By use the child acquires one of these different forms, and it is the only language he retains till the age of reason.  To acquire two languages he must be able to compare their ideas, and how can he compare ideas he can barely understand?  Everything may have a thousand meanings to him, but each idea can only have one form, so he can only learn one language.  You assure me he learns several languages; I deny it.  I have seen those little prodigies who are supposed to speak half a dozen languages.  I have heard them speak first in German, then in Latin, French, or Italian; true, they used half a dozen different vocabularies, but they always spoke German.  In a word, you may give children as many synonyms as you like; it is not their language but their words that you change; they will never have but one language.

To conceal their deficiencies teachers choose the dead languages, in which we have no longer any judges whose authority is beyond dispute.  The familiar use of these tongues disappeared long ago, so they are content to imitate what they find in books, and they call that talking.  If the master’s Greek and Latin is such poor stuff, what about the children?  They have scarcely learnt their primer by heart, without understanding a word of it, when they are set to translate a French speech into Latin words; then when they are more advanced they piece together a few phrases of Cicero for prose or a few lines of Vergil for verse.  Then they think they can speak Latin, and who will contradict them?

In any study whatsoever the symbols are of no value without the idea of the things symbolised.  Yet the education of the child in confined to those symbols, while no one ever succeeds in making him understand the thing signified.  You think you are teaching him what the world is like; he is only learning the map; he is taught the names of towns, countries, rivers, which have no existence for him except on the paper before him.  I remember seeing a geography somewhere which began with:  “What is the world?”—­“A sphere of cardboard.”  That is the child’s geography.  I maintain that after two years’ work with the globe and cosmography, there is not a single ten-year-old child who could find his way from Paris to Saint Denis by the help of the rules he has learnt.  I maintain that not one of these children could find his way by the map about the paths on his father’s estate without getting lost.  These are the young doctors who can tell us the position of Pekin, Ispahan, Mexico, and every country in the world.

You tell me the child must be employed on studies which only need eyes.  That may be; but if there are any such studies, they are unknown to me.