Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or, On Education, 1762

Excerpts from Book II

[208:] Our didactic and pedantic mania is always to teach children what they could learn better by themselves and to neglect what we alone can teach them. Can anything be stupider than the trouble taken to teach them to walk, as if any child has been seen who, from the negligence of its caretaker, has not learned how to walk by the time it grew up? Yet how many, on the contrary, we see walking badly all their life because they were ill taught!

[209:] Emile will have no padded bonnets, no go-carts, no leading-strings; or at least as soon as he can put one foot before another he will be supported only along pavements, and those will be crossed very quickly. Instead of keeping him cooped up in a stuffy room, take him out into a meadow every day. There let him run, let him frisk about. If he falls a hundred times, so much the better. He will learn all the sooner how to pick himself up. The well-being of liberty will make up for many wounds. My pupil will often have bruises; in return he will always be gay. Your pupils may have fewer bruises, but they are always constrained, always enchained, always sad. I doubt whether they are any better off.

[210:] Another progress which makes tears less necessary to children is the development of their strengths. Able to do more for themselves, they need the help of others less frequently. Along with their strength develops the understanding that puts them in a condition to direct it. It is with this second stage that the life of the individual properly begins; it is now that the child becomes conscious of himself. Memory extends the sentiment of identity to every moment of his existence. He becomes truly one and the same person, and consequently already capable of happiness or of misery. It is important therefore to begin to consider him here as a moral being.

[211:] Although we know approximately the limits of human life and our chances of attaining those limits, nothing is more uncertain than the length of the life of any one of us. Very few reach old age. The chief risks occur at the beginning of life; the shorter our past life, the less we must hope to live. Of all the children who are born scarcely one half reach adolescence, and it is very likely your pupil will not reach the age of manhood.

[212:] What is to be thought, therefore, of that cruel education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, that burdens a child with all sorts of restrictions, and begins by making him miserable in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness he may never enjoy? Even if I considered such an education wise in its aims, how could I view without indignation those poor creatures subjected to an intolerable yoke and condemned like galley-slaves to endless tasks with no certainty of any rewards? The age of gaity is spent in tears, punishments, threats, and slavery. You torment the poor thing for his own good; you fail to see that you are calling Death to snatch him from these gloomy machinations. Who can say how many children fall victims to the excessive wisdom of their fathers or tutors? Lucky to escape from his cruelty, the only advantage they gain from the ills they are made to suffer is to die without regretting a life known only for its torments.

[214:] How people will cry out against me! I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which projects us incessantly outside of ourselves, which counts the present as nothing, and which, pursuing without relief a future which flees as we advance, by transporting us away from where we are takes us to a place we will never be.

[215:] Now is the time, you say, to correct the evil inclinations of man. We must increase suffering in childhood, when it is less keenly felt, in order to lessen it in the age of reason. But how do you know that you can carry out all these fine schemes; how do you know that all this fine teaching with which you overwhelm the feeble mind of the child will not do him more harm than good in the future? How do you know that you can spare him anything by the sorrows that you lavish on him? Why inflict on him more ills than suit his present condition unless you are quite sure that these present ills will save him future ill? And what proof can you give me that those evil tendencies you profess to cure are not the result of your foolish precautions rather than of nature? What a poor sort of foresight, to make a child miserable in the present with the more or less doubtful hope of making him happy at some future day! If such vulger reasoners confuse licence and liberty, a happy child and a spoiled child, let us help them learn to distinguish between the two.

[216:] To avoid pursuing fantasies, let us not forget what suits our condition. Humanity has its place in the order of things; childhood has its place in the order of human life. The man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. . . .

