Do not give your pupil any sort of lesson verbally: he ought to receive none except from experience. Inflict upon him no kind of punishment, for he does not know what being in fault means; never oblige him to ask pardon, for he does not know what it is to offend you.
His actions being without moral quality, he can do nothing which is morally bad, or which deserves either punishment or reproof.[7]
Already I see the startled reader judging of this child by those around us; but he is mistaken. The perpetual constraint under which you keep your pupils increases their liveliness. The more cramped they are while under your eye the more unruly they are the moment they escape it. They must, in fact, make themselves amends for the severe restraint you put upon them. Two school-boys from a city will do more mischief in a community than the young people of a whole village.
Shut up in the same room a little gentleman and a little peasant; the former will have everything upset and broken before the latter has moved from his place. Why is this? Because the one hastens to misuse a moment of liberty, and the other, always sure of his freedom, is never in a hurry to use it. And yet the children of villagers, often petted or thwarted, are still very far from the condition in which I should wish to keep them.
May I venture to state here the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule in all education? It is, not to gain time, but to lose it. Forgive the paradox, O my ordinary reader! It must be uttered by any one who reflects, and whatever you may say, I prefer paradoxes to prejudices. The most perilous interval of human life is that between birth and the age of twelve years. At that time errors and vices take root without our having any means of destroying them; and when the instrument is found, the time for uprooting them is past. If children could spring at one bound from the mother's breast to the age of reason, the education given them now-a-days would be suitable; but in the due order of nature they need one entirely different. They should not use the mind at all, until it has all its faculties. For while it is blind it cannot see the torch you present to it; nor can it follow on the immense plain of ideas a path which, even for the keenest eyesight, reason traces so faintly.