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Andrew Naguib's Homepage
(آندرو نجيب؛ الصفحة الشخصية)
Émile, or Treatise on Education
Written by Jean-Jacque Rousseau
Book 1
A Man's Touch
Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things;
everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to
nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another.
He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside
down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity; monsters. He wants
nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him, man must be trained
like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy
like a tree in his garden.
Respecting Mothers
Mind how Jean roasts a child who disrespect their mother.
But if on any occasion whatsoever a child were unnatural enough to
lack respect for his mother– for her who carried him in her womb, who
nursed him with her milk, who for years forgot herself in favor of
caring for him alone– one should hasten to strangle this wretch as a
monster unworthy of seeing the light of day. Mothers, it is said,
spoil their children. In that they are doubtless wrong– but less
wrong than you perhaps who deprave them.
Learning How to Bear the Goods and Ills of Life
When it is only a question of going against the wind, one tacks. But
if the sea is heavy and one wants to stand still, one must cast
anchor. Take care, young pilot, for fear that your cable run or your
anchor drag and that the vessel drift without your noticing.
Living is the job I want to teach him. On leaving my hands, he will, I
admin, be neither magistrate nor soldier nor priest. He will, in the
first place, be a man.
He among us who best knows how to bear the goods and the ills of this
life is to my taste the best raised: from which it follows that the
true education consists less in precept than in practice.
This is not teaching him to bear suffering; it is training him to feel
it.
One things only of preserving one's child. That is not enough one
ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man, to bear the blows of
fate, to brave opulence and poverty, to live, if he has to, in
freezing Iceland or on Malta's burning rocks. You may very well take
precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to die. And
though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these
efforts would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him
from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is
to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of
all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our
existence.
Civil man is born, lives, and dies in slavery. At his birth he is
sewed in swaddling clothes; at his death he is nailed in a coffin. So
long as he keeps his human shape, he is enchained by our institution.
Swaddling Newborns
Their first sentiment is a sentiment of pain and suffering. They find
only obstacles to all the movements which they need. Unhappier than a
criminal in irons, they make vain efforts, they get irritable, they
cry. Their first voices, you say, are tears. I can well believe it.
You thwart them from their birth. The first gifts they receive from
you are chains. The first treatment they experience is torment.
It is claimed that children in freedom could assume bad positions and
make movements capable of hurting the good conformation of their
limbs. This is one of those vain reasonings of our false wisdom that
children who, among peoples more sensible than us, are reared with
complete freedom of their limbs, not a single one is seen who would
force to make them dangerous; and, when they take a strained position,
the pain soon warns them to change it.
We have not yet taken it into our heads to swaddle little dofs or
cats. Do we see that they have any problems as a result of this
negligence?
Fixing the Root
Do you wish to bring everyone back to his first duties? Begin with
mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you will produce.
Everything follows successively from their first depravity. The whole
moral order degenerates; naturalness is extinguished in all hearts;
family aborning is no longer attaches husbands, no longer imposes
respect on outsiders; the mother whose children one does not see is
less respected.
There are no longer fathers, mothers, children, brothers, or sisters.
They all hardly know each other. How could they love each other? Each
things only of himself. When home is only a asad solitude, one must
surely go elsewhere for gaiety.
Over-protection of Children
Here we are, from the first steps, outside of nature.
One leaves it by an opposite route as well when, instead of neglecting
a mother's care, a woman carries it to excess; when she makes an idol
of her child; when she increases and nurses his weakness in order to
prevent him from feeling it; and when, hoping to exempt him form the
laws of nature, she keeps hard blows away form him. She preserves many
mishaps and perils she is thereby accumulating for him to bear later,
and how barbarous a precaution is which adds childhood's weakness
to mature men's toils. Thetis, to make her son invulnerable, plunged
him, according to the fable, in the water of the Styx. This allegory
is a lovery one, and it is clear.
so the analogy above references Achilles water of Styx
which basically made him all strong except his ankle which remained weak
because he was held by one foot when dipped into the river of Styx.
