Author's
Preface
This collection of scattered thoughts and observations has little
order or continuity; it was begun to give pleasure to a good mother
who thinks for herself. My first idea was to write a tract a few
pages long, but I was carried away by my subject, and before I
knew what I was doing my tract had become a kind of book, too
large indeed for the matter contained in it, but too small for
the subject of which it treats. For a long time I hesitated whether
to publish it or not, and I have often felt, when at work upon
it, that it is one thing to publish a few pamphlets and another
to write a book. After vain attempts to improve it, I have decided
that it is my duty to publish it as it stands. I consider that
public attention requires to be directed to this subject, and
even if my own ideas are mistaken, my time will not have been
wasted if I stir up others to form right ideas. A solitary who
casts his writings before the public without any one to advertise
them, without any party ready to defend them, one who does not
even know what is thought and said about those writings, is at
least free from one anxiety--if he is mistaken, no one will take
his errors for gospel.
I shall say very little about the value of a good education, nor
shall I stop to prove that the customary method of education is
bad; this has been done again and again, and I do not wish to
fill my book with things which everyone knows. I will merely state
that, go as far back as you will, you will find a continual outcry
against the established method, but no attempt to suggest a better.
The literature and science of our day tend rather to destroy than
to build up. We find fault after the manner of a master; to suggest,
we must adopt another style, a style less in accordance with the
pride of the philosopher. In spite of all those books, whose only
aim, so they say, is public utility, the most useful of all arts,
the art of training men, is still neglected. Even after Locke's
book was written the subject remained almost untouched, and I
fear that my book will leave it pretty much as it found it.
We know nothing of childhood; and with our mistaken notions the
further we advance the further we go astray. The wisest writers
devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking
what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for
the man in the child, without considering what he is before he
becomes a man. It is to this study that I have chiefly devoted
myself, so that if my method is fanciful and unsound, my observations
may still be of service. I may be greatly mistaken as to what
ought to be done, but I think I have clearly perceived the material
which is to be worked upon. Begin thus by making a more careful
study of your scholars, for it is clear that you know nothing
about them; yet if you read this book with that end in view, I
think you will find that it is not entirely useless.
With regard to what will be called the systematic portion of the
book, which is nothing more than the course of nature, it is here
that the reader will probably go wrong, and no doubt I shall be
attacked on this side, and perhaps my critics may be right. You
will tell me, "This is not so much a treatise on education
as the visions of a dreamer with regard to education." What
can I do? I have not written about other people's ideas of education,
but about my own. My thoughts are not those of others; this reproach
has been brought against me again and again. But is it within
my power to furnish myself with other eyes, or to adopt other
ideas? It is within my power to refuse to be wedded to my own
opinions and to refuse to think myself wiser than others. I cannot
change my mind; I can distrust myself. This is all I can do, and
this I have done. If I sometimes adopt a confident tone, it is
not to impress the reader, it is to make my meaning plain to him.
Why should I profess to suggest as doubtful that which is not
a matter of doubt to myself? I say just what I think.
When I freely express my opinion, I have so little idea of claiming
authority that I always give my reasons, so that you may weigh
and judge them for yourselves; but though I would not obstinately
defend my ideas, I think it my duty to put them forward; for the
principles with regard to which I differ from other writers are
not matters of indifference; we must know whether they are true
or false, for on them depends the happiness or the misery of mankind.
People are always telling me to make PRACTICABLE suggestions.
You might as well tell me to suggest what people are doing already,
or at least to suggest improvements which may be incorporated
with the wrong methods at present in use. There are matters with
regard to which such a suggestion is far more chimerical than
my own, for in such a connection the good is corrupted and the
bad is none the better for it. I would rather follow exactly the
established method than adopt a better method by halves. There
would be fewer contradictions in the man; he cannot aim at one
and the same time at two different objects. Fathers and mothers,
what you desire that you can do. May I count on your goodwill?
There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme.
In the first place, "Is it good in itself" In the second,
"Can it be easily put into practice?"
With regard to the first of these it is enough that the scheme
should be intelligible and feasible in itself, that what is good
in it should be adapted to the nature of things, in this case,
for example, that the proposed method of education should be suitable
to man and adapted to the human heart.
The second consideration depends upon certain given conditions
in particular cases; these conditions are accidental and therefore
variable; they may vary indefinitely. Thus one kind of education
would be possible in Switzerland and not in France; another would
be adapted to the middle classes but not to the nobility. The
scheme can be carried out, with more or less success, according
to a multitude of circumstances, and its results can only be determined
by its special application to one country or another, to this
class or that. Now all these particular applications are not essential
to my subject, and they form no part of my scheme. It is enough
for me that, wherever men are born into the world, my suggestions
with regard to them may be carried out, and when you have made
them what I would have them be, you have done what is best for
them and best for other people. If I fail to fulfil this promise,
no doubt I am to blame; but if I fulfil my promise, it is your
own fault if you ask anything more of me, for I have promised
you nothing more.
BOOK I
God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become
evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one
tree to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time,
place, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse,
and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all
that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature
made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a
saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees
in his garden. Yet things would be worse without this education,
and mankind cannot be made by halves. Under existing conditions
a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than
the rest. Prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social
conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in him
and put nothing in her place. She would be like a sapling chance
sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and
soon crushed by the passers-by.
Tender, anxious mother, [Footnote: The earliest education is most
important and it undoubtedly is woman's work. If the author of
nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them
milk to feed the child. Address your treatises on education to
the women, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely
than men, not only is their influence always predominant in education,
its success concerns them more nearly, for most widows are at
the mercy of their children, who show them very plainly whether
their education was good or bad. The laws, always more concerned
about property than about people, since their object is not virtue
but peace, the laws give too little authority to the mother. Yet
her position is more certain than that of the father, her duties
are more trying; the right ordering of the family depends more
upon her, and she is usually fonder of her children. There are
occasions when a son may be excused for lack of respect for his
father, but if a child could be so unnatural as to fail in respect
for the mother who bore him and nursed him at her breast, who
for so many years devoted herself to his care, such a monstrous
wretch should be smothered at once as unworthy to live. You say
mothers spoil their children, and no doubt that is wrong, but
it is worse to deprave them as you do. The mother wants her child
to be happy now. She is right, and if her method is wrong, she
must be taught a better. Ambition, avarice, tyranny, the mistaken
foresight of fathers, their neglect, their harshness, are a hundredfold
more harmful to the child than the blind affection of the mother.
Moreover, I must explain what I mean by a mother and that explanation
follows.] I appeal to you. You can remove this young tree from
the highway and shield it from the crushing force of social conventions.
Tend and water it ere it dies. One day its fruit will reward your
care. From the outset raise a wall round your child's soul; another
may sketch the plan, you alone should carry it into execution.
Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. If a man
were born tall and strong, his size and strength would be of no
good to him till he had learnt to use them; they would even harm
him by preventing others from coming to his aid; [Footnote: Like
them in externals, but without speech and without the ideas which
are expressed by speech, he would be unable to make his wants
known, while there would be nothing in his appearance to suggest
that he needed their help.] left to himself he would die of want
before he knew his needs. We lament the helplessness of infancy;
we fail to perceive that the race would have perished had not
man begun by being a child.
We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish,
we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when
we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.
This education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things.
The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education
of nature, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education
of men, what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is
the education of things.
Thus we are each taught by three masters. If their teaching conflicts,
the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace with himself;
if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his goal, he lives
at peace with himself, he is well-educated.
Now of these three factors in education nature is wholly beyond
our control, things are only partly in our power; the education
of men is the only one controlled by us; and even here our power
is largely illusory, for who can hope to direct every word and
deed of all with whom the child has to do.
Viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible,
since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control.
Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune
must favour us if we are to reach it.
What is this goal? As we have just shown, it is the goal of nature.
Since all three modes of education must work together, the two
that we can control must follow the lead of that which is beyond
our control. Perhaps this word Nature has too vague a meaning.
Let us try to define it.
Nature, we are told, is merely habit. What does that mean? Are
there not habits formed under compulsion, habits which never stifle
nature? Such, for example, are the habits of plants trained horizontally.
The plant keeps its artificial shape, but the sap has not changed
its course, and any new growth the plant may make will be vertical.
It is the same with a man's disposition; while the conditions
remain the same, habits, even the least natural of them, hold
good; but change the conditions, habits vanish, nature reasserts
herself. Education itself is but habit, for are there not people
who forget or lose their education and others who keep it? Whence
comes this difference? If the term nature is to be restricted
to habits conformable to nature we need say no more.
