Rousseau and education

In Émile (1762) Rousseau presented a view of childhood and human nature which continues to inform educational thinking. In contrast to the Christian doctrine of original sin, he asserted that human nature was essentially good. He argued that it was the institutions of society that corrupted man. He reacted against the coercive nature of the authoritarian society of his time. 'From the beginning', he writes, 'to the end of life civilized man is a slave. At birth he is sewn up in swaddling bands, and at death nailed down in a coffin.' At a time when many children could not be expected to live for long, he argued powerfully that such life as they did have should be enjoyed. The memory of his own unhappy childhood made him acutely aware of the needs of children and insistent on their right to happiness. He argued for the transformation of child rearing: mothers were to breastfeed their own children, infants were to wear loose clothing and generally to enjoy freedom of movement and a closeness to nature. He viewed the child as a child and not as an inadequate adult, believing that it had the potential within itself to develop almost unlimited talents.

This kind of optimism is central to Rousseau's view of human nature and to his revolutionary ideas about society and education. The role of the teacher was not to restrain or to indoctrinate but so to arrange the child's environment that it could learn for itself. He attacked the education of his time on the grounds of its 'verbalism'; rote learning and textbooks were anathema to him. It was from things that they could actually experience that children best learned. His attitude was not antirational: 'I am far from thinking that children have no kind of reasoning. On the contrary, I notice that they think very well on everything which bears on their present and obvious interest.' From observation and his intuitive sympathy for children he was led to conceive of stages in their development towards adulthood, a notion which Jean Piaget (another Genevan) later developed more scientifically.

Rousseau did not question contemporary faculty psychology (the theory that various capacities — moral, aesthetic, reasoning — exist discretely in the human brain and develop separately), but his developmental view led him to recognize that children need to be childish and adolescents adolescent. He notes that the adolescent becomes ever more curious about the world, and eager for knowledge, but stresses that this knowledge must be his own, based on his own experience. Even at this stage he is sceptical of the educative value of books, except for Robinson Crusoe, which showed a man learning from nature and hard necessity. Rousseau understood adolescence, the moods and instability associated with the urgency of sexual development. His views about sex education are still pertinent: 'If your pupil cannot be kept ignorant of sex differences up to 16 make sure he learns about them before 10.' This strength of Rousseau's, his trust in an intuitive understanding of the nature and needs of children, remains a positive stimulus to educational thought and practice. His belief in the essential goodness of human nature may be a myth but it is a more sustaining one than its converse. There are also dangers: a distrust of accumulated human knowledge, an anti-intellectualism that can lead to the worship of unreason, an over-reliance on feeling as a sufficient basis for sane human action. His profound distrust of institutions, however, has proved well justified: we are still struggling to make schools good places for children to learn in. (See education: theory and practice for a discussion of the influence of his views.)

(Published 1987)

— Charles Hannam/Norman Stephenson

Bibliography
• Boyd, W. (1956). Émile for Today.

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