I shall never forget seeing a young man at Turin, who had learnt as a child the relations of contours and surfaces by having to choose every day isoperimetric cakes among cakes of every geometrical figure.  The greedy little fellow had exhausted the art of Archimedes to find which were the biggest.

When the child flies a kite he is training eye and hand to accuracy; when he whips a top, he is increasing his strength by using it, but without learning anything.  I have sometimes asked why children are not given the same games of skill as men; tennis, mall, billiards, archery, football, and musical instruments.  I was told that some of these are beyond their strength, that the child’s senses are not sufficiently developed for others.  These do not strike me as valid reasons; a child is not as tall as a man, but he wears the same sort of coat; I do not want him to play with our cues at a billiard-table three feet high; I do not want him knocking about among our games, nor carrying one of our racquets in his little hand; but let him play in a room whose windows have been protected; at first let him only use soft balls, let his first racquets be of wood, then of parchment, and lastly of gut, according to his progress.  You prefer the kite because it is less tiring and there is no danger.  You are doubly wrong.  Kite-flying is a sport for women, but every woman will run away from a swift ball.  Their white skins were not meant to be hardened by blows and their faces were not made for bruises.  But we men are made for strength; do you think we can attain it without hardship, and what defence shall we be able to make if we are attacked?  People always play carelessly in games where there is no danger.  A falling kite hurts nobody, but nothing makes the arm so supple as protecting the head, nothing makes the sight so accurate as having to guard the eye.  To dash from one end of the room to another, to judge the rebound of a ball before it touches the ground, to return it with strength and accuracy, such games are not so much sports fit for a man, as sports fit to make a man of him.

The child’s limbs, you say, are too tender.  They are not so strong as those of a man, but they are more supple.  His arm is weak, still it is an arm, and it should be used with due consideration as we use other tools.  Children have no skill in the use of their hands.  That is just why I want them to acquire skill; a man with as little practice would be just as clumsy.  We can only learn the use of our limbs by using them.  It is only by long experience that we learn to make the best of ourselves, and this experience is the real object of study to which we cannot apply ourselves too early.