We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected
in various ways by our environment. As soon as we become conscious
of our sensations we tend to seek or shun the things that cause
them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because
they suit us or not, and at last because of judgments formed by
means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives
us. These tendencies gain strength and permanence with the growth
of reason, but hindered by our habits they are more or less warped
by our prejudices. Before this change they are what I call Nature
within us.
Everything should therefore be brought into harmony with these
natural tendencies, and that might well be if our three modes
of education merely differed from one another; but what can be
done when they conflict, when instead of training man for himself
you try to train him for others? Harmony becomes impossible. Forced
to combat either nature or society, you must make your choice
between the man and the citizen, you cannot train both.
The smaller social group, firmly united in itself and dwelling
apart from others, tends to withdraw itself from the larger society.
Every patriot hates foreigners; they are only men, and nothing
to him.[Footnote: Thus the wars of republics are more cruel than
those of monarchies. But if the wars of kings are less cruel,
their peace is terrible; better be their foe than their subject.]
This defect is inevitable, but of little importance. The great
thing is to be kind to our neighbours. Among strangers the Spartan
was selfish, grasping, and unjust, but unselfishness, justice,
and harmony ruled his home life. Distrust those cosmopolitans
who search out remote duties in their books and neglect those
that lie nearest. Such philosophers will love the Tartars to avoid
loving their neighbour.
The natural man lives for himself; he is the unit, the whole,
dependent only on himself and on his like. The citizen is but
the numerator of a fraction, whose value depends on its denominator;
his value depends upon the whole, that is, on the community. Good
social institutions are those best fitted to make a man unnatural,
to exchange his independence for dependence, to merge the unit
in the group, so that he no longer regards himself as one, but
as a part of the whole, and is only conscious of the common life.
A citizen of Rome was neither Caius nor Lucius, he was a Roman;
he ever loved his country better than his life. The captive Regulus
professed himself a Carthaginian; as a foreigner he refused to
take his seat in the Senate except at his master's bidding. He
scorned the attempt to save his life. He had his will, and returned
in triumph to a cruel death. There is no great likeness between
Regulus and the men of our own day.
The Spartan Pedaretes presented himself for admission to the council
of the Three Hundred and was rejected; he went away rejoicing
that there were three hundred Spartans better than himself. I
suppose he was in earnest; there is no reason to doubt it. That
was a citizen.
A Spartan mother had five sons with the army. A Helot arrived;
trembling she asked his news. "Your five sons are slain."
"Vile slave, was that what I asked thee?" "We have
won the victory." She hastened to the temple to render thanks
to the gods. That was a citizen.
He who would preserve the supremacy of natural feelings in social
life knows not what he asks. Ever at war with himself, hesitating
between his wishes and his duties, he will be neither a man nor
a citizen. He will be of no use to himself nor to others. He will
be a man of our day, a Frenchman, an Englishman, one of the great
middle class.
To be something, to be himself, and always at one with himself,
a man must act as he speaks, must know what course he ought to
take, and must follow that course with vigour and persistence.
When I meet this miracle it will be time enough to decide whether
he is a man or a citizen, or how he contrives to be both.
Two conflicting types of educational systems spring from these
conflicting aims. One is public and common to many, the other
private and domestic.
If you wish to know what is meant by public education, read Plato's
Republic. Those who merely judge books by their titles take this
for a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education
ever written.
In popular estimation the Platonic Institute stands for all that
is fanciful and unreal. For my own part I should have thought
the system of Lycurgus far more impracticable had he merely committed
it to writing. Plato only sought to purge man's heart; Lycurgus
turned it from its natural course.
The public institute does not and cannot exist, for there is neither
country nor patriot. The very words should be struck out of our
language. The reason does not concern us at present, so that though
I know it I refrain from stating it.
I do not consider our ridiculous colleges [Footnote: There are
teachers dear to me in many schools and especially in the University
of Paris, men for whom I have a great respect, men whom I believe
to be quite capable of instructing young people, if they were
not compelled to follow the established custom. I exhort one of
them to publish the scheme of reform which he has thought out.
Perhaps people would at length seek to cure the evil if they realised
that there was a remedy.] as public institutes, nor do I include
under this head a fashionable education, for this education facing
two ways at once achieves nothing. It is only fit to turn out
hypocrites, always professing to live for others, while thinking
of themselves alone. These professions, however, deceive no one,
for every one has his share in them; they are so much labour wasted.
Our inner conflicts are caused by these contradictions. Drawn
this way by nature and that way by man, compelled to yield to
both forces, we make a compromise and reach neither goal. We go
through life, struggling and hesitating, and die before we have
found peace, useless alike to ourselves and to others.
There remains the education of the home or of nature; but how
will a man live with others if he is educated for himself alone?
If the twofold aims could be resolved into one by removing the
man's self-contradictions, one great obstacle to his happiness
would be gone. To judge of this you must see the man full-grown;
you must have noted his inclinations, watched his progress, followed
his steps; in a word you must really know a natural man. When
you have read this work, I think you will have made some progress
in this inquiry.
What must be done to train this exceptional man! We can do much,
but the chief thing is to prevent anything being done. To sail
against the wind we merely follow one tack and another; to keep
our position in a stormy sea we must cast anchor. Beware, young
pilot, lest your boat slip its cable or drag its anchor before
you know it.
In the social order where each has his own place a man must be
educated for it. If such a one leave his own station he is fit
for nothing else. His education is only useful when fate agrees
with his parents' choice; if not, education harms the scholar,
if only by the prejudices it has created. In Egypt, where the
son was compelled to adopt his father's calling, education had
at least a settled aim; where social grades remain fixed, but
the men who form them are constantly changing, no one knows whether
he is not harming his son by educating him for his own class.
In the natural order men are all equal and their common calling
is that of manhood, so that a well-educated man cannot fail to
do well in that calling and those related to it. It matters little
to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or
the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called
him to be a man. Life is the trade I would teach him. When he
leaves me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier,
nor a priest; he will be a man. All that becomes a man he will
learn as quickly as another. In vain will fate change his station,
he will always be in his right place. "Occupavi te, fortuna,
atque cepi; omnes-que aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare
non posses." The real object of our study is man and his
environment. To my mind those of us who can best endure the good
and evil of life are the best educated; hence it follows that
true education consists less in precept than in practice. We begin
to learn when we begin to live; our education begins with ourselves,
our first teacher is our nurse. The ancients used the word "Education"
in a different sense, it meant "Nurture." "Educit
obstetrix," says Varro. "Educat nutrix, instituit paedagogus,
docet magister." Thus, education, discipline, and instruction
are three things as different in their purpose as the dame, the
usher, and the teacher. But these distinctions are undesirable
and the child should only follow one guide.
We must therefore look at the general rather than the particular,
and consider our scholar as man in the abstract, man exposed to
all the changes and chances of mortal life. If men were born attached
to the soil of our country, if one season lasted all the year
round, if every man's fortune were so firmly grasped that he could
never lose it, then the established method of education would
have certain advantages; the child brought up to his own calling
would never leave it, he could never have to face the difficulties
of any other condition. But when we consider the fleeting nature
of human affairs, the restless and uneasy spirit of our times,
when every generation overturns the work of its predecessor, can
we conceive a more senseless plan than to educate a child as if
he would never leave his room, as if he would always have his
servants about him? If the wretched creature takes a single step
up or down he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear pain;
it is training him to feel it.
People think only of preserving their child's life; this is not
enough, he must be taught to preserve his own life when he is
a man, to bear the buffets of fortune, to brave wealth and poverty,
to live at need among the snows of Iceland or on the scorching
rocks of Malta. In vain you guard against death; he must needs
die; and even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they
are mistaken. Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life
is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our
faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of
our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen
sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never
have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control,
constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave.
The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed
down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our
institutions.
I am told that many midwives profess to improve the shape of the
infant's head by rubbing, and they are allowed to do it. Our heads
are not good enough as God made them, they must be moulded outside
by the nurse and inside by the philosopher. The Caribs are better
off than we are. The child has hardly left the mother's womb,
it has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs, when it is
deprived of its freedom. It is wrapped in swaddling bands, laid
down with its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms
by its sides; it is wound round with linen and bandages of all
sorts so that it cannot move. It is fortunate if it has room to
breathe, and it is laid on its side so that water which should
flow from its mouth can escape, for it is not free to turn its
head on one side for this purpose.
