Any fashion of instructing children whose most evident result is to lead them to despise their parents and the customs and activities among which they have grown up, is a calamity. It is effective for nothing but to produce a legion of malcontents, with hearts totally estranged from their origin, their race, their natural interests--everything, in short, that makes the fundamental fabric of a man. Once detached from the vigorous stock which produced them, the wind of their restless ambition drives them over the earth, like dead leaves that will in the end be heaped up to ferment and rot together.
Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds, but by an evolution slow and certain. In preparing a career for our children, let us imitate her. Let us not confound progress and advancement with those violent exercises called somersaults. Let us not so bring up our children that they will come to despise work and the aspirations and simple spirit of their fathers: let us not expose them to the temptation of being ashamed of our poverty if they themselves come to fortune. A society is indeed diseased when the sons of peasants begin to feel disgust for the fields, when the sons of sailors desert the sea, when the daughters of working-men, in the hope of being taken for heiresses, prefer to walk the streets alone rather than beside their honest parents. A society is healthy, on the contrary, when each of its members applies himself to doing very nearly what his parents have done before him, but doing it better, and, looking to future elevation, is content first to fulfill conscientiously more modest duties.[C]
[C] This would be the place to speak of work in general, and of its tonic effect upon education. But I have discussed the subject in my books _Justice_, _Jeunesse_, and _Vaillanos_. I must limit myself to referring the reader to them.
Education should make independent men. If you wish to train your children for liberty, bring them up simply, and do not for a moment fear that in so doing you are putting obstacles in the way of their happiness. It will be quite the contrary. The more costly toys a child has, the more feasts and curious entertainments, the less is he amused.