Emile - Rousseau

A deceptively simple text. Rousseau has distanced himself from the Social Contract and the concept of the noble savage here, and has decided to illustrate the principles of an education that will bring about `natural man.' Emile is his guinea pig, whom he allows to grow on his own accord. His governor and nurse impose nothing on him, and he is allowed to build and explore without any external authority, eventually choosing a vocation and place in society. For Rousseau, the most important property of modern society that is inimical to man is the exertion of authority and power over the subject. Emile is allowed to grow and flourish without the arbitrary directives of parent/authority figures. And as always, Rousseau's prose is light and wonderful. He falls short in the section on Emile's counter-part Sophie, who embodies practically all of the sexist facets of enlightenment prejudice, but this remains a very great work of political theory in spite of its shortcomings and frequent meanderings.

Rousseau has a reputation as a hypocrite and a left wing nut job. He certainly didn't practice what he preached but his writings cannot be reduced to serve mere partisan purposes. Everyone can learn something from this book. Allan Bloom does a great job of turning this book into good English. The translation is intended to be quite literal, but nonethess reads very smoothly. Highly recommended.

Heersink's distillation of the "essence" of Rousseau's Emile is so bazaar, tendentious and misleading that I am left to wonder whether he has read a single page of the book that he finds so tedious and banal. Nature, for Rousseau, is not the vast open spaces of the great outdoors; it is rather, the totality of created beings such as they exist prior to their being worked over by human artifice, and, in particular, the inner, inborn nature of human beings before it has been deflected, distorted, and perverted through their reciprocal, social interaction. In Emile, Rousseau sets out to show how, even in the midst of the corrupting forces of society, it might still be possible to raise a healthy, fully-actualized, harmonious individual; a human being whose inner nature is developed and realized in its potentialities. Such an education is not possible under the instruction of trees, bears and geysers, but only through the most exquisite attentiveness of the tutor, who, through constant vigilance, tries to develop the mind and sentiments of his pupil without giving a foothold to the social passions that make children vain, greedy, manipulative, and deceitful. This requires, above all, that at every moment, the child should learn to judge its actions by their natural effects, and feel its own will limited by the resistance of the nature without it, rather than by the will of other human beings. For whereas the child will submit easily to the force of nature, it will do everything to overcome the force that oppose it once it regards them as expressions of a human will. I disagree with Rousseau about many things, even about the most fundamental issues. Most of all, I do not think that what it means to be human should be thought limited by a pre-existing, and pristine human nature. Yet I also believe that, now more than ever, we must take Rousseau seriously, and read him rigorously - not merely as an antiquarian piece, but as a profound challenge to our conceits and myopias. There can be no true democracy without citizens who are free not only in the eyes of the law, but in their own eyes; yet we cannot recognize others as free, unless we have eyes for our own freedom. This demands nothing less than a liberal education. In place of this, we have entrusted our children to those whose seek only their own gain and who profit by tapping into human desires, dissociating them from the whole, and crystalizing them into a form in which it seems as though they could be satisfied through some given commodity. As a result, we have become, in the words of my friend, the social critic Dan A. Leythorn, "a nation of slaves - to our desires, to our whims, to money, to power, to each other"

This work by Jean Jacques Rousseau probably represents the single greatest work in defining what we would call education today. I am a Francophone living in Northern Ontario and so I have read just the french version, but barring that I believe that Rousseau was ahead of his time. His simple theory of education was the floor from which many other pedagogues would follow(Pestalozzi, Montessori, Itard, Séguin, among others). His theory of child development established him in all fairness, as the first psychologist of all time. 'The punishment is the natural consequence of the error' Such a novel concept for a time so tumultuous. One other statement is the following' You must begin by first knowing your children, because on the whole you do not'. Rousseau passions me and I believe him to be the reason why education turned towards the children rather than the teachers. To conclude, I can say most assuredly that Rousseau, with his avant-garde tactics, awoke the world to the concept of an education centered around the child. If you lose the child, you lose the concept of education.

Rousseau's "Emile" is a must read for everybody who is interested in education. The book may be more than 200 years old, but many of its insights could come up in any brand new treatise about modern methods of teaching. "Emile" is the fictitious account of the ideal education of a boy. (Maybe it was Rousseau's way of dealing with his own failures as a father.) Rousseau believes that education must be to blame for the deplorable state of the world, as "Everything is good that the Lord has made, it only degenerates in the hands of man." So Rousseau rejects the drill and cruelty of the schools of his times, he opts for freedom and learning by doing. Much of this is utopian, of course, but in one of his brilliant remarks Rousseau claims that "saying: Suggest something that can be done, is like saying: suggest what we have been doing all along."This is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. If you read just one book about education, make it this one, even if you are not prepared to agree with Rousseau.