Emile: On Education

“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.” 

Central to Rousseau’s educational theories is the idea that children are not miniature adults, as assumed by most teachers of his era, and that teaching them properly requires a respect for the developmental stages their minds go through as they get older. To this end, Rousseau strongly recommends that children learn mainly from encounters with the natural world while postponing book learning as long as possible. 

“God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” 

Rousseau’s overarching philosophical theme in Emile and other books is that humans grow best in natural settings—the “state of nature”—and that too much social interaction, especially among the frivolous urban elite, corrupts natural wisdom and well-being. 

“Ambition, avarice, tyranny, the mistaken foresight of fathers, their neglect, their harshness, are a hundredfold more harmful to the child than the blind affection of the mother.” 

When parents, especially the men, bring home from the city their acquired corrupt social ambitions, this interferes with their children’s natural growth and warps their education. Children copy their parents, and they begin to interact with peers not through friendship and camaraderie but with the petty cruelty and competition for status that they see in their parents’ behavior.