He makes education begin at birth; expresses himself on the subject of the habits to be given or to be avoided; discusses the use and meaning of tears, outcries, gestures, also the language that should be used with young children, so that, from their tenderest years, the inculcating of false ideas and the giving a wrong bent of mind may be avoided.
GENERAL REMARKS.
The Object of Education.
Coming from the hand of the Author of all things, everything is good; in the hands of man, everything degenerates. Man obliges one soil to nourish the productions of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another; he mingles and confounds climates, elements, seasons; he mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He overturns everything, disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters; he desires that nothing should be as nature made it, not even man himself. To please him, man must be broken in like a horse; man must be adapted to man's own fashion, like a tree in his garden.[[1]]
Were it not for all this, matters would be still worse. No one wishes to be a half-developed being; and in the present condition of things, a man left to himself among others from his birth would be the most deformed among them all. Prejudices, authority, necessities, example, all the social institutions in which we are submerged, would stifle nature in him, and would put nothing in its place. In such a man nature would be like a shrub sprung up by chance in the midst of a highway, and jostled from all sides, bent in every direction, by the passers-by.
Plants are improved by cultivation, and men by education. If man were born large and strong, his size and strength would be useless to him until he had learned to use them. They would be prejudicial to him, by preventing others from thinking of assisting him; and left to himself he would die of wretchedness before he had known his own necessities. We pity the state of infancy; we do not perceive that the human race would have perished if man had not begun by being a child.
We are born weak, we need strength; we are born destitute of all things, we need assistance; we are born stupid, we need judgment. All that we have not at our birth, and that we need when grown up, is given us by education.
This education comes to us from nature itself, or from other men, or from circumstances. The internal development of our faculties and of our organs is the education nature gives us; the use we are taught to make of this development is the education we get from other men; and what we learn, by our own experience, about things that interest as, is the education of circumstances.
Each of us is therefore formed by three kinds of teachers. The pupil in whom their different lessons contradict one another is badly educated, and will never be in harmony with himself; the one in whom they all touch upon the same points and tend toward the same object advances toward that goal only, and lives accordingly. He alone is well educated.
Now of these three different educations, that of nature does not depend upon us; that of circumstances depends upon us only in certain respects; that of men is the only one of which we are really masters, and that solely because we think we are. For who can hope to direct entirely the speech and conduct of all who surround a child?