Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)

Eloisa: Or, a Series of Original Letters [Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse]

London

Printed for R. Griffiths and T. Becket

1761

"The mind becomes heavy and dull by inaction. The seed takes no root in a soil badly prepared, and it is a strange manner of preparing children to become reasonable, by beginning to make them stupid."

A plan, so new, and so contrary to received opinions, at first surprized me. By dint of explanation, however, they at length represented it in an admirable light, and I was made sensible that the pathos nature is the best. The only inconvenience, which I find in this method, and which appeared to me very great, was to neglect the only faculty which children possess in perfection, and which is only debilitated by their growing into years. Methinks, according to their own system of education, that the weaker the understanding, the more one ought to exercise and strengthen the memory, which is then so proper to be exercised. It is that, said I, which ought to supply the place of reason; it is enriched by judgment. The mind becomes heavy and dull by inaction. The seed takes no root in a soil badly prepared, and it is a strange manner of preparing children to become reasonable, by beginning to make them stupid. How! stupid! cried Mrs. Wolmar immediately. Do you confound two qualities so different, and almost contrary, as memory and judgment? As if an ill-digested and unconnected lumber of things, in a weak head, did not do more harm than good to the understanding. I confess, that, of all the faculties of the human mind, the memory is the first which opens itself, and is the most convenient to be cultivated in children: but which, in your opinion, should be preferred, that which is most easy for them to learn, or that which is most important for them to know? Consider the use which is generally made of this aptitude, the eternal constraint to which they are subject in order to display their memory, and then compare its utility to what they are made to suffer. Why should a child be compelled to study languages he will never talk, and that even before he has learnt his own tongue? Why should he be forced incessantly to make and repeat verses he does not understand, and whose harmony all lies at the end of his fingers; or be perplexed to death with circles and triangles, of which he has no idea; or why burthened with an infinity of names of towns and rivers, which he constantly mistakes, and learns a-new every day? Is this to cultivate the memory to the improvement of the understanding, or is all such frivolous acquisition worth one of those many tears it costs him? Were all this, however, merely useless, I should not so much complain of it; but is it not pernicious to accustom a child to be satisfied with mere words? Must not such a heap of crude and indigested terms and notions be injurious to the formation of those primary ideas with which the human understanding ought first to be furnished? And would it not be better to have no memory at all, than to have it stuffed with such a heap of literary lumber, to the exclusion of necessary knowledge!
(III, pp. 285-6)

Plant::Seed Plant::Root Plant::Soil

Google Books

At least ten entries in the ESTC (1761, 1764, 1767, 1769, 1776, 1784, 1795).

Text from Eloisa: Or, a Series of Original Letters Collected and Published by J.J. Rousseau. Translated from the French. 4 vols. (London: Printed for R. Griffiths and T. Becket, 1761). <Link to Vol. I><Link to Vol. II><Link to Vol. III><Link to Vol. IV>

07/14/2013