People seek a tutor who has already educated one pupil.  This is too much; one man can only educate one pupil; if two were essential to success, what right would he have to undertake the first?  With more experience you may know better what to do, but you are less capable of doing it; once this task has been well done, you will know too much of its difficulties to attempt it a second time—­if ill done, the first attempt augurs badly for the second.

It is one thing to follow a young man about for four years, another to be his guide for five-and-twenty.  You find a tutor for your son when he is already formed; I want one for him before he is born.  Your man may change his pupil every five years; mine will never have but one pupil.  You distinguish between the teacher and the tutor.  Another piece of folly!  Do you make any distinction between the pupil and the scholar?  There is only one science for children to learn—­the duties of man.  This science is one, and, whatever Xenophon may say of the education of the Persians, it is indivisible.  Besides, I prefer to call the man who has this knowledge master rather than teacher, since it is a question of guidance rather than instruction.  He must not give precepts, he must let the scholar find them out for himself.

If the master is to be so carefully chosen, he may well choose his pupil, above all when he proposes to set a pattern for others.  This choice cannot depend on the child’s genius or character, as I adopt him before he is born, and they are only known when my task is finished.  If I had my choice I would take a child of ordinary mind, such as I assume in my pupil.  It is ordinary people who have to be educated, and their education alone can serve as a pattern for the education of their fellows.  The others find their way alone.

The birthplace is not a matter of indifference in the education of man; it is only in temperate climes that he comes to his full growth.  The disadvantages of extremes are easily seen.  A man is not planted in one place like a tree, to stay there the rest of his life, and to pass from one extreme to another you must travel twice as far as he who starts half-way.

If the inhabitant of a temperate climate passes in turn through both extremes his advantage is plain, for although he may be changed as much as he who goes from one extreme to the other, he only removes half-way from his natural condition.  A Frenchman can live in New Guinea or in Lapland, but a negro cannot live in Tornea nor a Samoyed in Benin.  It seems also as if the brain were less perfectly organised in the two extremes.  Neither the negroes nor the Laps are as wise as Europeans.  So if I want my pupil to be a citizen of the world I will choose him in the temperate zone, in France for example, rather than elsewhere.

In the north with its barren soil men devour much food, in the fertile south they eat little.  This produces another difference:  the one is industrious, the other contemplative.  Society shows us, in one and the same spot, a similar difference between rich and poor.  The one dwells in a fertile land, the other in a barren land.