Emile | Page 6

me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a
soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man. All that becomes a man he will learn as quickly as
another. In vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place.
"Occupavi te, fortuna, atque cepi; omnes-que aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non
posses." The real object of our study is man and his environment. To my mind those of us
who can best endure the good and evil of life are the best educated; hence it follows that
true education consists less in precept than in practice. We begin to learn when we begin
to live; our education begins with ourselves, our first teacher is our nurse. The ancients
used the word "Education" in a different sense, it meant "Nurture." "Educit obstetrix,"
says Varro. "Educat nutrix, instituit paedagogus, docet magister." Thus, education,
discipline, and instruction are three things as different in their purpose as the dame, the
usher, and the teacher. But these distinctions are undesirable and the child should only
follow one guide.
We must therefore look at the general rather than the particular, and consider our scholar
as man in the abstract, man exposed to all the changes and chances of mortal life. If men
were born attached to the soil of our country, if one season lasted all the year round, if
every man's fortune were so firmly grasped that he could never lose it, then the
established method of education would have certain advantages; the child brought up to
his own calling would never leave it, he could never have to face the difficulties of any
other condition. But when we consider the fleeting nature of human affairs, the restless
and uneasy spirit of our times, when every generation overturns the work of its
predecessor, can we conceive a more senseless plan than to educate a child as if he would
never leave his room, as if he would always have his servants about him? If the wretched
creature takes a single step up or down he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear pain; it
is training him to feel it.
People think only of preserving their child's life; this is not enough, he must be taught to
preserve his own life when he is a man, to bear the buffets of fortune, to brave wealth and
poverty, to live at need among the snows of Iceland or on the scorching rocks of Malta.
In vain you guard against death; he must needs die; and even if you do not kill him with
your precautions, they are mistaken. Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is
not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of

ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than
in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived
at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion.
Civilised man is born and dies a slave. The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the
corpse is nailed down in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.
I am told that many midwives profess to improve the shape of the infant's head by
rubbing, and they are allowed to do it. Our heads are not good enough as God made them,
they must be moulded outside by the nurse and inside by the philosopher. The Caribs are
better off than we are. The child has hardly left the mother's womb, it has hardly begun to
move and stretch its limbs, when it is deprived of its freedom. It is wrapped in swaddling
bands, laid down with its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms by its sides; it is
wound round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it cannot move. It is fortunate if
it has room to breathe, and it is laid on its side so that water which should flow from its
mouth can escape, for it is not free to turn its head on one side for this purpose.
The new-born child requires to stir and stretch his limbs to free them from the stiffness
resulting from being curled up so long. His limbs are stretched indeed, but he is not
allowed to move them. Even the head is confined by a cap. One would think they were
afraid the child should look as if it were alive.
Thus the internal impulses which should lead to growth find an insurmountable obstacle
in the way of the necessary movements.