A child becomes more precious as he advances in age. To the value of his person is added that of the cares he has cost us; if we lose his life, his own consciousness of death is added to our sense of loss. Above all things, then, in watching over his preservation we must think of the future. We must arm him against the misfortunes of youth before he has reached them. For, if the value of life increases up to the age when life becomes useful, what folly it is to spare the child some troubles, and to heap them upon the age of reason! Are these the counsels of a master?
In all ages suffering is the lot of man. Even to the cares of self-preservation pain is joined. Happy are we, who in childhood are acquainted with only physical misfortunes—misfortunes far less cruel, less painful than others; misfortunes which far more rarely make us renounce life. We do not kill ourselves on account of the pains of gout; seldom do any but those of the mind produce despair.[[3]]
We pity the lot of infancy, and it is our own lot that we ought to pity. Our greatest misfortunes come to us from ourselves.
At birth a child cries; his earliest infancy is spent in crying. Sometimes he is tossed, he is petted, to appease him; sometimes he is threatened, beaten, to make him keep quiet. We either do as he pleases, or else we exact from him what we please; we either submit to his whims, or make him submit to ours. There is no middle course; he must either give or receive orders. Thus his first ideas are those of absolute rule and of slavery. Before he knows how to speak, he commands; before he is able to act, he obeys; and sometimes he is punished before he knows what his faults are, or rather, before he is capable of committing them. Thus do we early pour into his young heart the passions that are afterward imputed to nature; and, after having taken pains to make him wicked, we complain of finding him wicked.
A child passes six or seven years of his life in this manner in the hands of women, the victim of his own caprice and of theirs. After having made him learn this and that,—after having loaded his memory either with words he cannot understand, or with facts which are of no use to him,—after having stifled his natural disposition by the passions we have created, we put this artificial creature into the hands of a tutor who finishes the development of the artificial germs he finds already formed, and teaches him everything except to know himself, everything except to know how to live and how to make himself happy. Finally, when this enslaved child, this little tyrant, full of learning and devoid of sense, enfeebled alike in mind and body, is cast upon the world, he there by his unfitness, by his pride, and by all his vices, makes us deplore human wretchedness and perversity. We deceive ourselves; this is the man our whims have created. Nature makes men by a different process.
Do you then wish him to preserve his original form? Preserve it from the moment he enters the world. As soon as he is born take possession of him, and do not leave him until he is a man. Without this you will never succeed. As the mother is the true nurse, the father is the true teacher. Let them be of one mind as to the order in which their functions are fulfilled, as well as in regard to their plan; let the child pass from the hands of the one into the hands of the other. He will be better educated by a father who is judicious, even though of moderate attainments, than by the most skilful master in the world. For zeal will supplement talent better than talent can supply what only zeal can give.
A father, when he brings his children into existence and supports them, has, in so doing, fulfilled only a third part of his task. To the human race he owes men; to society, men fitted for society; to the State, citizens. Every man who can pay this triple debt, and does not pay it is a guilty man; and if he pays it by halves, he is perhaps more guilty still. He who cannot fulfil the duties of a father has no right to be a father. Not poverty, nor severe labor, nor human respect can release him from the duty of supporting his children and of educating them himself. Readers, you may believe my words. I prophesy to any one who has natural feeling and neglects these sacred duties,—that he will long shed bitter tears over this fault, and that for those tears he will find no consolation.[[4]]
[It being supposed that the father is unable or unwilling to charge himself personally with the education of his son, he must charge a third person with it, must seek out a master, a teacher for the child.]
The qualifications of a good tutor are very freely discussed. The first qualification I should require in him, and this one presupposes many others, is, that he shall not be capable of selling himself. There are employments so noble that we cannot fulfil them for money without showing ourselves unworthy to fulfil them. Such an employment is that of a soldier; such a one is that of a teacher. Who, then, shall educate my child? I have told you already,—yourself. I cannot! Then make for yourself a friend who can. I see no other alternative.
A teacher! what a great soul he ought to be! Truly, to form a man, one must be either himself a father, or else something more than human. And this is the office you calmly entrust to hirelings![[5]]