The new-born child requires to stir and stretch his limbs to free
them from the stiffness resulting from being curled up so long.
His limbs are stretched indeed, but he is not allowed to move
them. Even the head is confined by a cap. One would think they
were afraid the child should look as if it were alive.
Thus the internal impulses which should lead to growth find an
insurmountable obstacle in the way of the necessary movements.
The child exhausts his strength in vain struggles, or he gains
strength very slowly. He was freer and less constrained in the
womb; he has gained nothing by birth.
The inaction, the constraint to which the child's limbs are subjected
can only check the circulation of the blood and humours; it can
only hinder the child's growth in size and strength, and injure
its constitution. Where these absurd precautions are absent, all
the men are tall, strong, and well-made. Where children are swaddled,
the country swarms with the hump-backed, the lame, the bow-legged,
the rickety, and every kind of deformity. In our fear lest the
body should become deformed by free movement, we hasten to deform
it by putting it in a press. We make our children helpless lest
they should hurt themselves.
Is not such a cruel bondage certain to affect both health and
temper? Their first feeling is one of pain and suffering; they
find every necessary movement hampered; more miserable than a
galley slave, in vain they struggle, they become angry, they cry.
Their first words you say are tears. That is so. From birth you
are always checking them, your first gifts are fetters, your first
treatment, torture. Their voice alone is free; why should they
not raise it in complaint? They cry because you are hurting them;
if you were swaddled you would cry louder still.
What is the origin of this senseless and unnatural custom? Since
mothers have despised their first duty and refused to nurse their
own children, they have had to be entrusted to hired nurses. Finding
themselves the mothers of a stranger's children, without the ties
of nature, they have merely tried to save themselves trouble.
A child unswaddled would need constant watching; well swaddled
it is cast into a corner and its cries are unheeded. So long as
the nurse's negligence escapes notice, so long as the nursling
does not break its arms or legs, what matter if it dies or becomes
a weakling for life. Its limbs are kept safe at the expense of
its body, and if anything goes wrong it is not the nurse's fault.
These gentle mothers, having got rid of their babies, devote themselves
gaily to the pleasures of the town. Do they know how their children
are being treated in the villages? If the nurse is at all busy,
the child is hung up on a nail like a bundle of clothes and is
left crucified while the nurse goes leisurely about her business.
Children have been found in this position purple in the face,
their tightly bandaged chest forbade the circulation of the blood,
and it went to the head; so the sufferer was considered very quiet
because he had not strength to cry. How long a child might survive
under such conditions I do not know, but it could not be long.
That, I fancy, is one of the chief advantages of swaddling clothes.
It is maintained that unswaddled infants would assume faulty positions
and make movements which might injure the proper development of
their limbs. That is one of the empty arguments of our false wisdom
which has never been confirmed by experience. Out of all the crowds
of children who grow up with the full use of their limbs among
nations wiser than ourselves, you never find one who hurts himself
or maims himself; their movements are too feeble to be dangerous,
and when they assume an injurious position, pain warns them to
change it.
We have not yet decided to swaddle our kittens and puppies; are
they any the worse for this neglect? Children are heavier, I admit,
but they are also weaker. They can scarcely move, how could they
hurt themselves! If you lay them on their backs, they will lie
there till they die, like the turtle, unable to turn itself over.
Not content with having ceased to suckle their children, women
no longer wish to do it; with the natural result motherhood becomes
a burden; means are found to avoid it. They will destroy their
work to begin it over again, and they thus turn to the injury
of the race the charm which was given them for its increase. This
practice, with other causes of depopulation, forbodes the coming
fate of Europe. Her arts and sciences, her philosophy and morals,
will shortly reduce her to a desert. She will be the home of wild
beasts, and her inhabitants will hardly have changed for the worse.
I have sometimes watched the tricks of young wives who pretend
that they wish to nurse their own children. They take care to
be dissuaded from this whim. They contrive that husbands, doctors,
and especially mothers should intervene. If a husband should let
his wife nurse her own baby it would be the ruin of him; they
would make him out a murderer who wanted to be rid of her. A prudent
husband must sacrifice paternal affection to domestic peace. Fortunately
for you there are women in the country districts more continent
than your wives. You are still more fortunate if the time thus
gained is not intended for another than yourself.
There can be no doubt about a wife's duty, but, considering the
contempt in which it is held, it is doubtful whether it is not
just as good for the child to be suckled by a stranger. This is
a question for the doctors to settle, and in my opinion they have
settled it according to the women's wishes, [Footnote: The league
between the women and the doctors has always struck me as one
of the oddest things in Paris. The doctors' reputation depends
on the women, and by means of the doctors the women get their
own way. It is easy to see what qualifications a doctor requires
in Paris if he is to become celebrated.] and for my own part I
think it is better that the child should suck the breast of a
healthy nurse rather than of a petted mother, if he has any further
evil to fear from her who has given him birth.
Ought the question, however, to be considered only from the physiological
point of view? Does not the child need a mother's care as much
as her milk? Other women, or even other animals, may give him
the milk she denies him, but there is no substitute for a mother's
love.
The woman who nurses another's child in place of her own is a
bad mother; how can she be a good nurse? She may become one in
time; use will overcome nature, but the child may perish a hundred
times before his nurse has developed a mother's affection for
him.
And this affection when developed has its drawbacks, which should
make any feeling woman afraid to put her child out to nurse. Is
she prepared to divide her mother's rights, or rather to abdicate
them in favour of a stranger; to see her child loving another
more than herself; to feel that the affection he retains for his
own mother is a favour, while his love for his foster-mother is
a duty; for is not some affection due where there has been a mother's
care?
To remove this difficulty, children are taught to look down on
their nurses, to treat them as mere servants. When their task
is completed the child is withdrawn or the nurse is dismissed.
Her visits to her foster-child are discouraged by a cold reception.
After a few years the child never sees her again. The mother expects
to take her place, and to repair by her cruelty the results of
her own neglect. But she is greatly mistaken; she is making an
ungrateful foster-child, not an affectionate son; she is teaching
him ingratitude, and she is preparing him to despise at a later
day the mother who bore him, as he now despises his nurse.
How emphatically would I speak if it were not so hopeless to keep
struggling in vain on behalf of a real reform. More depends on
this than you realise. Would you restore all men to their primal
duties, begin with the mothers; the results will surprise you.
Every evil follows in the train of this first sin; the whole moral
order is disturbed, nature is quenched in every breast, the home
becomes gloomy, the spectacle of a young family no longer stirs
the husband's love and the stranger's reverence. The mother whose
children are out of sight wins scanty esteem; there is no home
life, the ties of nature are not strengthened by those of habit;
fathers, mothers, children, brothers, and sisters cease to exist.
They are almost strangers; how should they love one another? Each
thinks of himself first. When the home is a gloomy solitude pleasure
will be sought elsewhere.
But when mothers deign to nurse their own children, then will
be a reform in morals; natural feeling will revive in every heart;
there will be no lack of citizens for the state; this first step
by itself will restore mutual affection. The charms of home are
the best antidote to vice. The noisy play of children, which we
thought so trying, becomes a delight; mother and father rely more
on each other and grow dearer to one another; the marriage tie
is strengthened. In the cheerful home life the mother finds her
sweetest duties and the father his pleasantest recreation. Thus
the cure of this one evil would work a wide-spread reformation;
nature would regain her rights. When women become good mothers,
men will be good husbands and fathers.
My words are vain! When we are sick of worldly pleasures we do
not return to the pleasures of the home. Women have ceased to
be mothers, they do not and will not return to their duty. Could
they do it if they would? The contrary custom is firmly established;
each would have to overcome the opposition of her neighbours,
leagued together against the example which some have never given
and others do not desire to follow.
Yet there are still a few young women of good natural disposition
who refuse to be the slaves of fashion and rebel against the clamour
of other women, who fulfil the sweet task imposed on them by nature.
Would that the reward in store for them might draw others to follow
their example. My conclusion is based upon plain reason, and upon
facts I have never seen disputed; and I venture to promise these
worthy mothers the firm and steadfast affection of their husbands
and the truly filial love of their children and the respect of
all the world. Child-birth will be easy and will leave no ill-results,
their health will be strong and vigorous, and they will see their
daughters follow their example, and find that example quoted as
a pattern to others.
No mother, no child; their duties are reciprocal, and when ill
done by the one they will be neglected by the other. The child
should love his mother before he knows what he owes her. If the
voice of instinct is not strengthened by habit it soon dies, the
heart is still-born. From the outset we have strayed from the
path of nature.
