Читать книгу Émile; Or, Concerning Education; Extracts - Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Страница 7

The new-born child needs to stretch and to move his limbs so as to draw them out of the torpor in which, rolled into a ball, they have so long remained. We do stretch his limbs, it is true, but we prevent him from moving them. We even constrain his head into a baby's cap. It seems as if we were afraid he might appear to be alive. The inaction, the constraint in which we keep his limbs, cannot fail to interfere with the circulation of the blood and of the secretions, to prevent the child from growing strong and sturdy, and to change his constitution. In regions where these extravagant precautions are not taken, the men are all large, strong, and well proportioned. Countries in which children are swaddled swarm with hunchbacks, with cripples, with persons crook-kneed, stunted, rickety, deformed in all kinds of ways. For fear that the bodies of children may be deformed by free movements, we hasten to deform them by putting them into a press. Of our own accord we cripple them to prevent their laming themselves.

Must not such a cruel constraint have an influence upon their temper as well as upon their constitution? Their first feeling is a feeling of constraint and of suffering. To all their necessary movements they find only obstacles. More unfortunate than chained criminals, they make fruitless efforts, they fret themselves, they cry. Do you tell me that the first sounds they make are cries? I can well believe it; you thwart them from the time they are born. The first gifts they receive from you are chains, the first treatment they undergo is torment. Having nothing free but the voice, why should they not use it in complaints? They cry on account of the suffering you cause them; if you were pinioned in the same way, your own cries would be louder.

Whence arises this unreasonable custom of swaddling children? From an unnatural custom. Since the time when mothers, despising their first duty, no longer wish to nurse their own children at the breast, it has been necessary to intrust the little ones to hired women. These, finding themselves in this way the mothers of strange children, concerning whom the voice of nature is silent to them, seek only to spare themselves annoyance. A child at liberty would require incessant watching; but after he is well swaddled, they throw him into a corner without troubling themselves at all on account of his cries. Provided there are no proofs of the nurse's carelessness, provided that the nursling does not break his legs or his arms, what does it matter, after all, that he is pining away, or that he continues feeble for the rest of his life? His limbs are preserved at the expense of his life, and whatever happens, the nurse is held free from blame.

It is pretended that children, when left free, may put themselves into bad positions, and make movements liable to injure the proper conformation of their limbs. This is one of the weak arguments of our false wisdom, which no experience has ever confirmed. Of that multitude of children who, among nations more sensible than ourselves, are brought up in the full freedom of their limbs, not one is seen to wound or lame himself. They cannot give their movements force enough to make them dangerous; and when they assume a hurtful position, pain soon warns them to change it.

We have not yet brought ourselves to the point of swaddling puppies or kittens; do we see that any inconvenience results to them from this negligence? Children are heavier, indeed; but in proportion they are weaker. They can scarcely move themselves at all; how can they lame themselves? If laid upon the back they would die in that position, like the tortoise, without being able ever to turn themselves again.

[This want of intelligence In the care bestowed upon young children is seen particularly in those mothers who give themselves no concern about their own, do not themselves nurse them, intrust them to hireling nurses. This custom is fatal to all; first to the children and finally to families, where barrenness becomes the rule, where woman sacrifices to her own convenience the joys and the duties of motherhood.]

Would you recall every one to his highest duties? Begin with the mothers; you will be astonished at the changes you will effect. From this first depravity all others come in succession. The entire moral order is changed; natural feeling is extinguished in all hearts. Within our homes there is less cheerfulness; the touching sight of a growing family no longer attaches the husband or attracts the attention of strangers. The mother whose children are not seen is less respected. There is no such thing as a family living together; habit no longer strengthens the ties of blood. There are no longer fathers and mothers and children and brothers and sisters. They all scarcely know one another; how then should they love one another? Each one thinks only of himself. When home is a melancholy, lonely place, we must indeed go elsewhere to enjoy ourselves.

But let mothers only vouchsafe to nourish their children,[2] and our manners will reform themselves; the feelings of nature will re-awaken in all hearts. The State will be repeopled; this chief thing, this one thing will bring all the rest into order again. The attractions of home life present the best antidote to bad morals. The bustling life of little children, considered so tiresome, becomes pleasant; it makes the father and the mother more necessary to one another, more dear to one another; it draws closer between them the conjugal tie. When the family is sprightly and animated, domestic cares form the dearest occupation of the wife and the sweetest recreation of the husband. Thus the correction of this one abuse would soon result in a general reform; nature would resume all her rights. When women are once more true mothers, men will become true fathers and husbands.

If mothers are not real mothers, children are not real children toward them. Their duties to one another are reciprocal, and if these be badly fulfilled on the one side, they will be neglected on the other side. The child ought to love his mother before he knows that it is his duty to love her. If the voice of natural affection be not strengthened by habit and by care, it will grow dumb even in childhood; and thus the heart dies, so to speak, before it is born. Thus from the outset we are beyond the pale of nature.

There is an opposite way by which a woman goes beyond it; that is, when, instead of neglecting a mother's cares, she carries them to excess; when she makes her child her idol. She increases and fosters his weakness to prevent him from feeling it. Hoping to shelter him from the laws of nature, she wards from him shocks of pain. She does not consider how, for the sake of preserving him for a moment from some inconveniences, she is heaping upon his head future accidents and perils; nor how cruel is the caution which prolongs the weakness of childhood in one who must bear the fatigues of a grown-up man. The fable says that, to render her son invulnerable, Thetis plunged him into the Styx. This allegory is beautiful and clear. The cruel mothers of whom I am speaking do far otherwise; by plunging their children into effeminacy they open their pores to ills of every kind, to which, when grown up, they fall a certain prey.

Watch nature carefully, and follow the paths she traces out for you. She gives children continual exercise; she strengthens their constitution by ordeals of every kind; she teaches them early what pain and trouble mean. The cutting of their teeth gives them fever, sharp fits of colic throw them into convulsions, long coughing chokes them, worms torment them, repletion corrupts their blood, different leavens fermenting there cause dangerous eruptions. Nearly the whole of infancy is sickness and danger; half the children born into the world die before their eighth year. These trials past, the child has gained strength, and as soon as he can use life, its principle becomes more assured.

This is the law of nature. Why do you oppose her? Do you not see that in thinking to correct her you destroy her work and counteract the effect of all her cares? In your opinion, to do without what she is doing within is to redouble the danger. On the contrary, it is really to avert, to mitigate that danger. Experience teaches that more children who are delicately reared die than others. Provided we do not exceed the measure of their strength, it is better to employ it than to hoard it. Give them practice, then, in the trials they will one day have to endure. Inure their bodies to the inclemencies of the seasons, of climates, of elements; to hunger, thirst, fatigue; plunge them into the water of the Styx. Before the habits of the body are acquired we can give it such as we please without risk. But when once it has reached its full vigor, any alteration is perilous to its well-being. A child will endure changes which a man could not bear. The fibres of the former, soft and pliable, take without effort the bent we give them; those of man, more hardened, do not without violence change those they have received. We may therefore make a child robust without exposing his life or his health; and even if there were some risk we still ought not to hesitate. Since there are risks inseparable from human life, can we do better than to throw them back upon that period of life when they are least disadvantageous?

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]