Understanding Rousseau's Émile: Education, Nature, and the Child

Émile, or On Education (1762) is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s major work on education and one of the most influential works of educational theory ever written. The book is a kind of philosophical novel that follows the education of a single child, Émile, from birth to adulthood, and it develops a comprehensive theory of child development and pedagogy that has had a profound influence on the development of modern education.

The Central Idea

The central idea of Émile is that education should follow the natural development of the child rather than impose artificial requirements. The child, for Rousseau, is naturally good, and the proper education of the child requires the protection of this natural goodness from the corrupting influences of society.

The conventional education of the eighteenth century, Rousseau argued, was based on a series of false assumptions. It assumed that the child was naturally bad and needed to be disciplined; it assumed that the proper way to teach the child was through books and formal instruction; it assumed that the proper end of education was the transmission of the established doctrines and values. All of these assumptions, in Rousseau’s view, were wrong, and they produced a kind of education that stunted the natural development of the child.

The Stages of Development

Rousseau divided the development of the child into four stages, each of which has its own characteristic form of education.

Infancy (0-2 years): The proper education of the infant, for Rousseau, is largely a matter of physical care. The infant should be allowed to develop physically in a free and supportive environment, without the imposition of artificial restraints. The clothing, the swaddling clothes, and the various other physical constraints of the conventional education should be avoided.

Childhood (2-12 years): The proper education of the child, for Rousseau, is the education of the senses. The child should be allowed to explore the world through direct experience, and the formal instruction in books and doctrines should be postponed. The child should be allowed to develop the powers of observation and judgment through the direct engagement with the world, and the abstract and formal instruction of the conventional education should be avoided.

Adolescence (12-15 years): The proper education of the adolescent, for Rousseau, is the education of the intellect. The adolescent is now ready for the formal study of the natural sciences, the modern languages, and the other subjects that will develop the powers of reason. The study of history, geography, and the natural sciences is appropriate at this stage, and the abstract study of metaphysics and theology should be postponed.

Late adolescence and adulthood (15+ years): The proper education of the young adult, for Rousseau, is the education of the heart and the moral sentiments. The young adult is now ready for the study of ethics, politics, and religion, and the proper end of education is the development of the moral and social virtues.

The Education of Sophie

The most controversial section of Émile for contemporary readers is the fifth book, in which Rousseau turns to the education of Sophie, the future wife of Émile. Sophie’s education is in many ways the complement of Émile’s. She is to be educated for the domestic life rather than for the public life; she is to be trained in obedience, modesty, and the care of the household; she is to cultivate the arts that make her pleasing to her future husband, but not the arts that would give her an independent voice in the world.

The passage has been the subject of intense criticism since the publication of the book. Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), used Rousseau’s treatment of Sophie as a foil for her own argument for the equal education of women. The contemporary feminist critique has argued that Rousseau’s account of women’s nature is a rationalization of the patriarchal subordination of women, and that the educational principles that Rousseau himself espoused — the natural development of the child, the protection of the natural goodness, the importance of the direct engagement with the world — were not applied to the education of girls. The critique has been enormously influential in the contemporary study of Rousseau, and it has been an important source of the development of feminist educational theory. For more on the feminist critique of Rousseau, see Rousseau on Women.

The Religious Section and Its Reception

The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar

The most famous and most controversial section of Émile is the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” a long passage in which Rousseau presents a comprehensive account of his religious views. The Vicar is a young priest who has lost his faith in orthodox Catholicism and who has developed a new, naturalistic religion based on the observation of nature and the exercise of reason.

The Vicar’s religion is a kind of natural deism, with a strong emphasis on the moral sentiments. The Vicar rejects the miracles and the prophecies of the Bible, the divinity of Christ, and the authority of the church, and he affirms a kind of natural religion in which the proper response to the natural world is gratitude, wonder, and moral commitment.

The “Profession of Faith” was one of the reasons that Émile was condemned by the Parlement of Paris and the Archbishop of Paris. The book was publicly burned, and Rousseau was forced to flee France.

The Legacy of Émile

Émile was enormously influential in the development of modern educational theory. The pedagogical ideas of Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori, Dewey, and many others all draw, on Rousseau’s pioneering work. The contemporary emphasis on child-centered education, on the importance of the natural development of the child, on the role of direct experience in learning, and on the limits of formal instruction all descend, from Émile.