| PREFACE
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| JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU began his famous Confessions by a
vehement appeal to the Deity: "I have shown myself as I was;
contemptible and vile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when
I was so; I have unveiled my interior such as Thou thyself hast
seen it, Eternal Father! Collect about me the innumerable swarm
of my fellows; let them hear my confessions; let them groan at my
unworthiness; let them blush at my meannesses! Let each of them
discover his heart in his turn at the foot of thy throne with the
same sincerity; and then let any one of them tell thee if he
dares: 'I was a better man!' "
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| Jean Jacques was a very great educator in the manner of the
eighteenth century, and has been commonly thought to have had
more influence than any other teacher of his time; but his
peculiar method of improving human nature has not been
universally admired. Most educators of the nineteenth century
have declined to show themselves before their scholars as objects
more vile or contemptible than necessary, and even the humblest
teacher hides, if possible, the faults with which nature has
generously embellished us all, as it did Jean Jacques, thinking,
as most religious minds are apt to do, that the Eternal Father
himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under his
eyes chiefly the least agreeable details of his creation.
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| As an unfortunate result the twentieth century finds few recent
guides to avoid, or to follow. American literature offers
scarcely one working model for high education. The student must
go back, beyond Jean Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin, to find a
model even of self-teaching. Except in the abandoned sphere of
the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education
has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and
what not. This volume attempts to discuss it.
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| As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he
erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his time,
and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface
itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which
the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit
or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not
the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes
to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to
fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the
world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to
them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their
fathers.
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| At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his
teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the
subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to
be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the
clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of
effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.
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| The manikin, therefore, has the same value as any other
geometrical figure of three or more dimensions, which is used for
the study of relation. For that purpose it cannot be spared; it
is the only measure of motion, of proportion, of human condition;
it must have the air of reality; must be taken for real; must be
treated as though it had life. Who knows? Possibly it had!
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| February 16, 1907
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| THE EDUCATION
OF HENRY ADAMS
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