to us from ourselves.

At birth a child cries; his earliest infancy is spent in crying.
Sometimes he is tossed, he is petted, to appease him; sometimes he is
threatened, beaten, to make him keep quiet. We either do as he
pleases, or else we exact from him what we please; we either submit to
his whims, or make him submit to ours. There is no middle course; he
must either give or receive orders. Thus his first ideas are those of
absolute rule and of slavery. Before he knows how to speak, he
commands; before he is able to act, he obeys; and sometimes he is
punished before he knows what his faults are, or rather, before he is
capable of committing them. Thus do we early pour into his young heart
the passions that are afterward imputed to nature; and, after having
taken pains to make him wicked, we complain of finding him wicked.

A child passes six or seven years of his life in this manner in the
hands of women, the victim of his own caprice and of theirs. After
having made him learn this and that,--after having loaded his memory
either with words he cannot understand, or with facts which are of no
use to him,--after having stifled his natural disposition by the
passions we have created, we put this artificial creature into the
hands of a tutor who finishes the development of the artificial germs
he finds already formed, and teaches him everything except to know
himself, everything except to know how to live and how to make himself
happy. Finally, when this enslaved child, this little tyrant, full of
learning and devoid of sense, enfeebled alike in mind and body, is cast
upon the world, he there by his unfitness, by his pride, and by all his
vices, makes us deplore human wretchedness and perversity. We deceive
ourselves; this is the man our whims have created. Nature makes men by
a different process.

Do you then wish him to preserve his original form? Preserve it from
the moment he enters the world. As soon as he is born take possession
of him, and do not leave him until he is a man. Without this you will
never succeed. As the mother is the true nurse, the father is the true
teacher. Let them be of one mind as to the order in which their
functions are fulfilled, as well as in regard to their plan; let the
child pass from the hands of the one into the hands of the other. He
will be better educated by a father who is judicious, even though of
moderate attainments, than by the most skilful master in the worl