Give your scholar no verbal lessons; he should be taught by experience alone; never punish him, for he does not know what it is to do wrong; never make him say, “Forgive me,” for he does not know how to do you wrong.  Wholly unmoral in his actions, he can do nothing morally wrong, and he deserves neither punishment nor reproof.

Already I see the frightened reader comparing this child with those of our time; he is mistaken.  The perpetual restraint imposed upon your scholars stimulates their activity; the more subdued they are in your presence, the more boisterous they are as soon as they are out of your sight.  They must make amends to themselves in some way or other for the harsh constraint to which you subject them.  Two schoolboys from the town will do more damage in the country than all the children of the village.  Shut up a young gentleman and a young peasant in a room; the former will have upset and smashed everything before the latter has stirred from his place.  Why is that, unless that the one hastens to misuse a moment’s licence, while the other, always sure of freedom, does not use it rashly.  And yet the village children, often flattered or constrained, are still very far from the state in which I would have them kept.

Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced.  The only natural passion is self-love or selfishness taken in a wider sense.  This selfishness is good in itself and in relation to ourselves; and as the child has no necessary relations to other people he is naturally indifferent to them; his self-love only becomes good or bad by the use made of it and the relations established by its means.  Until the time is ripe for the appearance of reason, that guide of selfishness, the main thing is that the child shall do nothing because you are watching him or listening to him; in a word, nothing because of other people, but only what nature asks of him; then he will never do wrong.

I do not mean to say that he will never do any mischief, never hurt himself, never break a costly ornament if you leave it within his reach.  He might do much damage without doing wrong, since wrong-doing depends on the harmful intention which will never be his.  If once he meant to do harm, his whole education would be ruined; he would be almost hopelessly bad.

Greed considers some things wrong which are not wrong in the eyes of reason.  When you leave free scope to a child’s heedlessness, you must put anything he could spoil out of his way, and leave nothing fragile or costly within his reach.  Let the room be furnished with plain and solid furniture; no mirrors, china, or useless ornaments.  My pupil Emile, who is brought up in the country, shall have a room just like a peasant’s.  Why take such pains to adorn it when he will be so little in it?  I am mistaken, however; he will ornament it for himself, and we shall soon see how.