Émile was to learn directly from nature in a retired country setting. Rousseau was one of the first proponents of the Romantic belief in the nobility of childhood, its freedom from adult corruption and closeness to the state of nature. Rather than stuffing children full of moral precepts and academic knowledge, the aim was to work with the grain of the pupil’s innate capacities and desires. Rousseau called this process ‘negative education’ and urged teachers to begin by ‘studying your pupils better’.

Émile was to be an unalienated ‘savage’ who could nevertheless thrive in the modern world. His aim in Émile was to devise a system of education capable of producing a complete, free and good human being. Natural man was solitary and free, but social man – especially as encountered in the salons of Enlightenment Paris – was self-conscious, calculating, deceitful, egotistical and perverse. It was only over time, Rousseau argued, as social bonds were extended and civilisation grew more complex, that this original unity was disturbed. In the primeval forests of our species’ infancy, mankind was solitary, happy and good – a zen-like noble savage who lived entirely for himself and in the present moment. Rousseau was renowned for being optimistic about human nature. Émile is a thought experiment, in which the philosopher imagines a system of education designed to protect the natural unity of his pupil’s consciousness from the ills of civilisation.

And his insistence on the value of learning in nature lies in the background of today’s Forest School movement.Īnd yet Rousseau referred to his text as ‘less an educational treatise than a visionary’s reveries about education’. His observation that children develop via a series of clearly demarcated stages, each with its own unique cognitive and emotional capacities, underpinned the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theories of child psychology in the 1920s. His stress on the training of the body as well as the mind was the forerunner of the mania for organised sports that swept English boarding schools in the 19th century and inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin to found the modern Olympic Games in 1896. Rousseau’s advocacy of learning via direct experience and creative play inspired the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi, the German educator Friedrich Fröbel and the kindergarten movement. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile or On Education (1762) is perhaps the most influential work on education written in the modern world.

The emile of jean jacques rousseau