Part 19

§ 16. “We are born weak, we have need of strength; we are born destitute of everything, we have need of assistance; we are born stupid, we have need of understanding. All that we have not at our birth, and which we require when grown up, is bestowed on us by education. This education we receive from nature, from men, or from things. The internal development of our organs and faculties is the education of nature: the use we are taught to make of that development is the education given us by men; and in the acquisitions made by our own experience on the objects that surround us, consists our education from things.”[126] “Since the concurrence of these three kinds of education is necessary to their perfection, it is by that one which is entirely independent of us, we must regulate the two others.”[127]

§ 17. Now “to live is not merely to breathe; it is to act, it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, and of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of our existence. The man who has lived most, is not he who has counted the greatest number of years, but he who has most thoroughly felt life.”[128]

§ 18. The aim of education, then, must be complete living.

But ordinary education, instead of seeking to develop the life of the child, sacrifices childhood to the acquirement of knowledge, or rather the semblance of knowledge, which it is thought will prove useful to the youth or the man. Rousseau’s great merit lies in his having exposed this fundamental error. He says, very truly, “We do not understand childhood, and pursuing false ideas of it our every step takes us further astray. The wisest among us fix upon what it concerns men to know without ever considering what children are capable of learning. They always expect to find the man in the child without thinking of what the child is before it is a man. And this is the study to which I have especially devoted myself, in order that should my entire method be false and visionary, my observations might always turn to account. I may not have seen aright what ought to be done: but I believe I have seen aright the subject on which we have to act. Begin then by studying your pupils better, for most certainly you do not understand them.”[129] “Nature wills that children should be _children_ before they are _men_. If we seek to pervert this order we shall produce forward fruits without ripeness or flavour, and tho’ not ripe, soon rotten: we shall have young _savans_ and old children. Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, feeling peculiar to itself; nothing is more absurd than to wish to substitute ours in their place.”[130] “We never know how to put ourselves in the place of children; we do not enter into their ideas, we attribute to them our own; and following always our own train of thought, even with syllogisms we manage to fill their heads with nothing but extravagance and error.”[131] “I wish some discreet person would give us a treatise on the art of observing children—an art which would be of immense value to us, but of which fathers and schoolmasters have not as yet learnt the very first rudiments.”[132]

§ 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.

“The first natural movements of the child being then to measure himself with his surroundings and to test in everything he sees all its sensible properties which may concern him, his first study is a kind of experimental physics relating to his own preservation; and from this we divert him to speculative studies before he feels himself at home here below. So long as his delicate and flexible organs can adjust themselves to the bodies on which they ought to act, so long as his senses as yet uncorrupted are free from illusion, this is the time to exercise them all in their proper functions; this is the time to learn to understand the sensuous relations which things have with us. As everything that enters the mind finds its way through the senses, the first reason of a human being is a reason of sensations; this it is which forms the basis of the intellectual reason; our first masters in philosophy are our feet, our hands, our eyes. Substituting books for all this is not teaching us to reason, but simply to use the reason of other people; it teaches us to take a great deal on trust and never to know anything.

“In order to practise an art we must begin by getting the proper implements; and that we may have good use of these implements they must be made strong enough to stand wear and tear. That we may learn to think we must then exercise our members, our senses, our organs, as these are the implements of our intelligence; and that we may make the most of these implements the body which supplies them must be strong and healthy. We see then that far from man’s true reason forming itself independently of his body, it is the sound constitution of the body that makes the operations of the mind easy and certain.”[141]

