order to suppress it, before having recourse to punishment.
When it is a case, as we have already mentioned, of simple
bloodlessness, then before stuffing the brain of a child with science,
nourish his system so as to produce blood, strengthen him, and, that he
shall not waste his time, take him to the country or to the seaside;
there, teach him in the open air, not in books--geometry, by measuring
the distance to a spire, or the height of a tree; natural sciences,
while picking flowers and fishing in the sea; physical science, while
building the boat he will go to fish in. But for mercy's sake do not
fill his brain with classical sentences and dead languages. Do not make
an idler of him!...

Or, here is a child which has neither order nor regular habits. Let the
children first inculcate order among themselves, and later on, the
laboratory, the workshop, the work that will have to be done in a
limited space, with many tools about, under the guidance of an
intelligent teacher, will teach them method. But do not make disorderly
beings out of them by your school, whose only order is the symmetry of
its benches, and which--true image of the chaos in its teachings--will
never inspire anybody with the love of harmony, of consistency, and
method in work.

Do not you see that by your methods of teaching, framed by a Ministry
for eight million scholars, who represent eight million different
capacities, you only impose a system good for mediocrities, conceived by
an average of mediocrities? Your school becomes a University of
laziness, as your prison is a University of crime. Make the school free,
abolish your University grades, appeal to the volunteers of teaching;
begin that way, instead of making laws against laziness which only serve
to increase it.

Give the workman who cannot condemn himself to make all his life a
minute particle of some object, who is stifled at his little tapping
machine, which he ends by loathing, give him the chance of tilling the
soil, of felling trees in the forest, sailing the seas in the teeth of a
storm, dashing through space on an engine, but do not make an idler of
him by forcing him all his life to attend to a small machine, to plough
the head of a screw, or to drill the eye of a needle.

Suppress the cause of idleness, and you may take it for granted that few
individuals will really hate work, especially voluntary work, and that
there will be no need to manufacture a code of laws on their