The cruel mothers of whom I speak do otherwise: by dint of plunging
their children in softness, they prepare them for suffering; they open
their pores to ills of every sort to which they will not fail to be
prey when grown.
Experience teaches that even more children raised delicately die than
do others. Provided the limit of their strength is not exceeded, less
is risked in employing that strength than in sparing it. Exercise
them, then, against the attacks they will one day have to bear. Harden
their bodies against the intemperance of season, climates, elements;
against hunger, thirst, fatigue. Steep then in the water of the Styx.
Nature contribution to raising children
Observe nature and follow the path it maps out for you. it exercises
children constantly; it hardens their temperament by tests of all
sorts; it teaches them early what effort and pain are. Teething puts
them in a fever; sharp colics give them convulsions; long coughs
suffocate them; worms torment them; plethora corrupts their blood;
various leavens ferment in it and cause perilous eruptions. Almost all
the first age is sickness and danger. Half the children born perish
before the eights year.
On the flexibility of children's mind and bodies,
Before the obdy's habit is acquired, one can give it the habit one
wants to give it without danger. But when it has once gained its
consistency, every alteration becomes perilous for it. A child will
bear changs that a man would not bear; the fibers of the former, soft
and flexible, take without effort the turn that they are given; those
of the man, more hardened, change only with violence the turn they
have received. A child, then, can be made robust without exposing its
life and its health; and if there were some risk, still one must not
hesitate. Since there are risks inseparable from human life, can one
do better than shift them to that part of its span when they are least
disadvantageous.
A child becomes more precious as he advances in age. To the value of
his person is joined that of the effort he has cost; to the loss of
his life is joined in him the sentiment of death.
Keeping a child in his original form
Do you, the, want him to keep his original form? Preserve it from the
instant he comes into the world. As soon as he is born, take hold of
him and leave him no more before he is a man.
Let them be in agreement both about the order of their functions and
about their system; let the child pass from the hands of the one into
those of the other.
To mothers who do not nurse their newborn
Let us not be surprised that a man whose wife did not deign to nurse
the fruit of their union does not deign to raise him. There is no
picture more charming than that of the family, but a single missing
feature disfigures all the others. ***If the mother has too little
health to be nurse, the father will have too much business to be
preceptor
Home Integrity
The children, sent away, dispersed in boarding scools, convents,
colleges, will take the love belonging to the paternal home elsewhere,
or to put it better, they will bring back to the paternal home the
habit of having no attachments. Brothers and sisters will hardly know
one another. When all are gathered together for a ceremonial
occassions, they will be able to be quite polite with one another.
They will treat one another as strangers. As soon as there is no more
intimacy between the parents, as soon as the society of the family no
longer constitutes the sweetnes of life, it is of course necessary
to turn to bad morals to find a substitute. Where is the man stupid
enough not to see the chain formed by all these links?
When you will leave your child?
I no longer let him out of sight for a moment until, whatever he may
say, he has no longer the least need of me.
Who a Child's Governor?
A child's governor ought to be young and even as young as a wise man
can be. I would want him to be a child himself if it were possible, to
be able to become his pupil's companion and attract his confident by
sharing his enjoyments. There are not enough things in common between
childhood and maturity for a really solid attachment ever to be formed
at this distance.
Children sometimes latter old man, but they never love them. One would
wish that a governor had already educated someone. That is too much to
wish for; the same man can only give one education. If two were
required in order to succeed, by what right would one undertake the
first.
A governor or a preceptor?
You distinguish the preceptor from the governor; another folly! It is
that of man's duties. This science is one, and whatever
Xenophone says about the education of the Persians it is not
divisible.
I would not take on a sickly and ill-constituted child, were he to
live until eighty. I want no pupil always useless to himself and
others, involved uniquely with preserving himself, whose body does
damage to the education of his soul. What would I be doing in vainly
lavishing my cares on him other than doubling society's loss and taking
two men from it instead of one?
