Book I - Birth to Age 5

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become
evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree
to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place,
and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his
slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is
deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it,
not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse,
and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden.
Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot
be made by halves. Under existing conditions a man left to himself
from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Prejudice,
authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which
we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her
place. She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the
highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.

Tender, anxious mother, [Footnote: The earliest education is
most important and it undoubtedly is woman's work. If the author
of nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them
milk to feed the child. Address your treatises on education to the
women, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely than
men, not only is their influence always predominant in education,
its success concerns them more nearly, for most widows are at the
mercy of their children, who show them very plainly whether their
education was good or bad. The laws, always more concerned about
property than about people, since their object is not virtue but
peace, the laws give too little authority to the mother. Yet her
position is more certain than that of the father, her duties are
more trying; the right ordering of the family depends more upon
her, and she is usually fonder of her children. There are occasions
when a son may be excused for lack of respect for his father, but
if a child could be so unnatural as to fail in respect for the
mother who bore him and nursed him at her breast, who for so many
years devoted herself to his care, such a monstrous wretch should
be smothered at once as unworthy to live. You say mothers spoil
their children, and no doubt that is wrong, but it is worse to
deprave them as you do. The mother wants her child to be happy
now. She is right, and if her method is wrong, she must be taught
a better. Ambition, avarice, tyranny, the mistaken foresight of fathers,
their neglect, their harshness, are a hundredfold more harmful to
the child than the blind affection of the mother. Moreover, I must
explain what I mean by a mother and that explanation follows.] I
appeal to you. You can remove this young tree