He devoted himself to the organisation of schooling in Bavaria; he was school inspector for the Mindel district and displayed great activity in this field. His principal merit lies in the fact that he was the first practically to apply the pedagogical ideas of Sailer (q.v.) in his extensive and continuous activity as a writer of fables and stories aimed at the Catholic education of youth.
His stories, beginning with the earliest, written in epistolary form and published in 1806 under the title Das Glück der guten Erziehung, down to the Erzählungen für Kinder und Kinderfreunde (Landshut 1823-29, in 4 vols.), not only met with and continue to enjoy great success in Germany, but were translated into almost all European languages and many non-European ones (e.g., Arabic, Japanese, Chinese).
S. himself supervised a complete edition of them in 24 vols. from 1840. Alongside this activity as a writer for the young, S. wished to free the teaching of sacred history from all abstractions that rendered it excessively difficult for the simple minds of children to understand: in 1801, therefore, he published a biblical history suitable for them, Biblische Geschichte. Also highly esteemed were the textbooks he composed for Bavarian schools and published around 1840.