I am not able to teach living to one who things of nothing but how
to keep himself from dying.
Frail Body Impact on the Soul
A frail body weakens the soul. This is the origin of the empire of
medicine, an art more pernicious to men than all the ills it claims to
cure.
A side note on Medicine
I do not know of what illness the doctors cure us; but I do know that
they give us quite fatal ones: cowardice, pusillanimity,
credulousness, and terror of death. If they cure the body, they kill
courage.
What difference does it make to us that they make cadavers walk? It is
men we need, and none is seen leaving their hands.
Science which instructs and medicine which cures are doubtless very
good. But science which deceives and medicine which kills are bad.
Learn, therefore to distinguish them.
Explicitly commenting on the following paragraph:
I do not, therefore, dispute that medicine is useful to some men, but
I say that it is fatal to humankind.
This lying art (referring to medicine), made more for the ills of the
mind than for those of the body, is no more useful for the former than
for the latter.
Do you want to find men of a true courage? Look for them in the places
where there are no doctors, where they are ignorant of the
consequences of illnesses, where they hardly think of death.
The wise John Locke, who spent a part of his life in the study of medicine,
strongly recommends never using drugs Medication on children either as a
precaution or for slight discomforts. I shall go farther, and I declare that,
never calling a doctor for myself, I shall never call one for my Emile, unless
his life is in evident danger, for then the doctor can do him no worse than kill
him.
When an animal is sick, it suffers in silence and keeps quiet. now one
does not see more sickly animals than men.
Temperance and work are the two true doctors of man. Work sharpens his
appetite, and temperance prevents him from abusing it.
Nursing
The milk of a herbivorous females is sweeter and healthier than that
of carnivores. Formed from a substance homogeneous with its own, it
preserves is nature better and becomes less subject to putrefaction
Not sure on what references is jean basing the argument above. But, it's
sounding to know that even back then, almost 300 years ago, carnivores
were a controversial argument.
Separated or curdled milk is feared; that is
foolish, since it is known that milk always curdles in the stomach. It
is thus that it becomes a food solid enough to nourish children and
animal babies. If it did not curdle at all, it would just go through;
it would not nourish them.
Living in the city
Pregnant women who are in the country rush to return to the city for
their confinement. They ought to do exactly the opposite particularly
those who want to nurse their children. They would have less to
regret than they think; and in an abode more natural to the species,
the pleasures connect with the duties of nature would soon efface the
taste for the pleasures not related to those duties.
Child Delivery
At first, after the confinement, the child is washed with some warm
water in which wine is ordinarily mixed. This addition of wine hardly
appears to me to be necessary. Since nature produces nothing
fermented, it is not to be believed that the use of an artificial
liquor is important for the life of its creatures.
Learning by Sensors
At the beginning of life whe memory and imagination are stil inactive,
the child is attentive only to waht affects his senses at the moment.
Since his sensations are the first materials of his knowledge, to
present them to him in an appropriate order is to prepare his memory
to provide them one day to his understanding in the same order.
Intimidating your child, whether by striking or (I suggest, yelling)
I shall never forget having seen one of these difficult cryers thus
struck by his nurse. He immediately kept quite. I believed he was
intimidated. I said to myself, "This will be a servile soul from which
you will get nothing except by severity"
Thwarting Children
As long as children find resistance only in things and never in wills,
they will become neither rebellious nor irascible and will prserve
their health better. Here is one of the reasons why the children of
the people, freer, more independent are generally less firm, less
delicate, more robust than those wh are allegedly better brought up by
being endlessly thearted.
When the child stretches out his hand without saying anything, he
believes he will reach the object because he does not estimate the
distance. He is mistaken. But when he complains and screams in
reaching out his hand, he is no longer deceived as to the tdistance;
he is ordering the object to approach or you to bring it to him. In
the first case carry him to the object slowly and with small steps. In
the second act as though you do not even hear him. The more he
screams, the less you should listen to him. It is important to
accustom him early not to give orders either to men, for he is not
their master, or to things, give orders either to men, for he is not
their master, or to things, for they do not hear him. Thus, when a
child desires something that he sees and one wants to give it to him,
it is better to carry the child to the object than to bring the object
to the child. He draws from this practice a conclusion appropriate to
his age, and there is no oteher means to suggest it to him.
