is young, you will make him a credulous dupe when he is a man. You are
continually saying to him, "All I require of you is for your own good,
but you cannot understand it yet. What does it matter to me whether
you do what I require or not? You are doing it entirely for your own
sake." With such fine speeches you are paving the way for some kind of
trickster or fool,--some visionary babbler or charlatan,--who will
entrap him or persuade him to adopt his own folly.

A man may be well acquainted with things whose utility a child cannot
comprehend; but is it right, or even possible, for a child to learn
what a man ought to know? Try to teach the child all that is useful to
him now, and you will keep him busy all the time. Why would you injure
the studies suitable to him at his age by giving him those of an age he
may never attain? "But," you say, "will there be time for learning
what he ought to know when the time to use it has already come?" I do
not know; but I am sure that he cannot learn it sooner. For experience
and feeling are our real teachers, and we never understand thoroughly
what is best for us except from the circumstances of our case. A child
knows that he will one day be a man. All the ideas of manhood that he
can understand give us opportunities of teaching him; but of those he
cannot understand he should remain in absolute ignorance. This entire
book is only a continued demonstration of this principle of education.

Finding out the East. The Forest of Montmorency.

I do not like explanatory lectures; young people pay very little
attention to them, and seldom remember them. Things! things! I cannot
repeat often enough that we attach too much importance to words. Our
babbling education produces nothing but babblers.

Suppose that while we are studying the course of the sun, and the
manner of finding where the east is, Emile all at once interrupts me,
to ask, "What is the use of all this?" What an opportunity for a fine
discourse! How many things I could tell him of in answering this
question, especially if anybody were by to listen! I could mention the
advantages of travel and of commerce; the peculiar products of each
climate; the manners of different nations; the use of the calendar; the
calculation of seasons in agriculture; the art of navigation, and the
manner of travelling by sea, following the true course without knowing
where we are. I might take up politics, natural history,