Emilio

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Emile, or On Education
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Émile, Or On Education   |

Title page of Rousseau's Émile |
Author(s) | Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
Country | Switzerland and France |
Language | French |
Publication date | 1762 |
Published in
English | 1762 |
ISBN | NA |
Émile, or On Education is a treatise on thenature of education and on the nature of manwritten by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best and most important of all my writings”.[1] Due to a section of the book entitled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” Émile was banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned in 1762.[2] During the French Revolution, Émile served as the inspiration for what became a new nationalsystem of education.[3]
Contents  [hide]  * 1 Politics and Philosophy * 2 Book Divisions * 2.1 Book I * 2.2 Book II * 2.3 Book III * 2.4 Book IV * 2.5 Book V * 3 Emile et Sophie * 4 Notes * 5 Bibliography * 6 See Also |
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[edit]Politics and Philosophy
The work tacklesfundamental political and philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society— how, in particular, the individual might retain what Rousseau saw as innate human goodness while remaining part of a corrupting collectivity. Its opening sentence: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
Rousseau seeks to describe a system of education thatwould enable the natural man he identifies in The Social Contract (1762) to survive corrupt society.[4] He employs thenovelistic device of Émile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Émile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but it does contain some specific advice on raising children.[5] It is regarded by some as the first philosophy of education inWesternculture to have a serious claim to completeness, as well as being one of the firstBildungsroman novels, having preceded Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by more than thirty years.[6]
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[edit]Book Divisions
The text is divided into five books: the first three are dedicated to the child Émile, the fourth to an exploration of the adolescent, andthe fifth to outlining the education of his female counterpart Sophie, as well as to Émile’s domestic and civic life.

Rousseau
[edit]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.Émile 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.”[7] 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.”[8] But Rousseau acknowledges that every society “must choosebetween making a man or a citizen”[9] 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.”[10] 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 Émile,but while it might seem that for Rousseau such a process would be entirely negative, this is not so. Émile 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,...