Emile: or, On Education (1762) which Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed to be the “best and most important of all my writings” is largely a philosophical treatise on the nature of man; it addresses political and philosophical questions regarding the individual’s relationship to society, in particular how the individual can retain what Rousseau saw as his natural goodness while participating in an inevitably corrupt society. In Emile, Rousseau attempts to describe a system of education that will enable the “natural man” that he outlines in The Social Contract (1762) to live within corrupt society. Rousseau includes the novelistic story of Emile and his tutor in order to illustrate how one might educate this ideal citizen; Emile is therefore not a detailed parenting guide, although it does contain some specific advice on raising children. It is the first complete philosophy of education in the Western tradition, as well as the first Bildungsroman, preceding 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 Emile, the fourth to an exploration of the adolescent Emile and the final book outlines the education of his female counterpart, Sophie, and Emile’s domestic and civic life.

Emile was banned and burned in Paris and Geneva as soon as it was published for the controversial section “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” but despite, or perhaps because of, this reputation, it became a European bestseller. Furthermore, during the French Revolution, Emile served as the inspiration for a new national system of education.

Social and pedagogical philosophy

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.

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 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

The third book concerns the selection of a trade. Rousseau believed that it is necessary that the child must be taught a manual trade, which was rare for the time. He believed that the benefits were not merely economic but also social: that the practice of apprenticeship was ideal for integrating the child into society, and providing him with appropriate role models of how to live his life.

Book IV

Once Emile 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” Emile 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, Emile can finally be brought into the world and socialized.

In addition to introducing a newly passionate Emile 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 Emile 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 “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 Emile’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 Emile’s education and socialization.

Book V

In Book V, Rousseau turns to the education of Sophie, Emile’s wife-to-be. This brief description of female education sparked an immense contemporary response, perhaps even more so than Emile 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. One ought to be active and strong, the other passive and weak. One must necessarily will and be able; it suffices that the other put up little resistance. Once this principle is established, it follows that woman is made specially to please man.

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.”

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 her’s.” He later relents somewhat, blaming himself for taking her to a city full of temptation, but he still abandons her and his 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.”

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

• fr: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)
• in an English translation by Barbara Foxley