Book I - Birth to Age 5 - Page 2

from the highway and
shield it from the crushing force of social conventions. Tend and
water it ere it dies. One day its fruit will reward your care.
From the outset raise a wall round your child's soul; another may
sketch the plan, you alone should carry it into execution.

Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. If a man
were born tall and strong, his size and strength would be of no
good to him till he had learnt to use them; they would even harm
him by preventing others from coming to his aid; [Footnote: Like
them in externals, but without speech and without the ideas which
are expressed by speech, he would be unable to make his wants known,
while there would be nothing in his appearance to suggest that he
needed their help.] left to himself he would die of want before he
knew his needs. We lament the helplessness of infancy; we fail to
perceive that the race would have perished had not man begun by
being a child.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish,
we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when
we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

This education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things.
The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of
nature, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education
of men, what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the
education of things.

Thus we are each taught by three masters. If their teaching
conflicts, the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace
with himself; if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his
goal, he lives at peace with himself, he is well-educated.

Now of these three factors in education nature is wholly beyond
our control, things are only partly in our power; the education of
men is the only one controlled by us; and even here our power is
largely illusory, for who can hope to direct every word and deed
of all with whom the child has to do.

Viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible,
since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control.
Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must
favour us if we are to reach it.

What is this goal? As we have just shown, it is the goal of nature.
Since all three modes of education must work together, the two
that we can control must follow the lead of that which is beyond
our control. Perhaps this word Nature has too vague a meaning. Let
us try to define it.

Nature, we are told, is merely habit. What does that mean? Are there
not habits formed under compulsion, habits which never stifle nature?
Such, for example, are the habits of plants trained horizontally.
The plant