In the social order where each has his own place a man must be educated for it.  If such a one leave his own station he is fit for nothing else.  His education is only useful when fate agrees with his parents’ choice; if not, education harms the scholar, if only by the prejudices it has created.  In Egypt, where the son was compelled to adopt his father’s calling, education had at least a settled aim; where social grades remain fixed, but the men who form them are constantly changing, no one knows whether he is not harming his son by educating him for his own class.

In the natural order men are all equal and their common calling is that of manhood, so that a well-educated man cannot fail to do well in that calling and those related to it.  It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law.  Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him to be a man.  Life is the trade I would teach him.  When he leaves me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man.  All that becomes a man he will learn as quickly as another.  In vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place.  “Occupavi te, fortuna, atque cepi; omnes-que aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non posses.”  The real object of our study is man and his environment.  To my mind those of us who can best endure the good and evil of life are the best educated; hence it follows that true education consists less in precept than in practice.  We begin to learn when we begin to live; our education begins with ourselves, our first teacher is our nurse.  The ancients used the word “Education” in a different sense, it meant “Nurture.”  “Educit obstetrix,” says Varro.  “Educat nutrix, instituit paedagogus, docet magister.”  Thus, education, discipline, and instruction are three things as different in their purpose as the dame, the usher, and the teacher.  But these distinctions are undesirable and the child should only follow one guide.

We must therefore look at the general rather than the particular, and consider our scholar as man in the abstract, man exposed to all the changes and chances of mortal life.  If men were born attached to the soil of our country, if one season lasted all the year round, if every man’s fortune were so firmly grasped that he could never lose it, then the established method of education would have certain advantages; the child brought up to his own calling would never leave it, he could never have to face the difficulties of any other condition.  But when we consider the fleeting nature of human affairs, the restless and uneasy spirit of our times, when every generation overturns the work of its predecessor, can we conceive a more senseless plan than to educate a child as if he would never leave his room, as if he would always have his servants about him?  If the wretched creature takes a single step up or down he is lost.  This is not teaching him to bear pain; it is training him to feel it.