There is another by-way which may tempt our feet from the path
of nature. The mother may lavish excessive care on her child instead
of neglecting him; she may make an idol of him; she may develop
and increase his weakness to prevent him feeling it; she wards
off every painful experience in the hope of withdrawing him from
the power of nature, and fails to realise that for every trifling
ill from which she preserves him the future holds in store many
accidents and dangers, and that it is a cruel kindness to prolong
the child's weakness when the grown man must bear fatigue.
Thetis, so the story goes, plunged her son in the waters of Styx
to make him invulnerable. The truth of this allegory is apparent.
The cruel mothers I speak of do otherwise; they plunge their children
into softness, and they are preparing suffering for them, they
open the way to every kind of ill, which their children will not
fail to experience after they grow up.
Fix your eyes on nature, follow the path traced by her. She keeps
children at work, she hardens them by all kinds of difficulties,
she soon teaches them the meaning of pain and grief. They cut
their teeth and are feverish, sharp colics bring on convulsions,
they are choked by fits of coughing and tormented by worms, evil
humours corrupt the blood, germs of various kinds ferment in it,
causing dangerous eruptions. Sickness and danger play the chief
part in infancy. One half of the children who are born die before
their eighth year. The child who has overcome hardships has gained
strength, and as soon as he can use his life he holds it more
securely.
This is nature's law; why contradict it? Do you not see that in
your efforts to improve upon her handiwork you are destroying
it; her cares are wasted? To do from without what she does within
is according to you to increase the danger twofold. On the contrary,
it is the way to avert it; experience shows that children delicately
nurtured are more likely to die. Provided we do not overdo it,
there is less risk in using their strength than in sparing it.
Accustom them therefore to the hardships they will have to face;
train them to endure extremes of temperature, climate, and condition,
hunger, thirst, and weariness. Dip them in the waters of Styx.
Before bodily habits become fixed you may teach what habits you
will without any risk, but once habits are established any change
is fraught with peril. A child will bear changes which a man cannot
bear, the muscles of the one are soft and flexible, they take
whatever direction you give them without any effort; the muscles
of the grown man are harder and they only change their accustomed
mode of action when subjected to violence. So we can make a child
strong without risking his life or health, and even if there were
some risk, it should not be taken into consideration. Since human
life is full of dangers, can we do better than face them at a
time when they can do the least harm?
A child's worth increases with his years. To his personal value
must be added the cost of the care bestowed upon him. For himself
there is not only loss of life, but the consciousness of death.
We must therefore think most of his future in our efforts for
his preservation. He must be protected against the ills of youth
before he reaches them: for if the value of life increases until
the child reaches an age when he can be useful, what madness to
spare some suffering in infancy only to multiply his pain when
he reaches the age of reason. Is that what our master teaches
us!
Man is born to suffer; pain is the means of his preservation.
His childhood is happy, knowing only pain of body. These bodily
sufferings are much less cruel, much less painful, than other
forms of suffering, and they rarely lead to self-destruction.
It is not the twinges of gout which make a man kill himself, it
is mental suffering that leads to despair. We pity the sufferings
of childhood; we should pity ourselves; our worst sorrows are
of our own making.
The new-born infant cries, his early days are spent in crying.
He is alternately petted and shaken by way of soothing him; sometimes
he is threatened, sometimes beaten, to keep him quiet. We do what
he wants or we make him do what we want, we submit to his whims
or subject him to our own. There is no middle course; he must
rule or obey. Thus his earliest ideas are those of the tyrant
or the slave. He commands before he can speak, he obeys before
he can act, and sometimes he is punished for faults before he
is aware of them, or rather before they are committed. Thus early
are the seeds of evil passions sown in his young heart. At a later
day these are attributed to nature, and when we have taken pains
to make him bad we lament his badness.
In this way the child passes six or seven years in the hands of
women, the victim of his own caprices or theirs, and after they
have taught him all sorts of things, when they have burdened his
memory with words he cannot understand, or things which are of
no use to him, when nature has been stifled by the passions they
have implanted in him, this sham article is sent to a tutor. The
tutor completes the development of the germs of artificiality
which he finds already well grown, he teaches him everything except
self-knowledge and self-control, the arts of life and happiness.
When at length this infant slave and tyrant, crammed with knowledge
but empty of sense, feeble alike in mind and body, is flung upon
the world, and his helplessness, his pride, and his other vices
are displayed, we begin to lament the wretchedness and perversity
of mankind. We are wrong; this is the creature of our fantasy;
the natural man is cast in another mould.
Would you keep him as nature made him? Watch over him from his
birth. Take possession of him as soon as he comes into the world
and keep him till he is a man; you will never succeed otherwise.
The real nurse is the mother and the real teacher is the father.
Let them agree in the ordering of their duties as well as in their
method, let the child pass from one to the other. He will be better
educated by a sensible though ignorant father than by the cleverest
master in the world. For zeal will atone for lack of knowledge,
rather than knowledge for lack of zeal. But the duties of public
and private business! Duty indeed! Does a father's duty come last.
[Footnote: When we read in Plutarch that Cato the Censor, who
ruled Rome with such glory, brought up his own sons from the cradle,
and so carefully that he left everything to be present when their
nurse, that is to say their mother, bathed them; when we read
in Suetonius that Augustus, the master of the world which he had
conquered and which he himself governed, himself taught his grandsons
to write, to swim, to understand the beginnings of science, and
that he always had them with him, we cannot help smiling at the
little people of those days who amused themselves with such follies,
and who were too ignorant, no doubt, to attend to the great affairs
of the great people of our own time.] It is not surprising that
the man whose wife despises the duty of suckling her child should
despise its education. There is no more charming picture than
that of family life; but when one feature is wanting the whole
is marred. If the mother is too delicate to nurse her child, the
father will be too busy to teach him. Their children, scattered
about in schools, convents, and colleges, will find the home of
their affections elsewhere, or rather they will form the habit
of oaring for nothing. Brothers and sisters will scarcely know
each other; when they are together in company they will behave
as strangers. When there is no confidence between relations, when
the family society ceases to give savour to life, its place is
soon usurped by vice. Is there any man so stupid that he cannot
see how all this hangs together?
A father has done but a third of his task when he begets children
and provides a living for them. He owes men to humanity, citizens
to the state. A man who can pay this threefold debt and neglect
to do so is guilty, more guilty, perhaps, if he pays it in part
than when he neglects it entirely. He has no right to be a father
if he cannot fulfil a father's duties. Poverty, pressure of business,
mistaken social prejudices, none of these can excuse a man from
his duty, which is to support and educate his own children. If
a man of any natural feeling neglects these sacred duties he will
repent it with bitter tears and will never be comforted.
But what does this rich man do, this father of a family, compelled,
so he says, to neglect his children? He pays another man to perform
those duties which are his alone. Mercenary man! do you expect
to purchase a second father for your child? Do not deceive yourself;
it is not even a master you have hired for him, it is a flunkey,
who will soon train such another as himself.
There is much discussion as to the characteristics of a good tutor.
My first requirement, and it implies a good many more, is that
he should not take up his task for reward. There are callings
so great that they cannot be undertaken for money without showing
our unfitness for them; such callings are those of the soldier
and the teacher.
"But who must train my child?" "I have just told
you, you should do it yourself." "I cannot." "You
cannot! Then find a friend. I see no other course."
A tutor! What a noble soul! Indeed for the training of a man one
must either be a father or more than man. It is this duty you
would calmly hand over to a hireling!
The more you think of it the harder you will find it. The tutor
must have been trained for his pupil, his servants must have been
trained for their master, so that all who come near him may have
received the impression which is to be transmitted to him. We
must pass from education to education, I know not how far. How
can a child be well educated by one who has not been well educated
himself!
Can such a one be found? I know not. In this age of degradation
who knows the height of virtue to which man's soul may attain?
But let us assume that this prodigy has been discovered. We shall
learn what he should be from the consideration of his duties.
I fancy the father who realises the value of a good tutor will
contrive to do without one, for it will be harder to find one
than to become such a tutor himself; he need search no further,
nature herself having done half the work.
Some one whose rank alone is known to me suggested that I should
educate his son. He did me a great honour, no doubt, but far from
regretting my refusal, he ought to congratulate himself on my
prudence. Had the offer been accepted, and had I been mistaken
in my method, there would have been an education ruined; had I
succeeded, things would have been worse--his son would have renounced
his title and refused to be a prince.
