§ 19. In these passages, Rousseau strikes the key-note of true education. The first thing necessary for us is to see aright the subject on which we have to act. Unfortunately, however, this subject has often been the subject most neglected in the schoolroom. Children have been treated as if they were made for their school books, not their school books for them. As education has been thought of as learning, childhood has been treated as unimportant, a necessary stage in existence no doubt, but far more troublesome and hardly more interesting than the state of the chrysalis. If some forms of words, tables, declensions, county towns, and the like can be drummed into children, this is, say educators of the old school, a clear gain. For the rest nothing can be done with them except teaching them to read, write, and say the multiplication table. But since the publication of the Émile, there has been in the world a very different view of education. According to this view, the importance of childhood is not to be measured by the amount of _our_ knowledge, or even the number of _our_ words, we can force it to remember. According to this view, in dealing with children we must not think of our knowledge or of our notions at all. We must think not of our own minds, but of the minds of the little ones.[133] § 20. The absurd results in which the opposite course has ended, Rousseau exposes with great severity. “All the studies demanded from the poor unfortunates lead to such things as are entirely beyond the range of their ideas, so you may judge what amount of attention they can give to them. Schoolmasters who make a great display of the instruction they give their pupils are paid to differ from me; but we see from what they do that they are entirely of my opinion. For what do they really teach? Words, words, for ever words. Among the various knowledges which they boast of giving, they are careful not to include such as would be of use; because these would involve a knowledge of things, and there they would be sure to fail; but they choose subjects that seem to be known when the terms are known such as heraldry, geography, chronology, languages and the like; all of them studies so foreign to a man, and still more to a child, that it is a great chance if anything of the whole lot ever proves useful to him on a single occasion in his whole life.”[134] “Whatever the study may be, without the idea of the things represented the signs representing them go for nothing. And yet the child is always kept to these signs without our being able to make him comprehend any of the things they represent.”[135] What does a child understand by “the globe”? An old geography book says candidly, that it is a round thing made of plaster; and this is the only notion children have of it. What a fearful waste, and worse than waste, it is to make them learn the signs without the things, when if they ever learn the things, they must at the same time acquire the signs! (Conf.