that teaching should promote people's all-round development and contribute to people's moral education. Successful teaching always has the nature of education, which not only develops children's intelligence, but also forms their whole personality: will, emotion and behavior. He closely combines discipline with teaching, and thinks that discipline is a tool to determine and adjust the order of students' activities, and also a tool to make students develop intellectually and morally and become perfect people.