Rousseau's Emile

It is not intended, even if it were desirable, to give a running commentary on the Emile. The reader is advised to study it for himself and to read in conjunction the account of the education of Julie's children described in Part V of The New Heloise. All that space permits is a summary of some of the more important ideas that Rousseau contributed to educational theory. Speaking of the Emile, Lord Morley described it as 'one of the seminal books in the history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task. It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for mechanism . . . it was the charter of youthful deliverance.'

It is the last sentence of this passage which expresses the most important influence that Rousseau exercised upon education. One may justly hail him as the discoverer of the child. This is not to forget that educational thinkers of the ancient world, the mediaeval period, and the Renaissance, had kindly, sympathetic, and helpful ideas about the training of children. In their view the child did not come first. They fixed their eyes upon what he was to be in the future and the curriculum they approved and the methods they recommended were coloured by this attitude. Rousseau, on the other hand, emphasised that the prime factor to be considered in education is the child and his present nature as a child. He wrote: 'Nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we deliberately pervert this order, we shall get premature fruits which are neither ripe nor well flavoured, and which soon decay. ... Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling, peculiar to itself; nothing can be more foolish than to substitute our ways for them.'

So important did this principle seem to him that he repeated it in the Emile. In the Preface to the Emile, he wrote: 'We know nothing of childhood; and with our mistaken notions, the further we advance, the further we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know, without asking what a child is capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child without considering what he is before he becomes a man.... Begin thus by making a more careful study of your scholars, for it is clear that you know nothing about them.' He carried out this advice in the Emile by expressing the view that education is a continuous process which begins at birth and which can be divided into four consecutive stages. Thus Book I deals with the infant; Book II with childhood; Book III with the pre-adolescent between the ages of twelve and fifteen; and Book IV with adolescence.

These stages of development correspond to the progress made in the history of the human race. To all intents and purposes, the infant is living at the animal level. The child can be compared with primitive man. Boyhood is a period of self-sufficiency, whilst at adolescence the sex impulses ripen, social behaviour becomes possible, and the young person is able to conduct his life according to moral principles.

It is an easy matter to criticise Rousseau's account of the child's development from the standpoint of present-day child study, but it is essential to bear in mind that in the eighteenth century he was a pioneer in this field. His exposition was rendered less effective by his adherence to a faculty psychology, but in his defence, one could urge that this was the dominant view of his time. The continuity of the child's development may seem to be broken by the emphasis placed upon the emergence of new faculties, for example, at adolescence, the pupil appears to make a complete break with his former life. One may dispute Rousseau's statement that the most dangerous period of human life lies between birth and the age of twelve, but when these partial criticisms have been made, the fact remains that he concentrated attention upon the child and his nature rather than upon the subject and the pupil's future occupation. This was one of the most revolutionary steps that educational theory had so far taken.

(From A Short History of Educational Ideas, by S. J. Curtis & M. E. A. Boultwood.)