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Emile, or On Education
Emile, or On Education (French: Émile, ou De l’éducation) is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the "best and most important" of all his writings. Due to a section of the book entitled "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar", Emile was banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned in 1762, the year of its first publication. It was forbidden by the Church being listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. During the French Revolution, Emile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education. After the American Revolution, Noah Webster used content from Emile in his best-selling schoolbooks and he also used it to argue for the civic necessity of broad-based female education.
The work tackles fundamental political and philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society: how, in particular, the individual might retain what Rousseau saw as innate human goodness but remain part of a corrupting collectivity. It has a famous opening sentence: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man".
Rousseau seeks to describe a system of education that would enable the natural man he identifies in The Social Contract (1762) to survive corrupt society. He employs the novelistic device of Emile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Emile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but contains some specific advice on raising children. It is regarded by some as the first philosophy of education in Western culture to have a serious claim to completeness and as one of the first Bildungsroman novels.
The text is divided into five books: the first three are dedicated to the child Emile, the fourth to an exploration of the adolescent, and the fifth to outlining the education of his female counterpart Sophie, as well as to Emile's domestic and civic life.
In Book I, Rousseau discusses not only his fundamental philosophy but also begins to outline how one would have to raise a child to conform with that philosophy. He begins with the early physical and emotional development of the infant and the child.
Emile attempts to "find a way of resolving the contradictions between the natural man who is 'all for himself' and the implications of life in society". The famous opening line does not bode well for the educational project—"Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man". But Rousseau acknowledges that every society "must choose between making a man or a citizen" and that the best "social institutions are those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the common unity". To "denature man" for Rousseau is to suppress some of the "natural" instincts that he extols in The Social Contract, published the same year as Emile, but while it might seem that for Rousseau such a process would be entirely negative, this is not so. Emile does not lament the loss of the noble savage. Instead, it is an effort to explain how natural man can live within society.
Many of Rousseau's suggestions in this book are restatements of the ideas of other educational reformers. For example, he endorses Locke's program of "harden[ing children's] bodies against the intemperance of season, climates, elements; against hunger, thirst, fatigue". He also emphasizes the perils of swaddling and the benefits of mothers nursing their own infants. Rousseau's enthusiasm for breastfeeding led him to argue: "[B]ut let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature's sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled"—a hyperbole that demonstrates Rousseau's commitment to grandiose rhetoric. As Peter Jimack, the noted Rousseau scholar, argues: "Rousseau consciously sought to find the striking, lapidary phrase which would compel the attention of his readers and move their hearts, even when it meant, as it often did, an exaggeration of his thought". And, in fact, Rousseau's pronouncements, although not original, affected a revolution in swaddling and breastfeeding.
The second book concerns the initial interactions of the child with the world. Rousseau believed that at this phase the education of children should be derived less from books and more from the child's interactions with the world, with an emphasis on developing the senses, and the ability to draw inferences from them. Rousseau concludes the chapter with an example of a boy who has been successfully educated through this phase. The father takes the boy out flying kites, and asks the child to infer the position of the kite by looking only at the shadow. This is a task that the child has never specifically been taught, but through inference and understanding of the physical world, the child is able to succeed in his task. In some ways, this approach is the precursor of the Montessori method.
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Emile, or On Education
Emile, or On Education (French: Émile, ou De l’éducation) is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the "best and most important" of all his writings. Due to a section of the book entitled "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar", Emile was banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned in 1762, the year of its first publication. It was forbidden by the Church being listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. During the French Revolution, Emile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education. After the American Revolution, Noah Webster used content from Emile in his best-selling schoolbooks and he also used it to argue for the civic necessity of broad-based female education.
The work tackles fundamental political and philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society: how, in particular, the individual might retain what Rousseau saw as innate human goodness but remain part of a corrupting collectivity. It has a famous opening sentence: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man".
Rousseau seeks to describe a system of education that would enable the natural man he identifies in The Social Contract (1762) to survive corrupt society. He employs the novelistic device of Emile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Emile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but contains some specific advice on raising children. It is regarded by some as the first philosophy of education in Western culture to have a serious claim to completeness and as one of the first Bildungsroman novels.
The text is divided into five books: the first three are dedicated to the child Emile, the fourth to an exploration of the adolescent, and the fifth to outlining the education of his female counterpart Sophie, as well as to Emile's domestic and civic life.
In Book I, Rousseau discusses not only his fundamental philosophy but also begins to outline how one would have to raise a child to conform with that philosophy. He begins with the early physical and emotional development of the infant and the child.
Emile attempts to "find a way of resolving the contradictions between the natural man who is 'all for himself' and the implications of life in society". The famous opening line does not bode well for the educational project—"Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man". But Rousseau acknowledges that every society "must choose between making a man or a citizen" and that the best "social institutions are those that best know how to denature man, to take his absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the common unity". To "denature man" for Rousseau is to suppress some of the "natural" instincts that he extols in The Social Contract, published the same year as Emile, but while it might seem that for Rousseau such a process would be entirely negative, this is not so. Emile does not lament the loss of the noble savage. Instead, it is an effort to explain how natural man can live within society.
Many of Rousseau's suggestions in this book are restatements of the ideas of other educational reformers. For example, he endorses Locke's program of "harden[ing children's] bodies against the intemperance of season, climates, elements; against hunger, thirst, fatigue". He also emphasizes the perils of swaddling and the benefits of mothers nursing their own infants. Rousseau's enthusiasm for breastfeeding led him to argue: "[B]ut let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature's sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled"—a hyperbole that demonstrates Rousseau's commitment to grandiose rhetoric. As Peter Jimack, the noted Rousseau scholar, argues: "Rousseau consciously sought to find the striking, lapidary phrase which would compel the attention of his readers and move their hearts, even when it meant, as it often did, an exaggeration of his thought". And, in fact, Rousseau's pronouncements, although not original, affected a revolution in swaddling and breastfeeding.
The second book concerns the initial interactions of the child with the world. Rousseau believed that at this phase the education of children should be derived less from books and more from the child's interactions with the world, with an emphasis on developing the senses, and the ability to draw inferences from them. Rousseau concludes the chapter with an example of a boy who has been successfully educated through this phase. The father takes the boy out flying kites, and asks the child to infer the position of the kite by looking only at the shadow. This is a task that the child has never specifically been taught, but through inference and understanding of the physical world, the child is able to succeed in his task. In some ways, this approach is the precursor of the Montessori method.
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