§ 25. Rousseau does not confine himself to advising that the senses should be cultivated; he also gives some hints of the _way_ in which they should be cultivated, and many modern experiments, such as “object lessons” and the use of actual weights and measures, may be directly traced to him. “As soon as a child begins to distinguish objects, a proper choice should be made in those which are presented to him.” Elsewhere he says, “To exercise the senses is not simply to make use of them; it is to learn to judge aright by means of them; it is to learn, so to say, to perceive; for we can only touch and see and hear according as we have learnt how. There is a kind of exercise perfectly natural and mechanical which serves to make the body strong without giving anything for the judgment to lay hold of: swimming, running, jumping, whip-top, stone throwing; all this is capital; but have we nothing but arms and legs? have we not also eyes and ears? and are these organs not needed in our use of the others? Do not then merely exercise the strength but exercise all the senses which direct it; get all you can out of each of them, and then check the impressions of one by the impressions of another. Measure, reckon, weigh, compare.”[142]

§ 26. Two subjects there were in which Émile was to receive instruction, viz.: music and drawing. Rousseau’s advice about drawing is well worth considering. He says: “Children who are great imitators all try to draw. I should wish my child to cultivate this art, not exactly for the art itself, but to make his eye correct and his hand supple: Les enfants, grands imitateurs, essayent tous de dessiner: je voudrais que le mien cultivât cet art, non précisément pour l’art même, mais pour se rendre l’œil juste et la main flexible.” (_Ém._ ij., 149). But Émile is to be kept clear of the ordinary drawing-master who would put him to imitate imitations; and there is a striking contrast between Rousseau’s suggestions and those of the authorities at South Kensington. Technical skill he cares for less than the training of the eye; so Émile is always to draw _from the object_, and, says Rousseau, “my intention is not so much that he should get to _imitate_ the objects, as get to _know_ them: mon intention n’est pas tant qu’il sache imiter les objets que les connaître.” (_Ém._ ij., 150).

§ 27. Before we pass the age of twelve years, at which point, as someone says, Rousseau substitutes another Émile for the one he has hitherto spoken of, let us look at his proposals for moral training. Rousseau is right, beyond question, in desiring that children should be treated as children. But what are children? What can they understand? What is the world in which they live? Is it the material world only, or is the moral world also open to them? (Girardin’s _R._, vol. ij., 136). On the subject of morals Rousseau seems to have admirable instincts,[143] but no principles, and moral as he is “on instinct,” there is always some confusion in what he Says. At one time he asserts that “there is only one knowledge to give children, and that is a knowledge of duty: Il n’y a qu’une science à enseigner aux enfants: c’est celle des devoirs de l’homme.” (_Ém._ j., 26). Elsewhere he says: “To know right from wrong, to be conscious of the reason of duty is not the business of a child: Connaître le bien et le mal, sentir la raison des devoirs de l’homme, n’est pas l’affaire d’un enfant.” (_Ém._ ij., 75).[144] In another place he mounts his hobby that “the most sublime virtues are negative” (_Ém._ ij., 95), and that about the best man who ever lived (till he found Friday?) was Robinson Crusoe. The outcome of all Rousseau’s teaching on this subject seems that we should in every way develop the child’s animal or physical life, retard his intellectual life, and ignore his life as a spiritual and moral being.

§ 28. A variety of influences had combined, as they combine still, to draw attention away from the importance of physical training; and by placing the child’s bodily organs and senses as the first things to be thought of in education, Rousseau did much to save us from the bad tradition of the Renascence. But there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy, and whatever Rousseau might say, Émile could never be restrained from inquiring after them. Every boy will _think_; _i.e._, he will think _for himself_, however unable he may seem to think in the direction in which his instructors try to urge him. The wise elders who have charge of him must take this into account, and must endeavour to guide him into thinking modestly and thinking right. Then again, as soon as the child can speak, or before, the world of sensation becomes for him a world, not of sensations only, but also of sentiments, of sympathies, of affections, of consciousness of right and wrong, good and evil. All these feelings, it is true, may be affected by traditional prejudices. The air the child breathes may also contain much that is noxious; but we have no more power to exclude the atmosphere of the moral world than of the physical. All we can do is to take thought for fresh air in both cases. As for Rousseau’s notion that we can withdraw the child from the moral atmosphere, we see in it nothing but a proof how little he understood the problems he professed to solve.[145]