I feel too deeply the importance of a tutor's duties and my own
unfitness, ever to accept such a post, whoever offered it, and
even the claims of friendship would be only an additional motive
for my refusal. Few, I think, will be tempted to make me such
an offer when they have read this book, and I beg any one who
would do so to spare his pains. I have had enough experience of
the task to convince myself of my own unfitness, and my circumstances
would make it impossible, even if my talents were such as to fit
me for it. I have thought it my duty to make this public declaration
to those who apparently refuse to do me the honour of believing
in the sincerity of my determination. If I am unable to undertake
the more useful task, I will at least venture to attempt the easier
one; I will follow the example of my predecessors and take up,
not the task, but my pen; and instead of doing the right thing
I will try to say it.
I know that in such an undertaking the author, who ranges at will
among theoretical systems, utters many fine precepts impossible
to practise, and even when he says what is practicable it remains
undone for want of details and examples as to its application.
I have therefore decided to take an imaginary pupil, to assume
on my own part the age, health, knowledge, and talents required
for the work of his education, to guide him from birth to manhood,
when he needs no guide but himself. This method seems to me useful
for an author who fears lest he may stray from the practical to
the visionary; for as soon as he departs from common practice
he has only to try his method on his pupil; he will soon know,
or the reader will know for him, whether he is following the development
of the child and the natural growth of the human heart.
This is what I have tried to do. Lest my book should be unduly
bulky, I have been content to state those principles the truth
of which is self-evident. But as to the rules which call for proof,
I have applied them to Emile or to others, and I have shown, in
very great detail, how my theories may be put into practice. Such
at least is my plan; the reader must decide whether I have succeeded.
At first I have said little about Emile, for my earliest maxims
of education, though very different from those generally accepted,
are so plain that it is hard for a man of sense to refuse to accept
them, but as I advance, my scholar, educated after another fashion
than yours, is no longer an ordinary child, he needs a special
system. Then he appears upon the scene more frequently, and towards
the end I never lose sight of him for a moment, until, whatever
he may say, he needs me no longer.
I pass over the qualities required in a good tutor; I take them
for granted, and assume that I am endowed with them. As you read
this book you will see how generous I have been to myself.
I will only remark that, contrary to the received opinion, a child's
tutor should be young, as young indeed as a man may well be who
is also wise. Were it possible, he should become a child himself,
that he may be the companion of his pupil and win his confidence
by sharing his games. Childhood and age have too little in common
for the formation of a really firm affection. Children sometimes
flatter old men; they never love them.
People seek a tutor who has already educated one pupil. This is
too much; one man can only educate one pupil; if two were essential
to success, what right would he have to undertake the first? With
more experience you may know better what to do, but you are less
capable of doing it; once this task has been well done, you will
know too much of its difficulties to attempt it a second time--if
ill done, the first attempt augurs badly for the second.
It is one thing to follow a young man about for four years, another
to be his guide for five-and-twenty. You find a tutor for your
son when he is already formed; I want one for him before he is
born. Your man may change his pupil every five years; mine will
never have but one pupil. You distinguish between the teacher
and the tutor. Another piece of folly! Do you make any distinction
between the pupil and the scholar? There is only one science for
children to learn--the duties of man. This science is one, and,
whatever Xenophon may say of the education of the Persians, it
is indivisible. Besides, I prefer to call the man who has this
knowledge master rather than teacher, since it is a question of
guidance rather than instruction. He must not give precepts, he
must let the scholar find them out for himself.
If the master is to be so carefully chosen, he may well choose
his pupil, above all when he proposes to set a pattern for others.
This choice cannot depend on the child's genius or character,
as I adopt him before he is born, and they are only known when
my task is finished. If I had my choice I would take a child of
ordinary mind, such as I assume in my pupil. It is ordinary people
who have to be educated, and their education alone can serve as
a pattern for the education of their fellows. The others find
their way alone.
The birthplace is not a matter of indifference in the education
of man; it is only in temperate climes that he comes to his full
growth. The disadvantages of extremes are easily seen. A man is
not planted in one place like a tree, to stay there the rest of
his life, and to pass from one extreme to another you must travel
twice as far as he who starts half-way.
If the inhabitant of a temperate climate passes in turn through
both extremes his advantage is plain, for although he may be changed
as much as he who goes from one extreme to the other, he only
removes half-way from his natural condition. A Frenchman can live
in New Guinea or in Lapland, but a negro cannot live in Tornea
nor a Samoyed in Benin. It seems also as if the brain were less
perfectly organised in the two extremes. Neither the negroes nor
the Laps are as wise as Europeans. So if I want my pupil to be
a citizen of the world I will choose him in the temperate zone,
in France for example, rather than elsewhere.
In the north with its barren soil men devour much food, in the
fertile south they eat little. This produces another difference:
the one is industrious, the other contemplative. Society shows
us, in one and the same spot, a similar difference between rich
and poor. The one dwells in a fertile land, the other in a barren
land.
The poor man has no need of education. The education of his own
station in life is forced upon him, he can have no other; the
education received by the rich man from his own station is least
fitted for himself and for society. Moreover, a natural education
should fit a man for any position. Now it is more unreasonable
to train a poor man for wealth than a rich man for poverty, for
in proportion to their numbers more rich men are ruined and fewer
poor men become rich. Let us choose our scholar among the rich;
we shall at least have made another man; the poor may come to
manhood without our help.
For the same reason I should not be sorry if Emile came of a good
family. He will be another victim snatched from prejudice.
Emile is an orphan. No matter whether he has father or mother,
having undertaken their duties I am invested with their rights.
He must honour his parents, but he must obey me. That is my first
and only condition.
I must add that there is just one other point arising out of this;
we must never be separated except by mutual consent. This clause
is essential, and I would have tutor and scholar so inseparable
that they should regard their fate as one. If once they perceive
the time of their separation drawing near, the time which must
make them strangers to one another, they become strangers then
and there; each makes his own little world, and both of them being
busy in thought with the time when they will no longer be together,
they remain together against their will. The disciple regards
his master as the badge and scourge of childhood, the master regards
his scholar as a heavy burden which he longs to be rid of. Both
are looking forward to the time when they will part, and as there
is never any real affection between them, there will be scant
vigilance on the one hand, and on the other scant obedience.
But when they consider they must always live together, they must
needs love one another, and in this way they really learn to love
one another. The pupil is not ashamed to follow as a child the
friend who will be with him in manhood; the tutor takes an interest
in the efforts whose fruits he will enjoy, and the virtues he
is cultivating in his pupil form a store laid up for his old age.
This agreement made beforehand assumes a normal birth, a strong,
well-made, healthy child. A father has no choice, and should have
no preference within the limits of the family God has given him;
all his children are his alike, the same care and affection is
due to all. Crippled or well-made, weak or strong, each of them
is a trust for which he is responsible to the Giver, and nature
is a party to the marriage contract along with husband and wife.
But if you undertake a duty not imposed upon you by nature, you
must secure beforehand the means for its fulfilment, unless you
would undertake duties you cannot fulfil. If you take the care
of a sickly, unhealthy child, you are a sick nurse, not a tutor.
To preserve a useless life you are wasting the time which should
be spent in increasing its value, you risk the sight of a despairing
mother reproaching you for the death of her child, who ought to
have died long ago.
I would not undertake the care of a feeble, sickly child, should
he live to four score years. I want no pupil who is useless alike
to himself and others, one whose sole business is to keep himself
alive, one whose body is always a hindrance to the training of
his mind. If I vainly lavish my care upon him, what can I do but
double the loss to society by robbing it of two men, instead of
one? Let another tend this weakling for me; I am quite willing,
I approve his charity, but I myself have no gift for such a task;
I could never teach the art of living to one who needs all his
strength to keep himself alive.
The body must be strong enough to obey the mind; a good servant
must be strong. I know that intemperance stimulates the passions;
in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance
often produce the same results in an opposite way. The weaker
the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is,
the better it obeys. All sensual passions find their home in effeminate
bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener their sting.
A feeble body makes a feeble mind. Hence the influence of physic,
an art which does more harm to man than all the evils it professes
to cure. I do not know what the doctors cure us of, but I know
this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity,
credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead
walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and
it is men we need.
Medicine is all the fashion in these days, and very naturally.
It is the amusement of the idle and unemployed, who do not know
what to do with their time, and so spend it in taking care of
themselves. If by ill-luck they had happened to be born immortal,
they would have been the most miserable of men; a life they could
not lose would be of no value to them. Such men must have doctors
to threaten and flatter them, to give them the only pleasure they
can enjoy, the pleasure of not being dead.
