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The sort of education given, especially in Italy, to those who are educated (who, to tell the truth, are not many) is a formal betrayal ordained by weakness against strength, by old age against youth. Old people come and say to young people,
‘Avoid the pleasures natural to your time of life, since they are all dangerous and contrary to good behaviour, and because we, who have enjoyed them as much as we were able, and who would do the same again if we could, are no longer capable of them, because of our years. Do not bother about living today, but be obedient, suffer, and strive as hard as you know how, in order to live when it will be too late. Wisdom and decorum require that the young abstain as far as possible from making use of their youth, except to surpass others in hard work. Leave the care of your destiny and everything important to us, who will direct everything to our advantage. At your age every one of us did quite the opposite of what we are recommending, and we would do the same again if we were young once more. But you must pay attention to our words, and not to what we did in the past, or to our intentions. Believe us, who are wise and experienced in human affairs: if you act as we say, you will be happy.’
I do not know what deceit and fraud are, if they do not consist of promising happiness to the inexperienced upon such conditions.
The interests of general tranquility, domestic and public, are opposed to the pleasures and enterprises of young people. And so even a good education, or what is called such, consists in great part of deceiving pupils into subordinating their own advantage to that of others. But even without this, old people naturally tend to destroy the young, as far as in them lies, and to obliterate them from human life, since they abhor the sight of them. In all times old age has conspired against youth, because in all times it has been natural for men basely to condemn and persecute in others those blessings which they would rather keep for themselves.
Nevertheless, it is still noteworthy that, among educators, who, if they are people of the world, profess to want their neighbours’ good, there are so many who try to deprive their pupils of the greatest blessing in life, which is youth. It is even more noteworthy that fathers and mothers, not to mention other tutors, never feel pangs of conscience for giving their children an education based on such a malign principle. This would be even more surprising if for a long time, for other reasons, trying to abolish youth had not been regarded as a meritorious work.
The result of such pernicious culture, intent on benefiting the cultivator with the ruin of the plant, is either that the pupils, having lived like old people in the first bloom of their lives, make themselves ridiculous and unhappy when they are old, by trying to live like young people, or rather, as happens more often, Nature wins, and young people, living as young people despite their education, rebel against the educators, who, if they had encouraged the use and enjoyment of youthful faculties, would have been able to regulate them, through the confidence their pupils would have had in their teachers, which they would never have lost.
