In the important business of forming the human mind: the inclination and pleasure of the pupil should be consulted; in order to render lessons effectual, they should please, and be sought rather as indulgences, than avoided as laborious toils
Obtaining knowledge
Priscilla Wakefield asserted that there were four methods of obtaining knowledge:
observation, reading, conversation and meditation
and her own works were designed to promote each of these methods.

Kathryn Sutherland argues that it was not until the 1790s that women writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Catherine Macaulay, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Priscilla Wakefield finally turned the focus of women’s education away from the “mere accomplishments” esteemed in the conduct books like that of Fordyce toward “a wider political debate concerning the nature and membership of the state, patriotism, and social ethics”
A Tradition of Nonconformist Women Writers, 1650-1850 Timothy Whelan
There is no reason for maintaining any sexual distinctions in the bodily exercises of children; if it is right to give both sexes all the corporeal advantages, which nature has formed them to enjoy, let them both partake of the same rational means of obtaining a flow of health and animal spirits, to enable them to perform the stations of life. Let girls be no longer confined to sedentary employments in a nursery, or at best permitted to take a gentle walk in the garden, as an apology for more vigorous exertions
Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798): pp20-21.
Persephone Unbound: The Natural Environment, Human Well- Being and Gender, Explored in Selected Texts, 1775-1900

During the nineteenth century, rural surroundings continued to be represented as a healthy alternative to the claustrophobia of confined urban streets, associated with domestic strife and social disorder, and the exploitation suffered on the factory floor. Wakefield, for example, feared for the consequences of urban life upon children's development:[...]
Surely none can see the beauties of creation, and not admire them. Children brought up in crowded cities are to be pitied in this respect: they see scarcely any thing but the works of art, and they associate the ideas of beauty and value, to the production of the mechanical only.
 The narrator of Priscilla Wakefield's Instinct Displayed (1811) is  sensitive to the charge that some will find the pursuit of natural history idiosyncratic, banal or simply vulgar:

Our correspondence is  also a  subject of ridicule for [the Miss Ormonds]: they say we write about nothing but cats, and dogs, and magpies, and that our letters could only amuse a man who shows wild beasts at  a  fair. They have no eyes for the beauties of nature, or the wonders displayed in the dispositions in the various tribes of animals.
Wakefield extends her attention from the particular in order to consider instances of cruelty germane to a broader enquiry into social ills and well-being. Indicating that the treatment of animals is conditioned by both the biological 'provision of nature' and the cultural fact of 'education', Wakefield demonstrates awareness that attitudes towards other species are influenced by factors such as gender and class.
I shall be glad to hear that the nestlings in your garden have escaped the claws of cruel cats or any other annoyance,
and that you enjoy the daily pleasures of seeing them hop about the grass plots in the confidence of your friendship.
Teach the little ones to show kindness to every thing that has life.
Letter 20 May 1814