I will say no more at present as to the uselessness of medicine.
My aim is to consider its bearings on morals. Still I cannot refrain
from saying that men employ the same sophism about medicine as
they do about the search for truth. They assume that the patient
is cured and that the seeker after truth finds it. They fail to
see that against one life saved by the doctors you must set a
hundred slain, and against the value of one truth discovered the
errors which creep in with it. The science which instructs and
the medicine which heals are no doubt excellent, but the science
which misleads us and the medicine which kills us are evil. Teach
us to know them apart. That is the real difficulty. If we were
content to be ignorant of truth we should not be the dupes of
falsehood; if we did not want to be cured in spite of nature,
we should not be killed by the doctors. We should do well to steer
clear of both, and we should evidently be the gainers. I do not
deny that medicine is useful to some men; I assert that it is
fatal to mankind.
You will tell me, as usual, that the doctors are to blame, that
medicine herself is infallible. Well and good, then give us the
medicine without the doctor, for when we have both, the blunders
of the artist are a hundredfold greater than our hopes from the
art. This lying art, invented rather for the ills of the mind
than of the body, is useless to both alike; it does less to cure
us of our diseases than to fill us with alarm. It does less to
ward off death than to make us dread its approach. It exhausts
life rather than prolongs it; should it even prolong life it would
only be to the prejudice of the race, since it makes us set its
precautions before society and our fears before our duties. It
is the knowledge of danger that makes us afraid. If we thought
ourselves invulnerable we should know no fear. The poet armed
Achilles against danger and so robbed him of the merit of courage;
on such terms any man would be an Achilles.
Would you find a really brave man? Seek him where there are no
doctors, where the results of disease are unknown, and where death
is little thought of. By nature a man bears pain bravely and dies
in peace. It is the doctors with their rules, the philosophers
with their precepts, the priests with their exhortations, who
debase the heart and make us afraid to die.
Give me a pupil who has no need of these, or I will have nothing
to do with him. No one else shall spoil my work, I will educate
him myself or not at all. That wise man, Locke, who had devoted
part of his life to the study of medicine, advises us to give
no drugs to the child, whether as a precaution, or on account
of slight ailments. I will go farther, and will declare that,
as I never call in a doctor for myself, I will never send for
one for Emile, unless his life is clearly in danger, when the
doctor can but kill him.
I know the doctor will make capital out of my delay. If the child
dies, he was called in too late; if he recovers, it is his doing.
So be it; let the doctor boast, but do not call him in except
in extremity.
As the child does not know how to be cured, he knows how to be
ill. The one art takes the place of the other and is often more
successful; it is the art of nature. When a beast is ill, it keeps
quiet and suffers in silence; but we see fewer sickly animals
than sick men. How many men have been slain by impatience, fear,
anxiety, and above all by medicine, men whom disease would have
spared, and time alone have cured. I shall be told that animals,
who live according to nature, are less liable to disease than
ourselves. Well, that way of living is just what I mean to teach
my pupil; he should profit by it in the same way.
Hygiene is the only useful part of medicine, and hygiene is rather
a virtue than a science. Temperance and industry are man's true
remedies; work sharpens his appetite and temperance teaches him
to control it.
To learn what system is most beneficial you have only to study
those races remarkable for health, strength, and length of days.
If common observation shows us that medicine neither increases
health nor prolongs life, it follows that this useless art is
worse than useless, since it wastes time, men, and things on what
is pure loss. Not only must we deduct the time spent, not in using
life, but preserving it, but if this time is spent in tormenting
ourselves it is worse than wasted, it is so much to the bad, and
to reckon fairly a corresponding share must be deducted from what
remains to us. A man who lives ten years for himself and others
without the help of doctors lives more for himself and others
than one who spends thirty years as their victim. I have tried
both, so I think I have a better right than most to draw my own
conclusions.
For these reasons I decline to take any but a strong and healthy
pupil, and these are my principles for keeping him in health.
I will not stop to prove at length the value of manual labour
and bodily exercise for strengthening the health and constitution;
no one denies it. Nearly all the instances of long life are to
be found among the men who have taken most exercise, who have
endured fatigue and labour. [Footnote: I cannot help quoting the
following passage from an English newspaper, as it throws much
light on my opinions: "A certain Patrick O'Neil, born in
1647, has just married his seventh wife in 1760. In the seventeenth
year of Charles II. he served in the dragoons and in other regiments
up to 1740, when he took his discharge. He served in all the campaigns
of William III. and Marlborough. This man has never drunk anything
but small beer; he has always lived on vegetables, and has never
eaten meat except on few occasions when he made a feast for his
relations. He has always been accustomed to rise with the sun
and go to bed at sunset unless prevented by his military duties.
He is now in his 130th year; he is healthy, his hearing is good,
and he walks with the help of a stick. In spite of his great age
he is never idle, and every Sunday he goes to his parish church
accompanied by his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren."]
Neither will I enter into details as to the care I shall take
for this alone. It will be clear that it forms such an essential
part of my practice that it is enough to get hold of the idea
without further explanation.
When our life begins our needs begin too. The new-born infant
must have a nurse. If his mother will do her duty, so much the
better; her instructions will be given her in writing, but this
advantage has its drawbacks, it removes the tutor from his charge.
But it is to be hoped that the child's own interests, and her
respect for the person to whom she is about to confide so precious
a treasure, will induce the mother to follow the master's wishes,
and whatever she does you may be sure she will do better than
another. If we must have a strange nurse, make a good choice to
begin with.
It is one of the misfortunes of the rich to be cheated on all
sides; what wonder they think ill of mankind! It is riches that
corrupt men, and the rich are rightly the first to feel the defects
of the only tool they know. Everything is ill-done for them, except
what they do themselves, and they do next to nothing. When a nurse
must be selected the choice is left to the doctor. What happens?
The best nurse is the one who offers the highest bribe. I shall
not consult the doctor about Emile's nurse, I shall take care
to choose her myself. I may not argue about it so elegantly as
the surgeon, but I shall be more reliable, I shall be less deceived
by my zeal than the doctor by his greed.
There is no mystery about this choice; its rules are well known,
but I think we ought probably to pay more attention to the age
of the milk as well as its quality. The first milk is watery,
it must be almost an aperient, to purge the remains of the meconium
curdled in the bowels of the new-born child. Little by little
the milk thickens and supplies more solid food as the child is
able to digest it. It is surely not without cause that nature
changes the milk in the female of every species according to the
age of the offspring.
Thus a new-born child requires a nurse who has recently become
mother. There is, I know, a difficulty here, but as soon as we
leave the path of nature there are difficulties in the way of
all well-doing. The wrong course is the only right one under the
circumstances, so we take it.
The nurse must be healthy alike in disposition and in body. The
violence of the passions as well as the humours may spoil her
milk. Moreover, to consider the body only is to keep only half
our aim in view. The milk may be good and the nurse bad; a good
character is as necessary as a good constitution. If you choose
a vicious person, I do not say her foster-child will acquire her
vices, but he will suffer for them. Ought she not to bestow on
him day by day, along with her milk, a care which calls for zeal,
patience, gentleness, and cleanliness. If she is intemperate and
greedy her milk will soon be spoilt; if she is careless and hasty
what will become of a poor little wretch left to her mercy, and
unable either to protect himself or to complain. The wicked are
never good for anything.
The choice is all the more important because her foster-child
should have no other guardian, just as he should have no teacher
but his tutor. This was the custom of the ancients, who talked
less but acted more wisely than we. The nurse never left her foster-daughter;
this is why the nurse is the confidante in most of their plays.
A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well
brought up.
At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually
tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with
it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up
people with no more sense than children the authority of age is
destroyed and his education is ruined. A child should know no
betters but its father and mother, or failing them its foster-mother
and its tutor, and even this is one too many, but this division
is inevitable, and the best that can be done in the way of remedy
is that the man and woman who control him shall be so well agreed
with regard to him that they seem like one.
The nurse must live rather more comfortably, she must have rather
more substantial food, but her whole way of living must not be
altered, for a sudden change, even a change for the better, is
dangerous to health, and since her usual way of life has made
her healthy and strong, why change it?
Country women eat less meat and more vegetables than towns-women,
and this vegetarian diet seems favourable rather than otherwise
to themselves and their children. When they take nurslings from
the upper classes they eat meat and broth with the idea that they
will form better chyle and supply more milk. I do not hold with
this at all, and experience is on my side, for we do not find
children fed in this way less liable to colic and worms.
