Chapter 21 6. Emile is 15 years old: Cultivate children's independent judgment

Emile is about to leave childhood and start to live an independent life.At this time, he felt more and more the need to rely on external objects.While his body and senses were being exercised, so were his mind and judgment.The movement of his limbs and the movement of his mind go hand in hand, and he will eventually grow into a person with strong ability to act and think. In order to make him more perfect, I have to do one more thing, which is to enhance his affinity and make him more approachable, that is to say, use emotion to perfect his reason.Before starting a new discussion, let us review the road he just walked and see what kind of situation he is in now.

At the beginning, my student only had feelings, and he could only use his senses to understand the surrounding things. Now he has some concepts and independent judgment. An idea is a mixed or compound sensation formed after long-term sensory training and comparison of successive or simultaneous sensations.It is precisely because of this particular way of forming that an idea can endow the human mind with character. A healthy mind can form ideas according to the real relationship between things, so it is orderly; a superficial mind can only see the most superficial relationship between things, so it is chaotic.

A lunatic is one who invents relations that do not exist, neither in the real sense nor in appearance; a fool is one who cannot compare relations. The standard for judging the level of intelligence is to see the size of a person's ability to compare different ideas and discover different relationships. Judgments based on sensations are unreliable, because we can only perceive the surface of things, but judgments based on ideas and perceptions are reliable, because we have to compare ideas and perceptions, and consider things. The relationship between. Our judgment can be mistaken, but our feelings are not.When a boy says that the ice cream in his hand burns him, he is not wrong about the feeling of hot and cold, only his judgment of hot and cold is wrong.

When we look in the mirror for the first time, when we enter the ice cellar in different seasons, when we put cold hands or warm hands in hot water, we may make wrong judgments.What is stationary is not the moon but the clouds floating over the moon, and the stick inserted in the water is broken. These illusions are all due to our wrong judgment. But in real life, we have to make judgments about things, or rely on things that require us to make judgments, so we have to learn how to use reason to make correct judgments. You may criticize me, saying that I am not acting according to the will of nature, because I want to train Emile's judgment.You would be wrong to say that.What nature chooses and uses is based on human needs rather than human prejudices, and human needs are not fixed but change with changes in the environment.

A man who lives in a state of nature is very different from a man who lives in a state of society.Emile is not a barbarian living in a primitive environment, but a civilized man living in a city. He needs to adapt to life in the city, learn to get along with other people and blend in with them.Although he doesn't have to live like them, he must live with them. One of the most effective ways to improve judgment is to simplify our feelings as much as possible. I mentioned before that we learn to confirm the impressions of one sense with the impressions of another, and now I will add that we also learn to let one sense self-confirmation of impressions.

In this way, every feeling can form an idea, and the idea thus formed is closer to the true nature of things. If the child can learn these things in the third stage of childhood, he has completed his learning task. This requires teachers to be more patient in the teaching process, otherwise it will be difficult to improve students' judgment.But in fact, many teachers can't do this. Take the stick inserted in the water as an example. The students immediately judged that the stick was broken after seeing it.At this time, if you hurriedly take the stick out of the water to correct him, but in this way, what else can he learn besides knowing that he is wrong?

He certainly wouldn't learn anything, and would have gotten the stick out of the water himself, and seen the result, without you.The important thing is not to tell him the result, but to let him know how the result was arrived at. Emile's knowledge is not very large, but all his knowledge is his own, and he understands it very deeply. Among Emile's limited knowledge reserves, one of the most important is that he clearly knows how many things he doesn't understand now but can understand in the future, and how many things he can never understand but can't understand. What others can understand, how many things no one can understand.

No matter what, what Emile does not reject, not because he knows a lot of knowledge, but because he has a strong learning ability.He is open-minded, intelligent, and adaptable.As Montaigne said, although he was not learned, at least he knew how to learn. As long as Emile knows the meaning of what she does, and why she believes it, I ask for nothing more.I repeat again, my purpose is not to let Emile acquire much knowledge, but to let him learn knowledge by himself and know how to evaluate the value of knowledge in an emergency or when he is in urgent need. I want him to love the truth more than anything else.Although this kind of education method is very slow to take effect, it will never have a bad effect, and as long as it is carried out step by step, it will definitely be effective.

The knowledge Emile learned only involved nature and physics. As for history, he had never heard of it, and he didn't even know what metaphysics or ethics were. Emile knew some basic relationships between people and things, but he didn't know anything about the morality between people.His mind has no so-called concepts, let alone abstract thinking. He can discover the common properties between things, but he cannot understand the properties themselves.Geometric images and algebraic symbols form the basis of his abstract thinking, the former can help him understand abstract space, and the latter can help him understand abstract numbers.At the same time, these two are also the basis for his senses to function.

The purpose of his understanding of things is not to explore the thing itself, but out of his own interest.For everything around him, he only judges the relationship with them according to his own interests, but this relationship is very reliable, without any prejudice or delusion in the middle. He adheres to the principle of practicality in everything he does, and only pays attention to what is useful to him. In this way, his choice will not be disturbed by too many objective factors. Emile is friendly, not afraid of suffering, not afraid of tiredness, patient and persistent in doing things, and not afraid of anything.He doesn't have enough imagination yet to exaggerate any danger he encounters, and he can go forward in everything he does.Even if he suffers, he can deal with it calmly, because he still doesn't know how to fight against fate.

As for death, he didn't even know what it was, he only knew how to live according to the laws of nature, and he didn't object to whatever was arranged by nature, so when death became an inevitable fact, he didn't have the slightest fear.Live carefreely and not have too much nostalgia for things in the world. Only in this way can we face death calmly. All personal morality is already possessed by Emile. As for social morality, he only needs to know that it is a concept representing the relationship between people.He is ready to learn these things, and when he has to, he will learn them as soon as he learns them. He only thinks about himself when he does things, and at the same time hopes that others will not always think about him.He doesn't want others to do anything for him, and he doesn't want to take too much responsibility for others.Although living in human society, he does not depend on anyone, and supports himself entirely by himself. Compared with people of his age, he is already perfect, so he should live by his own ability.He is free from any bad habits of the world, and his body and mind are healthy; his mind is free, free from all desires and prejudices. Among people's desires, the most important and most natural one is self-esteem, and the lovely Mier doesn't have this concept in her heart.He does not interfere with anyone, and lives freely, happily and contentedly under the guidance of the laws of nature. How can a child who grows up in this way be said to have wasted his life when he is 15 years old?