Wicked Children
Thomas Hobbes called the wicked man a robust child, he said
something absolutely contradictory. All wickedness comes from
weakness. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him
strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do
harm.
The comment I am about to lay here is out of context, but the last
sentence can be connected more or less to Leibniz on the Problem of Evil
Of all the attributes of the all-powerful divinity, goodness is the one without
which one can least conceive it (also argued in Divine Hiddenness and Human
Reason).
Cont'd
But as soon as they can consider the people who surround them as
instruments depending on them to be set in motion, they make use of
those people to follow their inclination and to supplement their own
weakness. That is how they become difficult, tyrannical, imperious,
wicked, unmanageable.
Maxims to Stay on the Path of Nature
First Maxim
One must, let them have the use of all the strength nature gives
them–a strength they could not know how to abuse
Second Maxim
One must aid them and supplement what is lacking to them, whether in
intelligence or strength, in all that is connected with physical need.
Third Maxim
One must, in the help one gives them, limit oneself solely to the
really useful, without granting anything to whim or to desire without
reason; for whim, in as much as it does not come from nature, will not
torment them if it has not been induced in them.
Fourth Maxim
One must study their language and their signs with care in order that,
at an ae at which they do not know how to dissimulate, one can
distinguish in their desires what comes immediately from nature and
what comes from opinion
The spirit of these rules is to accord children more true freedom and
less dominion, to let them do more by themselves and to exact less from
others
Again on Pacifying Children
But if you cannot relieve him, keep quiet without humoring him in
order to pacify him. Your caresses will not cure his colic; however,
he will remember what must be done to be humored, and if he once known
how to make your take care of him at his will, he has become your
master. All is lost.
And he emphasises,
Why would they stint their tears once they see that their tears are
good for so many things? Scoholed in the value put on their silence,
they are quite careful not to be prodigal with it. They finally put
such a price on it that it can no longer be paid, and it is then that,
by dint of crying unsuccessfully, they exert themselves, get exhausted
and die.
Correcting Child's Mistakes
it is insupportable pedantry and a most superfluous care to concentrate
on correcting children for all these little mistakes in usage which
they never with time fail to correct by themselves. Always speak
correctly before them, arrange that they enjoy themselves with no one
as much as with you, and be sure that imperceptibly their language
will be purfied on the model of yours without your ever having chided
them.
Speech
But an abuse of an entirely different importance and one no less easy
to prevent is when one is in too much of a hurry to make them talk, as
if one were afraid that they will not learn to talk by themselves.
Accentuation is the soul of speech. It gives speech sentiment and
truth. Accentuation lies less than the word does. This is perhaps why
well-brought-up people fear it so much. From the practice of saying
everything in the same tone came the practice of mocking people
wihtout their being aware of it.
A man who learns to speak only in his bedroom will fail to make hmself
understood at the head of a battalion and will hardly impress the
people in a riot. First teach children to speak to men; they will know
how ot speak to women when they have to.
The child who wants to speak should hear only words he can understand
and say only those he can articulate.
The first words they say have no meaning for them, but that they have
another meaning htan ours without our being able to perceive it; so
that, appearing to answer us quite exactly, they speak to us without
understanding us and without our understanding them.
It is ordinarily due to such equivocations that we are sometimes
surprised by their remarks; to which we lend ideas that they did not
attach to them. This lack of attention on our part to the true meaning
which words have for children appears to me the cause of their first
errors; and these errors, even after they are cured of them, have no
influence on their turn of mind for the rest of their lives. I shall
have more than one occasion to clarify this by examples in what
follows
Restrict, therefor, the child's vocabulary as much as possible. It is a
very great disadvantage for him to have more words than ideas, for him
to know how to say more things than he can think. I believe one of the
reasons why peasants generally have clearer minds than city people is
that their lexicon is less extensive. They have few ideas, but they
are very good at the comparison of ideas.
Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae
Book II
and now infancy, strictly, speaking, has ended.
When children begin to speak, they cry less, This is a natural
progress. One language i substituted for the other.
If the child is delicate, sensitive, if naturally h starts crying for
nothing, by making his cries useless and ineffective, I will soon dry
up their source. So long as he cries, I do not go tohim. I run as soon
as he has stopped.
Whatever injury a child may do to himself, it is very rare that he
crie when he is alone, unless he hopes to be heard.
To suffer is the first thing he ought to learn and the thing he will
most need to know. It seems that children are little and weak only in
order that they may gt these important lessons without danger.
My pupil will oftn have bruises. But, in compensation, he will always
be gay.
the time to correct man's bad inclinations; it is during the age of
childhood, when we are least sensitive to pains, that they must be
multiplied so as to spare them in the age of reason.
Slapping our ill-condition care with a trowel onto the newborn
We do not know what absolute happiness or unhappiness is. Everything
is mixed in this life; in it one tastes no pure sentiment; in it one
does not stay two moments in the same state. The affections of our
souls, as well as the states of our bodies, are in a continual flux
The happiest is he who suffers the least pain; the unhappiest is he
who feels the least pleasure
Weakness
Therefore, do not fancy that in extending your faculties you extend
your strength. On the contrary, you diminish your strength if your
pride is extended farther than it. Let us measure the radius of our
sphere and stay in the sufficient unto ourselves; and we shall not
have to complain of our weakness, for we shall never feel it.
Restraining the Will
O man, draw your existence up within yourself, and you will no longer
be miserable. remain in the place which nature assigns to you in the
chain of being. Nothing will be able to make you leave it. Do not
rebel against the hard law of necessity; and do not exhaust your
strength by your will to resist that law.
Don't involve others
The only one who does his own will is he who, in order to do it, has
no need to put another's arms at the end of his own; from which it
follow that the first of all goods is not authority but freedom.
Ripen in Silence.
I have seen a man who honored me with his friendship taken, at a
rather advanced age, to be a limited mind by his family and his
friends. This excellent head ripened in silence. Suddenly, he proved
to be a philosopher, and I do not doubt that posterity will give him
an honorable and distinguished place among the best reasoners and the
most profound meta-physicians of his age.
Amour-Propre
..one could say that he has done everything when he has taught them
well how to enjoy themselves.
Book III
As a man he would be very weak; as a child he is very strong.
Knowledge and Intelligence
Human intelligence has its limits; and not only is it impossible for
a man to know everything, he
cannot even know completely the little that other men know.
A choice must, therefore must be made of the things that ought to be
taught as well as of the proper time for learning them.
Think of it as a branching strategy through the tree of knowledge. For obvious
reasons, we cannot exhaustively explore the tree and it's not efficiently
solvable.
Make your pupil attentive to the phenomena of nature. Soon you will
make him curious. But to feed his curiosity, never hurry to satisfy
it. Put the questions within his reach and leave them to him to
resolve. Let him know something not because you told it to him but
because he has understood it himself. Let him not learn science but
discover it.
Jean continues later in this chapter…
…after having let him chat about it at his ease (the sun rising),
keep quiet for a few moments like a man who dreams, and they say to
him, "I was thinking that yesterday evening the sun set here and that
this morning it rose there. How is that possible?"
Even latter in the chapter…
… for in human society, the greatest instrument of man is man, and
the wisest is he who best makes use of this instrument.
Talking to your child
Do not make speeches to the child which he cannot understand. No
descriptions, no eloquence, no figures, no poetry. It is not now a
question of sentiment or taste. Continue to be clear, simple, and
cold. The time for adopting another kind of language will come only
too soon.
Amour-propre, the first and most natural of all the passions, is still
hardly aroused in him.
