As their strength increases, children have also less need for tears.
They can do more for themselves, they need the help of others less
frequently. With strength comes the sense to use it. It is with
this second phase that the real personal life has its beginning; it
is then that the child becomes conscious of himself. During every
moment of his life memory calls up the feeling of self; he becomes
really one person, always the same, and therefore capable of joy
or sorrow. Hence we must begin to consider him as a moral being.

Although we know approximately the limits of human life and our
chances of attaining those limits, nothing is more uncertain than
the length of the life of any one of us. Very few reach old age.
The chief risks occur at the beginning of life; the shorter our
past life, the less we must hope to live. Of all the children who
are born scarcely one half reach adolescence, and it is very likely
your pupil will not live to be a man.

What is to be thought, therefore, of that cruel education which
sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, that burdens a child
with all sorts of restrictions and begins by making him miserable,
in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness which he may
never enjoy? Even if I considered that education wise in its aims,
how could I view without indignation those poor wretches subjected
to an intolerable slavery and condemned like galley-slaves to endless
toil, with no certainty that they will gain anything by it? The
age of harmless mirth is spent in tears, punishments, threats,
and slavery. You torment the poor thing for his good; you fail
to see that you are calling Death to snatch him from these gloomy
surroundings. Who can say how many children fall victims to the
excessive care of their fathers and mothers? They are happy to