§ 19. In these passages, Rousseau strikes the key-note of true education. The first thing necessary for us is to see aright the subject on which we have to act. Unfortunately, however, this subject has often been the subject most neglected in the schoolroom. Children have been treated as if they were made for their school books, not their school books for them. As education has been thought of as learning, childhood has been treated as unimportant, a necessary stage in existence no doubt, but far more troublesome and hardly more interesting than the state of the chrysalis. If some forms of words, tables, declensions, county towns, and the like can be drummed into children, this is, say educators of the old school, a clear gain. For the rest nothing can be done with them except teaching them to read, write, and say the multiplication table.
But since the publication of the Émile, there has been in the world a very different view of education. According to this view, the importance of childhood is not to be measured by the amount of our knowledge, or even the number of our words, we can force it to remember. According to this view, in dealing with children we must not think of our knowledge or of our notions at all. We must think not of our own minds, but of the minds of the little ones.[133]
§ 20. The absurd results in which the opposite course has ended, Rousseau exposes with great severity. “All the studies demanded from the poor unfortunates lead to such things as are entirely beyond the range of their ideas, so you may judge what amount of attention they can give to them. Schoolmasters who make a great display of the instruction they give their pupils are paid to differ from me; but we see from what they do that they are entirely of my opinion. For what do they really teach? Words, words, for ever words. Among the various knowledges which they boast of giving, they are careful not to include such as would be of use; because these would involve a knowledge of things, and there they would be sure to fail; but they choose subjects that seem to be known when the terms are known such as heraldry, geography, chronology, languages and the like; all of them studies so foreign to a man, and still more to a child, that it is a great chance if anything of the whole lot ever proves useful to him on a single occasion in his whole life.”[134] “Whatever the study may be, without the idea of the things represented the signs representing them go for nothing. And yet the child is always kept to these signs without our being able to make him comprehend any of the things they represent.”[135] What does a child understand by “the globe”? An old geography book says candidly, that it is a round thing made of plaster; and this is the only notion children have of it. What a fearful waste, and worse than waste, it is to make them learn the signs without the things, when if they ever learn the things, they must at the same time acquire the signs! (Conf. Ruskin [supra p. 159, note].) “No! if Nature gives to the child’s brain this pliability which makes it capable of receiving impressions of every kind, this is not that we may engrave on it the names of kings, dates, the technical words of heraldry, of astronomy, of geography, and all those words meaningless at his age and useless at any age, with which we oppress his sad and sterile childhood; but that all the ideas which he can conceive and which are useful to him, all those which relate to his happiness and will one day make his duty plain to him, may trace themselves there in characters never to be effaced, and may assist him in conducting himself through life in a manner appropriate to his nature and his faculties.”[136]
§ 21. With Rousseau, as afterwards with Froebel, education was a kind of “child-gardening.” “Plants are developed by cultivation,” says he, “men by education: On façonne les plantes par la culture, et les hommes par l’éducation” (Ém. j., 6). The governor, who is the child-gardener, is to aim at three things: first, he is to shield the child from all corrupting influences; second, he is to devote himself to developing in the child a healthy and strong body in which the senses are to be rendered acute by exercise; third, he is, by practice not precept, to cultivate the child’s sense of duty.
§ 22. In his study of children Rousseau fixed on their never-resting activity. “The failing energy concentrates itself in the heart of the old man; in the heart of the child energy is overflowing and spreads outwards; he feels in him life enough to animate all his surroundings. Whether he makes or mars it is all one to him: it is enough that he has changed the state of things, and every change is an action. If he seems by preference to destroy, this is not from mischief; but the act of construction is always slow, and the act of destruction being quicker is more suited to his vivacity.”[137]
One of the first requisites in the care of the young is then to provide for the expansion of their activity. All restraints such as swaddling clothes for infants and “school” and “lessons” for children are to be entirely done away with.[138] Literary instruction must not be thought of. “There must be no other book than the world,” says Rousseau, “no other instruction than facts. The child who reads does not think, he does nothing but read, he gets no instruction; he learns words: Point d’autre livre que le monde, point d’autre instruction que les faits. L’enfant qui lit ne pense pas, il ne fait que lire; il ne s’instruit pas, il apprend les mots.” (Ém. iij., 181.)[139]
§ 23. If it be objected that, according to Rousseau’s plan, there would be a neglect of memory, he replies: “Without the study of books the kind of memory that a child should have will not remain inactive; all he sees, all he hears, strikes him, and he remembers it; he keeps a record in himself of people’s actions and people’s talk; and all around him makes the book by which without thinking of it he is constantly enriching his memory against the time that his judgment may benefit by it: Sans étudier dans les livres, l’espèce de mémoire que peut avoir un enfant ne reste pas pour cela oisive; tout ce qu’il voit, tout ce qu’il entend le frappe, et il s’en souvient; il tient registre en lui-même des actions, des discours des hommes; et tout ce qui l’environne est le livre, dans lequel, sans y songer, il enrichit continuellement sa mémoire, en attendant que son jugement puisse en profiter.” (Ém. ij., 106.) We should be most careful not to commit to our memory anything we do not understand, for if we do, we can never tell what part of our stores really belong to us. (Ém. iij., 236.)
§ 24. On the positive side the most striking part of Rousseau’s advice relates to the training of the senses. “The first faculties which become strong in us,” says he, “are our senses. These then are the first that should be cultivated; they are in fact the only faculties we forget or at least those which we neglect most completely.” We find that the young child “wants to touch and handle everything. By no means check this restlessness; it points to a very necessary apprenticeship. Thus it is that the child gets to be conscious of the hotness or coldness, the hardness or softness, the heaviness or lightness of bodies, to judge of their size and shape and all their sensible properties by looking, feeling, listening, especially by comparing sight and touch, and combining the sensations of the eye with those of the fingers.”[140] “See a cat enter a room for the first time; she examines round and stares and sniffs about without a moment’s rest, she is satisfied with nothing before she has tried it and made it out. This is just what a child does when he begins to walk, and enters, so to say, the chamber of the world. The only difference is that to the sight which is common to the child and the cat the first joins in his observations the hands which nature has given him, and the other animal that subtle sense of smell which has been bestowed upon her. It is this tendency, according as it is well cultivated or the reverse, that makes children either sharp or dull, active or slow, giddy or thoughtful.