Rousseau's Émile and the Romantic Child's Education

Introduction: Rousseau and the Romantic Child

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Émile, or On Education in 1762. The alternate title of this innovative novel reflects Rousseau's central motivation: to describe a system of education that would allow the natural innocence and intrinsic goodness of the young child to survive, uncorrupted, into adulthood. It is sometimes regarded as the first detailed and complete philosophy of education in Western culture.

"To say that children enjoyed special status in the Romantic period is perhaps to spout a cliché. The Romantics created a new economy of respect for children by acknowledging their differences from adults, and henceforth viewing them as adequate children as opposed to deficient adults." (Ferguson, Winter 2003) This was an important and highly significant moment for the fields of education, child psychology, child development, sociology, and family studies. The meaning of childhood changed considerably in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Émile is one of the most famous texts to depict this new worldview.

The Five-Book Structure of Émile

The methods that Rousseau employed to introduce and promote his ideas are best understood through the five components corresponding to the five individual books that make up the whole of Émile. These five components address: the fundamental philosophy of Rousseau's educational system and how best to incorporate it into raising a child; the child's initial interaction with the world; the need for early selection of a trade; the child's emotional education during adolescence; and the philosophic foundation of female educational requirements.

The opening line of Émile is famous for its implied criticism of the nature and intent of society: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." (Rousseau, 1979) This statement is indicative of Rousseau's general philosophical view of man and the world, discussed in detail in The Social Contract, first published in the same year as Émile. The premise is that man's base nature must be suppressed in order to live in harmony with, and function appropriately in, civilized society. In Émile, Rousseau attempts to work out how it might be possible to raise a child to take a proper place in a society that expects and demands accountability, responsibility, and productivity — without training the fundamental innocence and goodness out of the child's nature.

Early Childhood: Physical and Emotional Foundations

In Book I, Rousseau begins with the early physical and emotional development of the child. He endorses breastfeeding and swaddling for the infant, and advises against sheltering a young child so that he learns early that there are hardships and harshness to be found in the adult world. This point of view calls to mind the experience of children raised by parents whose constant refrain was that life is hard and not fair — parents who believed strongly in building a foundation of resilience and endurance through rigid expectations and harsh discipline.

Such an approach, however, risks missing Rousseau's other essential point: that children also need to be nurtured, cared for, and provided with stability and consistency in order to thrive. This is one of the major aspects of Romanticism — a notion that was almost entirely absent from the prevailing approach to raising children up to that point in history.

Bibliography

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1979) Emile (or On Education). Translated by Alan Bloom. New York: Basic Books.

Stroup, William. (Jan. 2003–Dec. 2004) "The Romantic Child." Literature Compass. Volume 1, Issue 1.

Ferguson, Frances. (Winter 2003) "The Afterlife of the Romantic Child: Rousseau and Kant Meet Deleuze and Guattari." The South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol. 102, No. 1, pp. 215–234.