Emile, or On Education

Without this, everything would go even worse, and our species does not want to be half-formed. In the state where things now stand, a man abandoned to himself among others from birth would be the most disfigured of all. Prejudices, authority, necessity, example, and all the social institutions in which we find ourselves submerged would stifle nature within him and put nothing in its place. He would be like a small shrub that chance causes to grow in the middle of a path, which passersby soon destroy by bumping into it from all sides and bending it in every direction.

It is to you that I address myself, tender and farsighted mother (1), who knew how to turn away from the high road, and protect

(1) The first education is that which matters most, and this first education belongs incontestably to women. If the Author of nature had wanted it to belong to men, He would have given them milk to nourish children. Therefore, always address women by preference in your treatises on education, for, besides the fact that they are in a position to watch over it more closely than men and that they always influence it more, success also interests them much more, since most widows find themselves almost at the mercy of their children, and then they make them feel keenly, for better or for worse, the effect of the way they raised them. Laws, always so oc-