§ 29. Although the governor is to devote himself to a single child, Rousseau is careful to protest against over-direction. “You would stupify the child,” says he, “if you were constantly directing him, if you were always saying to him, ‘Come here! Go there! Stop! Do this! Don’t do that!’ If your head always directs his arms, his own head becomes useless to him.” (_Ém._, ij., 114). Here we have a warning which should not be neglected by those who maintain the _Lycées_ in France, and the ordinary private boarding-schools in England. In these schools a boy is hardly called upon to exercise his will all day long. He rises in the morning when he must; at meals he eats till he is obliged to stop; he is taken out for exercise like a horse; he has all his indoor work prescribed for him both as to time and quantity. In this kind of life he never has occasion to think or act for himself. He is therefore without self-reliance. So much care is taken to prevent his doing wrong, that he gets to think only of checks from without. He is therefore incapable of self-restraint. In the English public schools boys have much less supervision from their elders, and organise a great portion of their lives for themselves. This proves a better preparation for life after the school age; and most public schoolmasters would agree with Rousseau that “the lessons the boys get from each other in the playground are a hundred times more useful to them than the lessons given them in school: les leçons que les écoliers prennent entre eux dans la cour du collège leur sont cent fois plus utiles que tout ce qu’on leur dira jamais dans la classe.” (_Ém._ ij., 123.)

§ 30. On questions put by children, Rousseau says: “The art of questioning is not so easy as it may be thought; it is rather the art of the master than of the pupil. We must have learnt a good deal of a thing to be able to ask what we do not know. The learned know and inquire, says an Indian proverb, but the ignorant know not what to inquire about.” And from this he infers that children learn less from asking than from being asked questions. (_N. H._, 5th p. 490.)

§ 31. At twelve years old Émile is said to be fit for instruction. “Now is the time for labour, for instruction, for study; and observe that it is not I who arbitrarily make this choice; it is pointed out to us by Nature herself.”

§ 32. What novelties await us here? As we have seen Rousseau was determined to recommend nothing that would harmonise with ordinary educational practice; but even a genius, though he may abandon previous practice, cannot keep clear of previous thought, and Rousseau’s plan for instruction is obviously connected with the thoughts of Montaigne and of Locke. But while on the same lines with these great writers Rousseau goes beyond them and is both clearer and bolder than they are.

§ 33. Rousseau’s proposals for instruction have the following main features.

1st. Instruction is to be no longer literary or linguistic. The teaching about words is to disappear, and the young are not to learn by books or about books.

2nd. The subjects to be studied are to be mathematics and physical science.

3rd. The method to be adopted is not the didactic but the method of _self-teaching_.

4th. The hands are to be called into play as a means of learning.

§ 34. 1st. Till quite recently the only learning ever given in schools was book-learning, a fact to which the language of the people still bears witness: when a child does not profit by school instruction he is always said to be “no good at his book.” Now-a-days the tendency is to change the character of the schools so that they may become less and less mere “Ludi Literarii.” In this Rousseau seems to have been a century and more in advance of us; and yet we cannot credit him with any remarkable wisdom or insight about literature. He himself used books as a means of “collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear” (J. Morley’s _Rousseau_, j. chap. 3, p. 85), and he has recorded for us his opinion that “the sensible and interesting conversations of a young woman of merit are more proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of books” (_Confessions_, quoted by Morley j., 87). After this, whatever we may think of the merit of his suggestions we can sit at the Sage’s feet no longer.

§ 35. 2nd. Rousseau had himself little knowledge of mathematics and natural science, but he was strongly in favour of the “study of Nature”; and in his last years his devotion to botany became a passion. His curriculum for Émile is in the air, but the chief thing is to get him to attend to the phenomena of nature, and “to foster his curiosity by being in no hurry to satisfy it.”

§ 36. 3rd. About teaching and learning, there is one point on which we find a consensus of great authorities extending from the least learned of writers who was probably Rousseau to the most learned who was probably Friedrich August Wolf. In one form or other these assert that there is no true teaching but _self_-teaching.