There are two things to be considered with regard to any scheme.  In the first place, “Is it good in itself” In the second, “Can it be easily put into practice?”

With regard to the first of these it is enough that the scheme should be intelligible and feasible in itself, that what is good in it should be adapted to the nature of things, in this case, for example, that the proposed method of education should be suitable to man and adapted to the human heart.

The second consideration depends upon certain given conditions in particular cases; these conditions are accidental and therefore variable; they may vary indefinitely.  Thus one kind of education would be possible in Switzerland and not in France; another would be adapted to the middle classes but not to the nobility.  The scheme can be carried out, with more or less success, according to a multitude of circumstances, and its results can only be determined by its special application to one country or another, to this class or that.  Now all these particular applications are not essential to my subject, and they form no part of my scheme.  It is enough for me that, wherever men are born into the world, my suggestions with regard to them may be carried out, and when you have made them what I would have them be, you have done what is best for them and best for other people.  If I fail to fulfil this promise, no doubt I am to blame; but if I fulfil my promise, it is your own fault if you ask anything more of me, for I have promised you nothing more.

BOOK I

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.  He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit.  He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions.  He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave.  He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master’s taste like the trees in his garden.  Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves.  Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest.  Prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her place.  She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.

Tender, anxious mother, [Footnote:  The earliest education is most important and it undoubtedly is woman’s work.  If the author of nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them milk to feed the child.  Address your treatises on education to the women, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely than men, not only is their influence always predominant in education, its