It follows from these principles that discipline ought not to be severe.
“Do you not think it strange,” exclaims Madame Guizot, “that for centuries education has been, so to speak, a systematic hostility against human nature; that to correct and to punish have been synonymous; and that we have heard only of dispositions to break, and natures to overcome, just as though it were a question of taking away from children the nature which God has given them in order to give them another such as teachers would have it?”
580. Nature of the Child.—That which gives a great value to the work of Madame Guizot is, that besides the general considerations and the philosophical reflections, we there find a great number of circumstantial experiences and detailed observations which are admissible in a sound treatise on pedagogy. Like the psychology of the child, pedagogy itself, at least in its first chapters, ought to be conceived and written near a cradle. Madame Guizot forcibly indicates the importance of the first years, where the future destiny of the child is determined: “In those imperfect organs, in that incomplete intelligence, are contained, from the first moment of existence, the germs of that which is ever more to proceed from them either for better or for worse. The man will never have, in the whole course of his life, an impulse which does not belong to that nature, all the features of which are already foreshadowed in the infant. The infant will never receive a keen and durable impression, however slight, an impress of whatever kind, whose effects are not to influence the life of the man.”
At the same time that she sees in the infant the rough draft of the man, Madame Guizot recognizes with a remarkable delicacy of psychologic sense, that which distinguishes, that which characterizes, the irreflective and inconsiderate nature of the child. What is more just than this observation?
“We often deceive ourselves in attributing to the conduct of children, because it is analogous to our own, motives similar to those which guide ourselves.”
What better observation than the example which Madame Guizot cites in support of this statement!
“Louise, by a sudden impulse, drops her toys, throws herself upon my neck, and cannot cease kissing me. It seems that all my mother’s heart could not sufficiently respond to the warmth of her caresses; but by the same playful impulse she leaves me to kiss her doll or the arm of the chair which she meets on her way.”
581. Philosophic Rationalism.—Madame Guizot pushes rationalism much farther than Madame de Rémusat, and still farther than Madame Necker de Saussure. She is first a philosopher, then a Christian. She more nearly approaches Rousseau. She would first form in the minds of children the universal idea of God before initiating them into the particular dogmas of positive religions. She bases morals on the idea of duty, which is “the only basis of a complete education.”
“I would place,” she says, “each act of the child under the protection of an idea or of a moral sentiment.”
Recalling the distinction made by Dupont de Nemours between paternal commands and military commands, the first addressing themselves to the reason, the others to be observed without protest and with a passive obedience, she does not conceal her preference for the use of the first, because she would form in the woman, as in the man, a spirit of reason and of liberty. She absolutely proscribes personal interest, and hence declares that “rewards have always seemed to her contrary to the true principle of education.”