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[253:] I return to practical matters. I have already said your child must not get what he asks, but what he needs;[note 22] he must never act from obedience, but from necessity. Thus the very words obey and command will be excluded from his vocabulary, still more those of duty and obligation. But the words strength, necessity, weakness, and constraint must have a large place in it. Before the age of reason it is impossible to form any idea of moral beings or social relations. One must thus avoid as much as possible the use of words which express these ideas lest the child at an early age should attach wrong ideas to them, ideas which you cannot or will not destroy when he is older. The first mistaken idea he gets into his head is the germ of error and vice; it is the first step that needs watching. Act in such a way that while he only notices external objects his ideas are confined to sensations; let him only see the physical world around him. If not, you may be sure that either he will not hear you at all, or that he will form of this moral world you speak about some farfetched notions that you will never erase as long as he lives.

[254:] To reason with children was Locke's chief maxim. It is even more in vogue today. Its success however does not seem to me strong enough to give it credit; for me I see nothing more stupid that these children with whom people reasoned so much. Of all man's faculties, reason, which is, so to speak, the one composed of all the others, is the one that develops with the most difficulty and the latest, and yet you want to use it to develop the earlier ones! The culmination of a good education is to make a man reasonable, and you claim to raise a child with reason! You begin at the wrong end; you make the end the means. If children understood reason they would not need education. But by talking to them from their earliest age in a language they do not understand you accustom them to manipulate with words, to control all that is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their teachers, to become argumentative and rebellious. And whatever you think you gain from motives of reason you really gain from the greediness, or fear, or vanity, which you are always forced to add to your reasoning.

[255:] Most of the moral lessons which are and can be given to children may be reduced to this formula:

[256:] Master.

You must not do that.

Child.

Why not?

Master.

Because it is wrong.

Child.

Wrong ! What is wrong?

Master.

What is forbidden you.

Child.

Why is it wrong to do what is forbidden?

Master.

You will be punished for disobeying.

Child.

I will do it when no one is looking.

Master.

We will keep an eye on you.

Child.

I will hide.

Master.

We will ask you what you were doing.

Child.

I will tell a lie.

Master.

You must not tell lies.

Child.

Why must not I tell lies?

Master.

Because it is wrong, etc.

[257:] That is the inevitable circle. Go beyond it, and the child will not understand you. What sort of use is there in such teaching? I should greatly like to know what you would substitute for this dialogue. It would have puzzled Locke himself. It is no part of a child's business to know right and wrong, to perceive the reason for a man's duties.

[258:] Nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we try to pervert this order we shall produce a forced fruit that will have neither ripeness nor flavor and that will soon spoil. We will have young doctors and old children. Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling that are proper to it. Nothing is less sensible than to try and substitute our ways. I would like no more to require a young child be five feet tall than that he have judgement at the age of ten. Indeed, what use would reason be to him at that age? It is the curb of strength, and the child does not need this curb.

[259:] In trying to persuade your pupils of the duty of obedience you add to this so-called persuasion force and threats, or still worse, flattery and bribes. Thus attracted by self-interest or constrained by force, they pretend to be convinced by reason. They see very well that obedience is to their advantage and disobedience to their disadvantage as soon as you perceive one or the other. But since you only demand disagreeable things of them, and since it is always painful to do another's will, they hide themselves so that they may do as they please, persuaded that they are doing well if no one knows of their disobedience, but ready, if found out, to admit they are in the wrong for fear of worse evils. Since the rationale for duty is beyond their age, there is not a man in the world who could make them really aware of it. But the fear of punishment, the hope of forgiveness, importunity, the difficulty of answering, wrings from them as many confessions as you want; and you think you have convinced them when you have only wearied or frightened them.

[260:] What is the result of all this? In the first place, by imposing on them a duty which they do not feel, you make them disinclined to submit to your tyranny and turn them away from loving you. You teach them to become deceitful, false, liars in order to extort rewards or escape punishment. Finally, by accustoming them to conceal a secret motive under an apparent one, you yourself give them the means of ceaselessly abusing you, of depriving you of the means of knowing their real character, and of answering you and others with empty words whenever they have the chance. Laws, you say, though binding on conscience, exercise the same constraint over grown men. I agree, but what are these men if not children spoiled by education? This is exactly what one must avoid. Use force with children and reason with men; this is the natural order. The wise man needs no laws.