READING ROUSSEAU'S EMILE

Emile is an orphan. It makes no difference whether he has his father and mother. Charged with their duties, I inherit all their rights. He ought to honor his parents, but he ought to obey only me. That is my first, or rather, my sole condition.

I ought to add the following one, which is only a consequence of the other, that we never be taken from one another without our consent. This clause is essential, and I would even want the pupil and the governor to regard themselves as so inseparable that the lot of each in life is always a common object for them.... But when they regard themselves as people who are going to spend their lives together, it is important for each to make himself loved by the other; and by that very fact they become dear to one another. The pupil does not blush at following in his childhood the friend he is going to have when he is grown. The governor takes an interest in concerns whose fruit he is going to harvest, and whatever merit he imparts to his pupil is an investment he makes for his old age.

The outline of the story

Jean-Jacques, the tutor, will educate Emile. This takes close to 500 pages. At the end of this long story, a girl, Sophie, is chosen, properly educated, and prepared to be Emile's wife. Emile and Sophie marry and have a child. In the final paragraph, Emile takes for himself the responsibility for rearing his own child, but immediately begs Jean-Jacques to "remain the master of the young masters." "Advise us and govern us," he says. "We shall be docile. As long as I live, I shall need you. I need you more than ever now that my functions as a man begin." (480)

So this is what Rousseau meant when, in the opening pages, he referred to "the fruit [the tutor] is going to harvest." We see why Rousseau says that "whatever merits [Jean-Jacques] imparts to his pupil is an investment he makes for his old age." Jean-Jacques will live with his pupil and his pupil's wife in a ménage à trois.

* * *

You can understand nothing about our times without understanding the times in which Emile was written. The 17th and 18th centuries establish a lot of the givens of our time, the unquestioned "certainties" that infuse our talk and which remain unquestioned, even unexamined.

For example, this time establishes the ideal of the inidvidual. The individual is, for the first time, conceived as a being endowed with political rights that come straight from a Creator, i.e., that are unmediated by earthly institutions like a monarchy. This time, in particular, gives political force to the derivative ideal that all people are equal.

This time establishes the ideal of a child. Ariés discusses this in his History of Childhood. Children become something separate from adults, something that requires a specific kind of attention. Rousseau says, "Childhood is unknown." At the time, it was. Because of Plato and Aristotle, a little one was simply an adult becoming who it was. At this time, it became possible to say that he is a child, something that is related to but not derivative from who he is in his essense the full nature of which is revealed in the adult form. And then people debated the nature of the relationship between the child and the adult.

Such ideals become the basis for making political demands. You know some of the demands made on the basis of the ideal of the individual. The history of education could, I suspect, be written in terms of the demands made on the basis of the ideal of the child.

Beyond that ideal of the child, the statement that you cannot understand anything of our time without understanding this period in history is absolutely true with regard to education. I will suggest that the whole of our contemporary educational agenda was set during this period (and it is argueable that Rousseau did most of the setting). (Reading: I am suggesting that when you read Plato you ought to begin with the prejudice that you are reading something utterly foreign. When you read Rousseau, the experience of being in familiar, fatherly hands is something you should pay attention to.) Just to suggest how modern this book is, take a glimpse at education from the other side, from the side of the teacher. Jean-Jacques says, near the end, "I am Emile's true father; I made him a man. I would have refused to raise him if I had not been the master of marrying him to the woman of his choice--that is, of my choice." (407) Jean-Jacques thinks of the couple as his personal work of art. He grows giddy with the pride of craftsmanship: "How many times, as I contemplate my work in them, I feel myself seized by a rapture that makes my heart palpitate!" (480) This reaction is but a small exaggeration of the feelings all teachers are tempted to feel with respect to their "best" students. Even if we are willing to let them go, we still want to claim a bit of their souls as our own.

From a broader perspective, consider that Rousseau has clear answers to most of today's educational questions. For example,

Class size? 1-1

Natural development is the guide to teaching (not state of nature, but natural to society)

Should teachers like students and should students like teachers?: They are going to spend their lives together and will become dear to one another.

Are they co-learners? Ha. Only one hand can hold the chisel.

Is a student's comfort a criterion for judging effective education? At one point Emile cries "hot tears."

Should education be relevant? There is no question that it must occur outside of society, but there is also no question that Emile will become capable of living in society.

How do you know an educated person? He is good, he has friends, he won't hurt others, and he holds all social forms suspect because they are likely to be harmful. The goal of Jean-Jacques, the tutor, is to "create a new, artificial man, a 'social' man,"5 a man whose education respects Nature but is also in tune with the nature of human affairs in society. The essential spirit of Rousseau's project is to ground Emile's education in Nature and to aim it toward freedom, a freedom to enter with others into social and civic association, a freedom to obey self-imposed laws.

