Emile: On Education

Rousseau states that he is writing Emile “to give pleasure to a good mother who thinks for herself” (1). Meant to be a pamphlet, the manuscript balloons into an entire book “too large indeed for the matter contained in it, but too small for the subject of which it treats (1).” Despite this, Rousseau feels that his time and effort will not have been wasted if the book encourages people to think differently. The literature on education in Rousseau’s time routinely critiqued current teaching methods but failed to offer practical solutions. Though critics call Rousseau’s ideas impractical and urge him to compromise them, he believes weak changes made to bad methods get people nowhere. Rousseau wants an education system “adapted to the human heart” (1), and configurable to various places and cultures. 

Rousseau laments that man takes the good things of God’s earth and mutilates them: “he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it” (2). People thus need to be taught how to live with others, yet social conditioning takes the good nature out of people, like a sapling crushed on a highway: Mothers, then, must “remove this young tree from the highway and shield it from the crushing force of social conventions” via education (2).