“Do not give your pupil any kind of verbal lesson; he should receive none save from experience.” “The most important, the most useful rule in all education, is not to gain time, but to lose it.”
The preceptor will interfere at most only by a few timid and guarded words, to aid the child in interpreting the lessons of nature. “State questions within his comprehension, and leave him to resolve them for himself. Let him not know anything because you have told it to him, but because he has comprehended it for himself.”
“For the body as for the mind, the child must be left to himself.”
“Let him run, and frolic, and fall a hundred times a day. So much the better; for he will learn from this the sooner to help himself up. The welfare of liberty atones for many bruises.”
In his horror for what he calls “the teaching and pedantic mania,” Rousseau goes so far as to proscribe an education in habits:—
“The only habit that a child should be allowed to form is to contract no habit.”
316. The Child’s Right to Happiness.—Rousseau did not tire of demanding that we should respect the infancy that is in the child, and take into account his tastes and his aptitudes. With what eloquence he claims for him the right of being happy!
“Love childhood. Encourage its sports, its pleasures, and its instinct for happiness. Who of you has not sometimes regretted that period when a laugh was always on the lips, and the soul always in peace? Why will you deny those little innocents the enjoyment of that brief period which is so soon to escape them, and of that precious good which they cannot abuse? Why will you fill with bitterness and sorrow those first years so quickly passing which will no more return to them than they can return to you? Fathers, do you know the moment when death awaits your children? Do not lay up for yourselves regrets by depriving them of the few moments that nature gives them. As soon as they can feel the pleasure of existence, try to have them enjoy it, and act in such a way that at whatever hour God summons them they may not die without having tasted the sweetness of living.”
317. Proscription of Intellectual Exercises.—Rousseau rejects from the education of Émile all the intellectual exercises ordinarily employed. He proscribes history on the pretext that Émile cannot comprehend the relations of events. He takes as an example the disgust of a child who had been told the anecdote of Alexander and his physician:—