3. The conception that the child, by his very constitution, is predetermined, like plants and animals, to a progressive development quite independent of artificial aid, easily degenerates into the hypothesis that the typical education is a process of spontaneous growth.
4. The error in this hypothesis is that of exaggeration or of disproportion. Education is neither a work of nature alone, nor of art alone, but is a natural process, supplemented, controlled, and perfected by human art. What education would become when abandoned wholly to “nature” may be seen in the state of a perfected fruit which has been allowed to revert to its primitive or natural condition.
5. Man is distinguished from all other creatures by the fact that he is not the victim of his environment, but is endowed with the power to control his environment, almost to re-create it, and so to rise superior to it. This ability gives rise to human art, which is a coördinate factor with nature in the work of education.
6. This convenient fiction of “Nature,” conceived as an infallible and incomparable guide in education, has introduced countless errors into educational theory; and Miss E. R. Sill is amply justified in saying that “probably nine-tenths of the popular sophistries on the subject of education, would be cleared away by clarifying the word Nature.”[176]
7. In spite of its paradoxes, its exaggerations, its overwrought sentiment, and florid declamation, the Émile, in its general spirit, is a work of incomparable power and of perennial value.]
FOOTNOTES:
[169] Dom Joseph Cajet, Les Plagiats de J. J. R. de Genève sur l’éducation, 1768.
[170] Œuvres diverses, Tome I. p. 12.
[171] De l’éducation des enfants, La Haye, 1722; Pensées libres sur les instructions publiques des bas collèges, Amsterdam, 1727.
[172] Spectacle de la nature, Paris, 1732, Vol. VI. Entretien sur l’éducation.