ence; where those who know
the least make the most noise; where those who stand for public order
are alarmed by every chance comer whose power lies in his making a great
outcry and respecting nothing. It insures the reign of transitory
passion, the triumph of the inferior will. I compare these two
educations--one, the exaltation of the environment, the other of the
individual; one the absolutism of tradition, the other the tyranny of
the new--and I find them equally baneful. But the most disastrous of all
is the combination of the two, which produces human beings
half-automatons, half-despots, forever vacillating between the spirit
of a sheep and the spirit of revolt or domination.

Children should be educated neither for themselves nor for their
parents: for man is no more designed to be a personage than a specimen.
They should be educated for life. The aim of their education is to aid
them to become active members of humanity, brotherly forces, free
servants of the civil organization. To follow a method of education
inspired by any other principle, is to complicate life, deform it, sow
the seeds of all disorders.

When we would sum up in a phrase the destiny of the child, the word
future springs to our lips. The child is the future. This word says
all--the sufferings of the past, the stress of to-day, hope. But when
the education of the child begins, he is incapable of estimating the
reach of this word; for he is held by impressions of the present. Who
then shall give him the first enlightenment and put him in the way he
should go? The parents, the teachers. And with very little reflection
they perceive that their work does not interest simply themselves and
the child, but that they represent and administer impersonal powers and
interests. The child should continually appear to them as a future
citizen. With this ruling idea, they will take thought for two things
that complement each other--for the initial and personal force which is
germinating in the child, and for the social destination of this force.
At no moment of their direction over him can they forget that this
little being confided to their care must become _himself_ and a
_brother_. These two conditions, far from excluding each other, never
exist apart. It is impossible to be brotherly, to love, to give one's
self, unless one is master of himself; and reciprocally, none can
possess himself, comprehend his own individual being, until he has first
made his