Treat your scholar according to his age.  Put him in his place from the first, and keep him in it, so that he no longer tries to leave it.  Then before he knows what goodness is, he will be practising its chief lesson.  Give him no orders at all, absolutely none.  Do not even let him think that you claim any authority over him.  Let him only know that he is weak and you are strong, that his condition and yours puts him at your mercy; let this be perceived, learned, and felt.  Let him early find upon his proud neck, the heavy yoke which nature has imposed upon us, the heavy yoke of necessity, under which every finite being must bow.  Let him find this necessity in things, not in the caprices [Footnote:  You may be sure the child will regard as caprice any will which opposes his own or any will which he does not understand.  Now the child does not understand anything which interferes with his own fancies.] of man; let the curb be force, not authority.  If there is something he should not do, do not forbid him, but prevent him without explanation or reasoning; what you give him, give it at his first word without prayers or entreaties, above all without conditions.  Give willingly, refuse unwillingly, but let your refusal be irrevocable; let no entreaties move you; let your “No,” once uttered, be a wall of brass, against which the child may exhaust his strength some five or six times, but in the end he will try no more to overthrow it.

Thus you will make him patient, equable, calm, and resigned, even when he does not get all he wants; for it is in man’s nature to bear patiently with the nature of things, but not with the ill-will of another.  A child never rebels against, “There is none left,” unless he thinks the reply is false.  Moreover, there is no middle course; you must either make no demands on him at all, or else you must fashion him to perfect obedience.  The worst education of all is to leave him hesitating between his own will and yours, constantly disputing whether you or he is master; I would rather a hundred times that he were master.

It is very strange that ever since people began to think about education they should have hit upon no other way of guiding children than emulation, jealousy, envy, vanity, greediness, base cowardice, all the most dangerous passions, passions ever ready to ferment, ever prepared to corrupt the soul even before the body is full-grown.  With every piece of precocious instruction which you try to force into their minds you plant a vice in the depths of their hearts; foolish teachers think they are doing wonders when they are making their scholars wicked in order to teach them what goodness is, and then they tell us seriously, “Such is man.”  Yes, such is man, as you have made him.  Every means has been tried except one, the very one which might succeed—­well-regulated liberty.  Do not undertake to bring up a child if you cannot guide him merely by the laws of what can or cannot be.  The limits of the possible and the impossible are alike unknown to him, so they can be extended or contracted around him at your will.  Without a murmur he is restrained, urged on, held back, by the hands of necessity alone; he is made adaptable and teachable by the mere force of things, without any chance for vice to spring up in him; for passions do not arise so long as they have accomplished nothing.