That need not surprise us, for decaying animal matter swarms with
worms, but this is not the case with vegetable matter. [Footnote:
Women eat bread, vegetables, and dairy produce; female dogs and
cats do the same; the she-wolves eat grass. This supplies vegetable
juices to their milk. There are still those species which are
unable to eat anything but flesh, if such there are, which I very
much doubt.] Milk, although manufactured in the body of an animal,
is a vegetable substance; this is shown by analysis; it readily
turns acid, and far from showing traces of any volatile alkali
like animal matter, it gives a neutral salt like plants.
The milk of herbivorous creatures is sweeter and more wholesome
than the milk of the carnivorous; formed of a substance similar
to its own, it keeps its goodness and becomes less liable to putrifaction.
If quantity is considered, it is well known that farinaceous foods
produce more blood than meat, so they ought to yield more milk.
If a child were not weaned too soon, and if it were fed on vegetarian
food, and its foster-mother were a vegetarian, I do not think
it would be troubled with worms.
Milk derived from vegetable foods may perhaps be more liable to
go sour, but I am far from considering sour milk an unwholesome
food; whole nations have no other food and are none the worse,
and all the array of absorbents seems to me mere humbug. There
are constitutions which do not thrive on milk, others can take
it without absorbents. People are afraid of the milk separating
or curdling; that is absurd, for we know that milk always curdles
in the stomach. This is how it becomes sufficiently solid to nourish
children and young animals; if it did not curdle it would merely
pass away without feeding them. [Footnote: Although the juices
which nourish us are liquid, they must be extracted from solids.
A hard-working man who ate nothing but soup would soon waste away.
He would be far better fed on milk, just because it curdles.]
In vain you dilute milk and use absorbents; whoever swallows milk
digests cheese, this rule is without exception; rennet is made
from a calf's stomach.
Instead of changing the nurse's usual diet, I think it would be
enough to give food in larger quantities and better of its kind.
It is not the nature of the food that makes a vegetable diet indigestible,
but the flavouring that makes it unwholesome. Reform your cookery,
use neither butter nor oil for frying. Butter, salt, and milk
should never be cooked. Let your vegetables be cooked in water
and only seasoned when they come to table. The vegetable diet,
far from disturbing the nurse, will give her a plentiful supply
of milk. [Footnote: Those who wish to study a full account of
the advantages and disadvantages of the Pythagorean regime, may
consult the works of Dr. Cocchi and his opponent Dr. Bianchi on
this important subject.] If a vegetable diet is best for the child,
how can meat food be best for his nurse? The things are contradictory.
Fresh air affects children's constitutions, particularly in early
years. It enters every pore of a soft and tender skin, it has
a powerful effect on their young bodies. Its effects can never
be destroyed. So I should not agree with those who take a country
woman from her village and shut her up in one room in a town and
her nursling with her. I would rather send him to breathe the
fresh air of the country than the foul air of the town. He will
take his new mother's position, will live in her cottage, where
his tutor will follow him. The reader will bear in mind that this
tutor is not a paid servant, but the father's friend. But if this
friend cannot be found, if this transfer is not easy, if none
of my advice can be followed, you will say to me, "What shall
I do instead?" I have told you already--"Do what you
are doing;" no advice is needed there.
Men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered
over the earth to till it. The more they are massed together,
the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results
of over-crowded cities. Of all creatures man is least fitted to
live in herds. Huddled together like sheep, men would very soon
die. Man's breath is fatal to his fellows. This is literally as
well as figuratively true.
Men are devoured by our towns. In a few generations the race dies
out or becomes degenerate; it needs renewal, and it is always
renewed from the country. Send your children to renew themselves,
so to speak, send them to regain in the open fields the strength
lost in the foul air of our crowded cities. Women hurry home that
their children may be born in the town; they ought to do just
the opposite, especially those who mean to nurse their own children.
They would lose less than they think, and in more natural surroundings
the pleasures associated by nature with maternal duties would
soon destroy the taste for other delights.
The new-born infant is first bathed in warm water to which a little
wine is usually added. I think the wine might be dispensed with.
As nature does not produce fermented liquors, it is not likely
that they are of much value to her creatures.
In the same way it is unnecessary to take the precaution of heating
the water; in fact among many races the new-born infants are bathed
with no more ado in rivers or in the sea. Our children, made tender
before birth by the softness of their parents, come into the world
with a constitution already enfeebled, which cannot be at once
exposed to all the trials required to restore it to health. Little
by little they must be restored to their natural vigour. Begin
then by following this custom, and leave it off gradually. Wash
your children often, their dirty ways show the need of this. If
they are only wiped their skin is injured; but as they grow stronger
gradually reduce the heat of the water, till at last you bathe
them winter and summer in cold, even in ice-cold water. To avoid
risk this change must be slow, gradual, and imperceptible, so
you may use the thermometer for exact measurements.
This habit of the bath, once established, should never be broken
off, it must be kept up all through life. I value it not only
on grounds of cleanliness and present health, but also as a wholesome
means of making the muscles supple, and accustoming them to bear
without risk or effort extremes of heat and cold. As he gets older
I would have the child trained to bathe occasionally in hot water
of every bearable degree, and often in every degree of cold water.
Now water being a denser fluid touches us at more points than
air, so that, having learnt to bear all the variations of temperature
in water, we shall scarcely feel this of the air. [Footnote: Children
in towns are stifled by being kept indoors and too much wrapped
up. Those who control them have still to learn that fresh air,
far from doing them harm, will make them strong, while hot air
will make them weak, will give rise to fevers, and will eventually
kill them.]
When the child draws its first breath do not confine it in tight
wrappings. No cap, no bandages, nor swaddling clothes. Loose and
flowing flannel wrappers, which leave its limbs free and are not
too heavy to check his movements, not too warm to prevent his
feeling the air. [Footnote: I say "cradle" using the
common word for want of a better, though I am convinced that it
is never necessary and often harmful to rock children in the cradle.]
Put him in a big cradle, well padded, where he can move easily
and safely. As he begins to grow stronger, let him crawl about
the room; let him develop and stretch his tiny limbs; you will
see him gain strength from day to day. Compare him with a well
swaddled child of the same age and you will be surprised at their
different rates of progress. [Footnote: The ancient Peruvians
wrapped their children in loose swaddling bands, leaving the arms
quite free. Later they placed them unswaddled in a hole in the
ground, lined with cloths, so that the lower part of the body
was in the hole, and their arms were free and they could move
the head and bend the body at will without falling or hurting
themselves. When they began to walk they were enticed to come
to the breast. The little negroes are often in a position much
more difficult for sucking. They cling to the mother's hip, and
cling so tightly that the mother's arm is often not needed to
support them. They clasp the breast with their hand and continue
sucking while their mother goes on with her ordinary work. These
children begin to walk at two months, or rather to crawl. Later
on they can run on all fours almost as well as on their feet.--Buffon.
M. Buffon might also have quoted the example of England, where
the senseless and barbarous swaddling clothes have become almost
obsolete. Cf. La Longue Voyage de Siam, Le Beau Voyage de Canada,
etc.]
You must expect great opposition from the nurses, who find a half
strangled baby needs much less watching. Besides his dirtyness
is more perceptible in an open garment; he must be attended to
more frequently. Indeed, custom is an unanswerable argument in
some lands and among all classes of people.
Do not argue with the nurses; give your orders, see them carried
out, and spare no pains to make the attention you prescribe easy
in practice. Why not take your share in it? With ordinary nurslings,
where the body alone is thought of, nothing matters so long as
the child lives and does not actually die, but with us, when education
begins with life, the new-born child is already a disciple, not
of his tutor, but of nature. The tutor merely studies under this
master, and sees that his orders are not evaded. He watches over
the infant, he observes it, he looks for the first feeble glimmering
of intelligence, as the Moslem looks for the moment of the moon's
rising in her first quarter.
We are born capable of learning, but knowing nothing, perceiving
nothing. The mind, bound up within imperfect and half grown organs,
is not even aware of its own existence. The movements and cries
of the new-born child are purely reflex, without knowledge or
will.
