Emile, or On Education

Émile Or, On Education

Title page of Rousseau's Émile
Author	Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Language	French
Publication date	1762
Publication place	Switzerland and France
Published in English	1762
ISBN	NA

Émile, or On Education 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 my writings”. On its first appearance in 1762 it was publicly burned.

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 while remaining part of a corrupting collectivity. Its 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 Émile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Émile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but it does contain 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, as well as being the first Bildungsroman, having preceded Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by more than thirty years.

The text is divided into five books: the first three are dedicated to the child Émile, the fourth to an exploration of the adolescent, and the fifth to outlining the education of his female counterpart Sophie, as well as to Émile’s domestic and civic life.

No sooner was it published than the section of the book titled, “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” caused it to be banned in Paris and Geneva and burned. It became a European bestseller. During the French Revolution, Émile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education.

Social and pedagogical philosophy

Rousseau

Book I

In Book I, Rousseau discusses not only his fundamental philosophy but he 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.

Émile 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 Émile, but while it might seem that for Rousseau such a process would be entirely negative, this is not so. Émile is not a panegyric for the loss of the noble savage, a term Rousseau never actually used. 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 to him to argue “but 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, effected a revolution in swaddling and breast-feeding.

Book II

The second book concerns the initial interactions of the child with the world. Rousseau believed that at this phase education should be derived less from books and more from their 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.

Book III

Frontispiece to Rousseau's Émile by de Launay for the 1782 edition. The original caption read: "L'éducation de l'homme commence à sa naissance" ("A man's education begins at birth"). "In the foreground, a mother dutifully reads Émile as she breastfeeds one baby and changes another. Her daughter looks on, eager to learn from her mother's example. They are seated in a forest clearing at the foot of a pedestal bearing a larger than life bust of Rousseau, who by the 1780s had become a kind of patron saint for nursing mothers....In the background are scenes from Émile's childhood."

The third book concerns the selection of a trade. Rousseau believed that it is necessary that the child must be taught a manual appropriate role models of how to live his life.

Book IV

Once Émile is physically strong and learns to carefully observe the world around him, he is ready for the last part of his education—sentiment: “We have made an active and thinking being. It remains for us, in order to complete the man, only to make a loving and feeling being—that is to say, to perfect reason by sentiment” Émile is a teenager at this point and it is only now that Rousseau believes he is capable of understanding complex human emotions, particularly sympathy. Rousseau argues that the child cannot put himself in the place of others but once adolescence has been reached and he is able do so, Émile can finally be brought into the world and socialized.

In addition to introducing a newly passionate Émile to society during his adolescent years, the tutor also introduces him to religion. According to Rousseau, children cannot understand abstract concepts such as the soul before the age of about fifteen or sixteen, so to introduce religion to them is dangerous. He writes, “it is a lesser evil to be unaware of the divinity than to offend it” Moreover, because children are incapable of understanding the difficult concepts that are part of religion, he points out that children will only recite what is told to them – they are unable to believe. Book IV also contains the infamous “Profession of a Savoyard Priest,” the section that was largely responsible for the condemnation of Émile and the one, paradoxically, most frequently excerpted and published independently of its parent tome. Rousseau claims at the end of the “Profession” that it is not “a rule for the sentiments that one ought to follow in religious matters, but . . . an example of the way one can reason with one’s pupil in order not to diverge from the method I have tried to establish." Such a claim was clearly difficult for many readers at the time to accept and still is. Rousseau, through the priest, leads his readers through an argument with only one concluding belief: “natural religion.” Even more importantly, after this brief excursion into religious education, religion does not play any role in Émile’s life; religion, however important to Rousseau (Rousseau is believed to have created the Savoyard Vicar by combining the traits of two Savoyard priests whom he had known in his childhood: Abbé Gaime from Turin and Abbé Gâtier from Annecy), is insignificant in Émile’s education and socialization.

Title page from a German edition of Émile

Book V

In Book V, Rousseau turns to the education of Sophie, Émile’s wife-to-be. This brief description of female education sparked an immense contemporary response, perhaps even more so than Émile itself. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, dedicated a substantial portion of her chapter “Animadversions on Some of the Writers who have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt” in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to attacking Rousseau and his arguments. Rousseau begins his description of Sophie, the ideal woman, by describing the differences between men and women in a famous passage:

In what they have in common, they are equal. Where they differ, they are not comparable. A perfect woman and a perfect man ought not to resemble each other in mind any more than in looks, and perfection is not susceptible of more or less. In the union of the sexes each contributes equally to the common aim, but not in the same way. From this diversity arises the first assignable difference in the moral relations of the two sexes. While the opening “in what they have in common, they are equal” offers an intriguing possibility for women, Rousseau does not elaborate on it. For him, sexual differences far outweigh similarities and those differences tilt in man’s favor: women should be “passive and weak,” “put up little resistance” and are “made specially to please man.”

Rousseau also touches on the political upbringing of Émile in book V by including a concise version of his The Social Contract in the book. His political treatise The Social Contract was published in the same year as Émile and was likewise soon banned by the government for its controversial theories on general will. The version of this work in Émile however does not go into detail concerning the tension between the Sovereign and the Executive, but instead refer the reader to the original work.

Emile et Sophie

In the incomplete sequel to Emile, Emile et Sophie, published after Rousseau’s death, Sophie is unfaithful (in what is hinted at might be a drugged rape), and Emile, initially furious with her betrayal, remarks “the adulteries of the women of the world are not more than gallantries; but Sophia an adulteress is the most odious of all monsters; the distance between what she was, and what she is, is immense. No! there is no disgrace, no crime equal to hers.” He later relents somewhat, blaming himself for taking her to a city full of temptation, but he still abandons her and their children. Throughout the agonized internal monologue, represented through letters to his old tutor, he repeatedly comments on all of the affective ties that he has formed in his domestic life—“the chains [his heart] forged for itself” As he begins to recover from the shock, the reader is led to believe that these “chains” are not worth the price of possible pain—“By renouncing my attachments to a single spot, I extended them to the whole earth, and, while I ceased to be a citizen, became truly a man.” While in La Nouvelle Héloïse, the ideal is domestic, rural happiness (if not bliss), in Emile and its sequel, the ideal is “emotional self-sufficiency which was the natural state of primitive, pre-social man, but which for modern man can be attained only by the suppression of his natural inclinations.”

See Also

Robinson Crusoe

Notes

Bibliography

• Bloch, Jean. Rousseauism and Education in Eighteenth-century France. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995.

• Boyd, William. The Educational Theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911. No ISBN available.

• Jimack, Peter. Rousseau: Emile. London: Grant and Cutler, Ltd., 1983.

• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Emile, or On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Emilius and Sophia; or, The Solitaries. London: Printed by H. Baldwin, 1783.

• Trouille, Mary Seidman. Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.

External links

• Émile, ou De l'éducation at Wikisource (in French)
• The Emile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, at Columbia. Complete French text and English translation by Grace G. Roosevelt (an adaptation and revision of the Foxley translation)
• Emile at Project Gutenberg in an English translation by Barbara Foxley