Rational education of children
Quotations from a text by Emilie Lamotte (1908) by Benoît Labourdette (2019)
Education in which the child is not the first artisan of his education is more dangerous than profitable.
How to educate the child?
How to make him a man and not a slave?
It is necessary for the child to educate himself,
not only because forced attendance is detrimental to its development,
not only because what he discovered is more fixed in his mind than what he learned,
but above all because the "ability to discover is the first and most precious of all;
the one that needs to be cared for, maintained, developed with the greatest care and respect".
Let us not lose sight of the fact that providing answers in advance
to the child who does not question means stopping the momentum of research,
making his mind lazy, atrophying his sagacity.
It is impossible to argue that the current education system has any effect other than to depress the child.
The child must be boldly considered as a genius to whom
the material of his discoveries and the instruments of his experience must be provided.
There is no one method that is suitable for all children.
Everyone demands an appropriate culture.
All faculties, including memory, have their mode of acquisition,
varying from one individual to another:
this one determines what he hears, this one needs to read to retain;
this one observes when he wants, this one when he can;
this one the exact and limited things, this other one the imponderable things;
one child will show equal ability in all branches
while another will mark a tendency to specialize against which the most loyal efforts will fail.
Naturally, we can only rely on the child himself to know in which direction
he will embark with joy and passion, that is, with profit.
I know what a smile serious teachers would crush me with if they heard me,
but I think that if instead of considering the child as a being
to whom we must infuse the science we possess, and as evidenced by diplomas;
we boldly considered him as a genius to whom we must provide
the material for his discoveries and the instruments for his experiments,
the result would be a harvest of geniuses.
So it is a question of resolutely getting out of the rut, of enabling the student to learn,
to experiment himself, to be himself the first artisan of his education.
Emilie Lamotte "Rational education of children" (excerpts)
Text published in the monthly journal "L'idée libre" in 1922
direction, images, sound Benoît Labourdette 2019