Subsection 2 Education as a cause of melancholy.

Among these accidental causes of melancholy, education may justly claim the next place, for someone who escapes a bad nurse may be ruined by a bad upbringing. Jason Pratensis places education among the principal causes. Bad parents, stepmothers, tutors, masters and teachers, too rigorous or severe—or, at the other extreme, too lax or indulgent—often originate and promote this disease.

Parents and others entrusted with the care and supervision of children often go wrong by being too stern, always threatening, scolding, shouting, whipping or hitting. Their poor children become so disheartened and cowed that they never afterwards have any courage, a happy hour in their lives, or pleasure in anything. Great moderation is needed in such matters, which mean so much to the making or ruining of a child.

Some frighten their children with beggars, bogeymen and hobgoblins if they cry or are otherwise unruly; but they are much to blame for doing so. Often, says Lavater in On Ghosts, part 1, chapter 5, “through fear they fall into serious diseases and cry out at night in their sleep”: fear brings on many diseases, makes them cry out in their sleep and leaves them much the worse for it throughout their lives. These things should not be done at all, or only sparingly and for a good reason.

Tyrannical, impatient, hare-brained schoolmasters—“barren teachers”, as Fabius calls them, “whip-bearing Ajaxes”—are as bad in this respect as hangmen and executioners. They make many children endure a martyrdom throughout their schooldays. With poor food, if the children board in their houses, excessive severity and ill-treatment, they utterly distort their constitution of body and mind.

Always scolding, railing, frowning, lashing, setting tasks and keeping them in, they leave the children “broken in spirit”, often stupefied and weary of life: “through excessive severity they lose heart and despair”. They think no slavery in the world—as I once thought myself—equals that of a grammar-school pupil. “Children’s minds are tortured by their teachers’ foolishness,” says Erasmus. They tremble at the teacher’s voice, his looks, his entrance.

St Augustine, in the first book of his Confessions, chapter 4, calls this schooling “a fearful compulsion”, and elsewhere a martyrdom. He confesses how cruelly his mind was tortured in learning Greek: “I knew none of the words, and they pressed me violently, with savage terrors and punishments, to learn them.” I knew nothing, and was compelled daily with cruel terrors and punishment.

Beza complains similarly of a harsh schoolmaster in Paris whose continual thunder and threats once made him think of drowning himself. He would have done so had he not met an uncle on the way, who rescued him from that misery for the time by taking him into his house. Trincavelli, in book 1, consultation 16, had a patient nineteen years old, extremely melancholy “because of excessive study, and the threats of Tarvitius and his teacher”: because of too much study and his tutor’s threats.

Many masters are hard-hearted and bitter towards their servants, and so depress them, so torment them with frightening words and harsh treatment, that they become desperate and can never be brought back.

Others, at the opposite extreme, do just as much harm through excessive laxity. They provide no upbringing, no occupation to keep their charges busy or give them a livelihood, teach them no trade and set them on no good course. As a result, their servants, children and pupils are swept away in the stream of drunkenness, idleness, gambling and many such unruly ways, until in the end they rue it, curse their parents and bring harm upon themselves.

Too much indulgence has the same effect: “a father’s foolish mildness and perverse willingness to give way”. Like Micio, with too much freedom and too generous an allowance, they indulge their children’s whims, let them revel, chase women, riot, swagger and do whatever they please, and then punish them with a band of musicians.

Let him feast, drink and smell of perfume at my expense. Is he in love? I shall give him money when it suits. Has he broken down doors? They shall be replaced. Has he torn A garment? It shall be mended. Let him do as he likes, Take, spend, squander: I have resolved to put up with it.

But as Demea told him, “You allow him to be corrupted”: your leniency will undo him. “I seem already to foresee the day when, destitute, he will run away somewhere to serve as a soldier”: I foresee his ruin.

So parents often err, especially many foolishly fond mothers, who dote on their children like Aesop’s ape until in the end they crush them to death: “nurses of their bodies, stepmothers of their souls”, pampering their bodies to their souls’ undoing. They will not let them be corrected or restrained, but insist that they be indulged in everything they do, until in the end they “bring sorrow, shame and grief to their parents” (Ecclesiasticus, chapter 30, verses 8–9), and become wanton, stubborn, wilful and disobedient: rude, wicked, headstrong, incorrigible and graceless.

They love them so foolishly, says Cardano, that they seem rather to hate them, bringing them up for wrongdoing instead of virtue, for riotous living instead of learning, for every pleasure and kind of licence instead of a sober life and conduct.

Who has so little experience that he does not know this saying of Fabius to be true? Education is a second nature, altering the mind and will. And would to God, he says, that we ourselves did not spoil our children’s characters by excessive coddling and delicate upbringing, weakening the strength of their bodies and minds. This creates habit, and habit becomes nature, and so on.

For these reasons Plutarch, in On the Education of Children, and Jerome, in book 1, letter 17, to Laeta on bringing up her daughter, give parents a most particular charge and many good cautions about raising children. They must not entrust them to indiscreet, hot-tempered, mad tutors, or to frivolous, giddy or greedy people. They must spare no expense to have them well brought up and taught, since the matter is of such great consequence.

Parents who do otherwise, Plutarch considers, care more for their shoes than for their feet and value their wealth above their children. And the man, says Cardano, who leaves his son with a greedy schoolmaster to be educated, or shuts him in an abbey to fast and learn wisdom together, does nothing but make him a learned fool or a sickly wise man.