We're told that of all his works, and there were a lot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered “Emile, Or On Education” to be the “best and most important”. Considering Rousseau's importance to Enlightenment thought, and thus to the founding of the United States, this is clearly something we should attend to.
It's no particular surprise to find that “Emile” isn't really a novel. Rather, it's a kind of treatise on (you guessed it) education, thinly disguised as a work of fiction. Our narrator is Emile's tutor, from shortly after his birth to the age of about 20, at which point Emile decides to get married and the narrator sensibly turns him over to his new wife. He is apparently the narrator's only pupil, and his parents (not to speak of any brothers or sisters) are nowhere in evidence. At times, Emile himself is nowhere in evidence either, disappearing in favor of the tutor's lengthy discourses on the various subjects he teaches the kid.
Before we get into that, though, just what is Rousseau's point regarding education? In a 500-page book, of course, there are several. One overarching idea, however, is that the pupil should be taught using his natural inclinations. This includes the reluctance to teach the child anything he doesn't find immediately useful. His desire to learn, that is, extends only to those things he is naturally interested in, rather than those things his tutor and the educational establishment think he should know. Thus, the establishment of the nation – in this case France – wants the kid to learn duty and patriotism as early as possible, despite the fact that, at the age that the establishment wants him to learn those things, he has no idea and can have no idea what those words even mean.
He can, however, see the natural world for himself, so his tutor takes him out into the fields and allows him to learn for himself how to measure distances and determine directions. The tutor does not tell him how to do those things. He may even allow his pupil to get lost at times. Eventually, he will learn what he needs to know by discovering it for himself. Today, studies show that learning by discovering things for yourself sticks with a person far longer than learning by reading books or listening to lectures will do.
Getting back to Rousseau's periodic digressions, a good example appears about halfway through “Emile”. The boy is now an adolescent; how is he to learn religion, still a critical part of education at the time? The narrator departs from his description of Emile's learning and spends 50-odd pages describing his own encounter with a former Catholic priest, who tells him how he managed to come back to God, once again through his own observations and reason. This sort of digression occurs several times throughout the book, for subjects like politics, relationships between nations, and love and marriage.
The irony, of course, is this: Having insisted that the pupil cannot possibly learn much by means of lectures, the narrator now proceeds to lecture us at length on several subjects. Whoops.
Oh well, no one ever said Rousseau was completely consistent in his ideas. Critical as his thinking was, he spent his life making a nuisance of himself to the many people who wanted to help him. He struggled for a long time to make his living, partly because of that tendency. Usefully for this work, for a while, he made his living as a tutor; I have not been able to learn how much of “Emile” derives from his experience in the educational field and how much derives from his more academic thoughts, but at least his ideas on education apparently come from something more than his own brain. Today's politicians should learn a little something from that alone.
As for “Emile” itself, it's not the easiest read I've ever come across. This has something to do with its length, something to do with the fact that I read it in translation from the original French, and probably something to do with Rousseau's apparent ego. He spends an inordinate amount of time insulting the educational practices of his day, challenging other tutors to compare their pupils to Emile – who, I remind you, is a fictional character.
Tough as it was, and as inconsistent in what you might call its “entertainment value,” “Emile” is a useful exploration of the subject if nothing else. I wish America's school system would read it and implement some its ideas if at all possible. The students, and the teachers, would certainly benefit.
Benshlomo says, When it comes to the young, try being with them instead of attending only to the rules you've been taught.
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