radoxes to
prejudices. The most perilous interval of human life is that between
birth and the age of twelve years. At that time errors and vices take
root without our having any means of destroying them; and when the
instrument is found, the time for uprooting them is past. If children
could spring at one bound from the mother's breast to the age of
reason, the education given them now-a-days would be suitable; but in
the due order of nature they need one entirely different. They should
not use the mind at all, until it has all its faculties. For while it
is blind it cannot see the torch you present to it; nor can it follow
on the immense plain of ideas a path which, even for the keenest
eyesight, reason traces so faintly.

The earliest education ought, then, to be purely negative. It consists
not in teaching truth or virtue, but in shielding the heart from vice
and the mind from error. If you could do nothing at all, and allow
nothing to be done; if you could bring up your pupil sound and robust
to the age of twelve years, without his knowing how to distinguish his
right hand from his left, the eyes of his understanding would from the
very first open to reason. Without a prejudice or a habit, there would
be in him nothing to counteract the effect of your care. Before long
he would become in your hands the wisest of men; and beginning by doing
nothing, you would have accomplished a marvel in education.

Reverse the common practice, and you will nearly always do well.
Parents and teachers desiring to make of a child not a child, but a
learned man, have never begun early enough to chide, to correct, to
reprimand, to flatter, to promise, to instruct, to discourse reason to
him. Do better than this: be reasonable yourself, and do not argue
with your pupil, least of all, to make him approve what he dislikes.
For if you persist in reasoning about disagreeable things, you make
reasoning disagreeable to him, and weaken its influence beforehand in a
mind as yet unfitted to understand it. Keep his organs, his senses,
his physical strength, busy; but, as long as possible, keep his mind
inactive. Guard against all sensations arising in advance of judgment,
which estimates their true value. Keep back and check unfamiliar
impressions, and be in no haste to do good for the sake of preventing
evil. For the good is not real unless enlightened by reason. Regard
every delay as an advantage; for much is gained if the critic