Book IV
ÉMILE FROM FIFTEEN TO TWENTY–THE PERIOD OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
How swift is our passage over this earth! The first quarter of life has slipped
away before we know its use, and the last quarter also slips away after we have
ceased to enjoy it. At first we do not know how to live; soon we are no longer
able to live; and in the interval which separates these two useless extremities
three quarters of the time which remains to us is consumed in sleep, in labor,
in suffering, in constraint, in troubles of every description. Life is short,
less through the brevity of the time that it lasts than because, of this brief
period, we have almost nothing for enjoying it. It matters not that the moment
of death is far removed from that of birth, for life is always too short when
this space is badly filled.
Early Enlightenment of Sex
…whether is is fitting to enlighten children early concerning the
objects of their curiosity, or whether it is better to put them off
the trail with little falsehoods? I thinkon eought to do neither he
one nor the other.
explitily emphasizing on the next sentence
It is better to impose silence on him than to answer him by lying. He
will be little surprised by this law if care has been take to subject
himto it in inconsequential things.
and even more importantly
There is much less daner in satisfying the child's curiosity than
there is in exciting it.
Early Corrupted Young
I have always seen that young people who are ocrrupted early and given
over to women and debaunchery are inhuman and crule. The heat of their
temperaments made them impatient, vindictive, and wild. Their
imaginations, filled by a single object, rejected all the rest.
And continues, read it in capital letters
They would have sacrificed fathers, mothers, and the whole universe to
the least of their pleasures.
On Questioning God or *religion
Suffused with the sense of my inadequacy, I shall never reason about
the nature of God without being forced to by the sentiment of His
relations with me. These reasonings are always rash; a wise man ought
to yield to them only with trembling and with certainty that he is not
made to plumb their depths; for what is most insulting to the divinity
is not thinking not at all about it b thinking badly about it.
While the sentence "he is not made to plumb their depths" is so…beautiful, I
am afraid that it can be used to manipulate people, I would rather choose the
word "ready" than "made".
On Onanism
By these measures and other similar ones I believe he will be so well protected
against external objects and vulgar maxims that I would rather see him in the
midst of the worse society of Paris than alone in his room or in a park, given
over to all the restlessness of his age. No matter what one does, the most
dangerous of all the enemies that can attach a young man, and the only one that
cannot be put out of the way, is himself. This enemy however is dangerous only
thorugh our own fault; for as I have said countless times, the senses are
awakened by the imagination alone. Their need is not properly a physical need It
is not true that it is a true need. If no lewd object had eve struck our eyes,
if no indecent idea had ever entered our minds, perhaps this alleged need would
never have made itself felt to us, and we would have remained chaste without
temptation, without effort, and without merit.
Even more worriedly,
I am persuaded that a solitary man raised in a desert, without books,
without instruction, and without women, would die there a virgin at
whatever age he had reached. But we are not talking here about a
savage of this kind. In raising a man among his fellows for a life in
society, it is impossible, it is even counter to my intention, to keep
him always in this salutary ignorance, and the worse situation for
chastity is to be halfway knowledgeable. The memory of objects that
have mae an impression upon us, the ideas that we have acquired follow
us in our retreat and people it in spite of ourselves with images more
seductive tha nthe objects themselves; they make solitude as fatal to
the man who carries these images to his retreat as it is useful to the
man who has always remained there alone.
Advice
Therefore watch the young man carefully. He can protect himself from
everything else, but it is up to you to protect him from himself. Do
not leave him alone, day or night. At the very least, sleep in his
room.
It must not be destroyed, but it must be regulated, and that is
perhaps more difficult than annihilating it. It would be very
dangerous if instinct taught your pupil to trick his senses and to
find a substitute for the opporutnity of satisfying them.
Consequence
He will suffer until his death the sad effects of this habit, the most
fatal to which a man can be subjected.
A criticism, or rather an arbiter as the author, Glen Baier, called it: A PROPER
ARBITER OF PLEASURE: ROUSSEAU ON THE CONTROL OF SEXUAL DESIRE
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