Suppose a child born with the size and strength of manhood, entering
upon life full grown like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter; such
a child-man would be a perfect idiot, an automaton, a statue without
motion and almost without feeling; he would see and hear nothing,
he would recognise no one, he could not turn his eyes towards
what he wanted to see; not only would he perceive no external
object, he would not even be aware of sensation through the several
sense-organs. His eye would not perceive colour, his ear sounds,
his body would be unaware of contact with neighbouring bodies,
he would not even know he had a body, what his hands handled would
be in his brain alone; all his sensations would be united in one
place, they would exist only in the common "sensorium,"
he would have only one idea, that of self, to which he would refer
all his sensations; and this idea, or rather this feeling, would
be the only thing in which he excelled an ordinary child.
This man, full grown at birth, would also be unable to stand on
his feet, he would need a long time to learn how to keep his balance;
perhaps he would not even be able to try to do it, and you would
see the big strong body left in one place like a stone, or creeping
and crawling like a young puppy.
He would feel the discomfort of bodily needs without knowing what
was the matter and without knowing how to provide for these needs.
There is no immediate connection between the muscles of the stomach
and those of the arms and legs to make him take a step towards
food, or stretch a hand to seize it, even were he surrounded with
it; and as his body would be full grown and his limbs well developed
he would be without the perpetual restlessness and movement of
childhood, so that he might die of hunger without stirring to
seek food. However little you may have thought about the order
and development of our knowledge, you cannot deny that such a
one would be in the state of almost primitive ignorance and stupidity
natural to man before he has learnt anything from experience or
from his fellows.
We know then, or we may know, the point of departure from which
we each start towards the usual level of understanding; but who
knows the other extreme? Each progresses more or less according
to his genius, his taste, his needs, his talents, his zeal, and
his opportunities for using them. No philosopher, so far as I
know, has dared to say to man, "Thus far shalt thou go and
no further." We know not what nature allows us to be, none
of us has measured the possible difference between man and man.
Is there a mind so dead that this thought has never kindled it,
that has never said in his pride, "How much have I already
done, how much more may I achieve? Why should I lag behind my
fellows?"
As I said before, man's education begins at birth; before he can
speak or understand he is learning. Experience precedes instruction;
when he recognises his nurse he has learnt much. The knowledge
of the most ignorant man would surprise us if we had followed
his course from birth to the present time. If all human knowledge
were divided into two parts, one common to all, the other peculiar
to the learned, the latter would seem very small compared with
the former. But we scarcely heed this general experience, because
it is acquired before the age of reason. Moreover, knowledge only
attracts attention by its rarity, as in algebraic equations common
factors count for nothing. Even animals learn much. They have
senses and must learn to use them; they have needs, they must
learn to satisfy them; they must learn to eat, walk, or fly. Quadrupeds
which can stand on their feet from the first cannot walk for all
that; from their first attempts it is clear that they lack confidence.
Canaries who escape from their cage are unable to fly, having
never used their wings. Living and feeling creatures are always
learning. If plants could walk they would need senses and knowledge,
else their species would die out. The child's first mental experiences
are purely affective, he is only aware of pleasure and pain; it
takes him a long time to acquire the definite sensations which
show him things outside himself, but before these things present
and withdraw themselves, so to speak, from his sight, taking size
and shape for him, the recurrence of emotional experiences is
beginning to subject the child to the rule of habit. You see his
eyes constantly follow the light, and if the light comes from
the side the eyes turn towards it, so that one must be careful
to turn his head towards the light lest he should squint. He must
also be accustomed from the first to the dark, or he will cry
if he misses the light. Food and sleep, too, exactly measured,
become necessary at regular intervals, and soon desire is no longer
the effect of need, but of habit, or rather habit adds a fresh
need to those of nature. You must be on your guard against this.
The only habit the child should be allowed to contract is that
of having no habits; let him be carried on either arm, let him
be accustomed to offer either hand, to use one or other indifferently;
let him not want to eat, sleep, or do anything at fixed hours,
nor be unable to be left alone by day or night. Prepare the way
for his control of his liberty and the use of his strength by
leaving his body its natural habit, by making him capable of lasting
self-control, of doing all that he wills when his will is formed.
As soon as the child begins to take notice, what is shown him
must be carefully chosen. The natural man is interested in all
new things. He feels so feeble that he fears the unknown: the
habit of seeing fresh things without ill effects destroys this
fear. Children brought up in clean houses where there are no spiders
are afraid of spiders, and this fear often lasts through life.
I never saw peasants, man, woman, or child, afraid of spiders.
Since the mere choice of things shown him may make the child timid
or brave, why should not his education begin before he can speak
or understand? I would have him accustomed to see fresh things,
ugly, repulsive, and strange beasts, but little by little, and
far off till he is used to them, and till having seen others handle
them he handles them himself. If in childhood he sees toads, snakes,
and crayfish, he will not be afraid of any animal when he is grown
up. Those who are continually seeing terrible things think nothing
of them.
All children are afraid of masks. I begin by showing Emile a mask
with a pleasant face, then some one puts this mask before his
face; I begin to laugh, they all laugh too, and the child with
them. By degrees I accustom him to less pleasing masks, and at
last hideous ones. If I have arranged my stages skilfully, far
from being afraid of the last mask, he will laugh at it as he
did at the first. After that I am not afraid of people frightening
him with masks.
When Hector bids farewell to Andromache, the young Astyanax, startled
by the nodding plumes on the helmet, does not know his father;
he flings himself weeping upon his nurse's bosom and wins from
his mother a smile mingled with tears. What must be done to stay
this terror? Just what Hector did; put the helmet on the ground
and caress the child. In a calmer moment one would do more; one
would go up to the helmet, play with the plumes, let the child
feel them; at last the nurse would take the helmet and place it
laughingly on her own head, if indeed a woman's hand dare touch
the armour of Hector.
If Emile must get used to the sound of a gun, I first fire a pistol
with a small charge. He is delighted with this sudden flash, this
sort of lightning; I repeat the process with more powder; gradually
I add a small charge without a wad, then a larger; in the end
I accustom him to the sound of a gun, to fireworks, cannon, and
the most terrible explosions.
I have observed that children are rarely afraid of thunder unless
the peals are really terrible and actually hurt the ear, otherwise
this fear only comes to them when they know that thunder sometimes
hurts or kills. When reason begins to cause fear, let use reassure
them. By slow and careful stages man and child learn to fear nothing.
In the dawn of life, when memory and imagination have not begun
to function, the child only attends to what affects its senses.
His sense experiences are the raw material of thought; they should,
therefore, be presented to him in fitting order, so that memory
may at a future time present them in the same order to his understanding;
but as he only attends to his sensations it is enough, at first,
to show him clearly the connection between these sensations and
the things which cause them. He wants to touch and handle everything;
do not check these movements which teach him invaluable lessons.
Thus he learns to perceive the heat, cold, hardness, softness,
weight, or lightness of bodies, to judge their size and shape
and all their physical properties, by looking, feeling, [Footnote:
Of all the senses that of smell is the latest to develop in children
up to two or three years of age they appear to be insensible of
pleasant or unpleasant odours; in this respect they are as indifferent
or rather as insensible as many animals.] listening, and, above
all, by comparing sight and touch, by judging with the eye what
sensation they would cause to his hand.
It is only by movement that we learn the difference between self
and not self; it is only by our own movements that we gain the
idea of space. The child has not this idea, so he stretches out
his hand to seize the object within his reach or that which is
a hundred paces from him. You take this as a sign of tyranny,
an attempt to bid the thing draw near, or to bid you bring it.
Nothing of the kind, it is merely that the object first seen in
his brain, then before his eyes, now seems close to his arms,
and he has no idea of space beyond his reach. Be careful, therefore,
to take him about, to move him from place to place, and to let
him perceive the change in his surroundings, so as to teach him
to judge of distances.
When he begins to perceive distances then you must change your
plan, and only carry him when you please, not when he pleases;
for as soon as he is no longer deceived by his senses, there is
another motive for his effort. This change is remarkable and calls
for explanation.
The discomfort caused by real needs is shown by signs, when the
help of others is required. Hence the cries of children; they
often cry; it must be so. Since they are only conscious of feelings,
when those feelings are pleasant they enjoy them in silence; when
they are painful they say so in their own way and demand relief.
Now when they are awake they can scarcely be in a state of indifference,
either they are asleep or else they are feeling something.
All our languages are the result of art. It has long been a subject
of inquiry whether there ever was a natural language common to
all; no doubt there is, and it is the language of children before
they begin to speak. This language is inarticulate, but it has
tone, stress, and meaning. The use of our own language has led
us to neglect it so far as to forget it altogether. Let us study
children and we shall soon learn it afresh from them. Nurses can
teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say
to them, they ........Continua >>>
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