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(آندرو نجيب؛ الصفحة الشخصية)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The children, sent away, dispersed in boarding schools, 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 occasions, 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 sweetens 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

..one could say that he has done everything when he has taught them well how to enjoy themselves.

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.

…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?"

… for in human society, the greatest instrument of man is man, and the wisest is he who best makes use of this instrument.

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.