As soon as they foresee their needs before they feel them, their intelligence has made a great step forward, they are beginning to know the value of time.  They must then be trained to devote this time to useful purposes, but this usefulness should be such as they can readily perceive and should be within the reach of their age and experience.  What concerns the moral order and the customs of society should not yet be given them, for they are not in a condition to understand it.  It is folly to expect them to attend to things vaguely described as good for them, when they do not know what this good is, things which they are assured will be to their advantage when they are grown up, though for the present they take no interest in this so-called advantage, which they are unable to understand.

Let the child do nothing because he is told; nothing is good for him but what he recognises as good.  When you are always urging him beyond his present understanding, you think you are exercising a foresight which you really lack.  To provide him with useless tools which he may never require, you deprive him of man’s most useful tool—­common-sense.  You would have him docile as a child; he will be a credulous dupe when he grows up.  You are always saying, “What I ask is for your good, though you cannot understand it.  What does it matter to me whether you do it or not; my efforts are entirely on your account.”  All these fine speeches with which you hope to make him good, are preparing the way, so that the visionary, the tempter, the charlatan, the rascal, and every kind of fool may catch him in his snare or draw him into his folly.

A man must know many things which seem useless to a child, but need the child learn, or can he indeed learn, all that the man must know?  Try to teach the child what is of use to a child and you will find that it takes all his time.  Why urge him to the studies of an age he may never reach, to the neglect of those studies which meet his present needs?  “But,” you ask, “will it not be too late to learn what he ought to know when the time comes to use it?” I cannot tell; but this I do know, it is impossible to teach it sooner, for our real teachers are experience and emotion, and man will never learn what befits a man except under its own conditions.  A child knows he must become a man; all the ideas he may have as to man’s estate are so many opportunities for his instruction, but he should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas which are beyond his grasp.  My whole book is one continued argument in support of this fundamental principle of education.

As soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word “Useful,” we have got an additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its relation to his own well-being.  This word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not know what utility is.