Emile, or On Education

there is no longer a fatherland, there can no longer be citizens. These two words, fatherland and citizen, must be erased from modern languages. I know the reason for this, but I do not wish to say it; it is irrelevant to my subject.

I do not view as a public institution those laughable establishments called Colleges (4). I do not count the education of the world either, because this education, tending toward two contrary ends, misses both: it is fit only to make double men, who always appear to relate everything to others and never relate anything but to themselves alone. Now, since these demonstrations are common to everyone, they deceive no one; they are so much effort lost.

From these contradictions is born the one that we incessantly experience within ourselves. Dragged by nature and by men along contrary routes, forced to divide ourselves between these diverse

(4) In several schools, and especially in the University of Paris, there are Professors whom I like, whom I esteem greatly, and whom I believe very capable of instructing youth well, if they were not forced to follow the established custom. I exhort one of them to publish the reform project he has conceived. One might perhaps finally be tempted to cure the evil, by seeing that it is not without remedy.