All the terms of all modern debates about education are established at this point. And if you want to know the right answer to all educational questions, read Rousseau. "If sometimes I adopt an assertive tone, it is not for the sake of making an impression on the reader but for the sake of speaking to him as I think. Why should I propose as doubtful what, so far, as I am concerned, I do not doubt at all? I say exactly what goes on in my mind." [He could be an Evergreen student. But he, here, shows his familiarity with philosophy write large: Locke, Socrates, Descartes.]

A Personal Relationship

If we put our minds for a moment into a traditional cast, we can appreciate some of the shock inherent in Rousseau's insistence on the importance of a personal relationship. At the time of Emile's composition, an educator was usually a "preceptor." His job was to instruct pupils by means of precepts--rational, moral statements whose internalization would shape a disciplined, obedient character. Just prior to this time, education was firmly lodged in a religious tradition, and its job was to promote virtue and tame "fallen" human nature, particularly its infantile expression in children. It mattered little whether the teacher had one pupil or many; the master's posture toward his pupils would be the same--distant, stern, authoritative, an embodiment of reason, morality, and the adult world. His job was to transmit the culture and to shape the child so that he could take his place within that culture. Education's task was to replace the merely human with the moral and the good.

The Enlightenment broke with this Platonic/Christian tradition of aiming for an elevated existence (or keeping your eye on heaven while being in the world). But being a preceptor was still the dominant mode of education. The principal question was how to shape children, through education, so they could live a good life? One of the people against who Rousseau was writing was John Locke. His book on education begins, "A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this world...." Only a few paragraphs later, he is telling how to achieve, for example, "health." He advises women to consider, "that most children's constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by cockering and tenderness. The first thing to be taken care of is, that children be not too warmly clad or covered, winter or summer.... I would ... advise that [a child's] feet to be washed every day in cold water; and to have his shoes so thin, that they might leak and let in water.... He that considers how mischevious and mortal a thing, taking wet in the feet is to those, who have been bred nicely, will wish he had, with the poor people's children, gone barefoot; who by that means, comes to be so reconciled, by custom, to wet feet, that they take no more cold or harm by it, than if they were wet in their hands." No one who reads John Locke on education will ever forget his advice to mothers to make sure their children's shoes are thin so their feet will get cold so they will be tougher. There are certain precepts that, if followed, lead to the proper raising of children, and the preceptor simply advises parents and teachers correctly.

Into this tradition comes Rousseau suggesting we abandon this inhumane approach to education and create instead a personal, loving bond between student and teacher. This bond will be the bedrock, the indispensable prerequisite, for any real education at all. And Rousseau was willing to go further in cultivating this bond than anyone before or since: The tutor takes as his sole job the raising of one child from infancy to adulthood. He lives with his pupil day and night during this whole period. He dedicates his entire life to one child's education. "One would wish that the governor had already educated someone. That is too much to wish for; the same man can only give one education. If two were required in order to succeed, by what right would one undertake the first?" This is going to be intimate pedagogy.

Natural Development

In Emile, Rousseau articulates a developmental pedagogy, but in his Confessions, the first book of its kind, he made clear the connection between the effects of the world on the child and becoming an adult. In the Confessions, Rousseau discusses his childhood and shows how he received his "education" there. After 180 pages of recollections, he says, "These lengthy details of my early youth will naturally have seemed puerile, and I regret it; although born a man in certain respects, I long remained a child, and in many respects I am one still. I have never promised to introduce a great character to the public; I have promised to describe myself as I am; and in order to know me in my riper years, it is necessary to have known me well in my youth" (180). This is a new way of thinking that for us is commonplace.

Rousseau's pedagogy is thoroughly developmental and follow nature. Nature dictates a sequence of development for children. At each successive stage, the child knows the world differently, and better, than at the previous stage.

A child can only progress when he is ready.

A child knows that he is made to become a man; all the ideas he can have of a man's estate are opportunities of instruction for him; but he must remain in absolute ignorance of ideas of that estate which are not within his reach. My whole book is only a constant proof of this principle of education. (178)

Readiness cannot be rushed, even by the best tutor. For Rousseau, the scale along which development progressed is inscribed by Nature in every human being. Nature reveals when the pupil is ready to progress and Nature points out the direction of development. The tutor must take his cues only from Nature. He must always remember he is "the minister of nature" (317) and that attending closely to Nature's way is the teacher's first obligation since "everything that is not nature is against nature." (405)

Rousseau sees human beings as moving through qualitatively distinct stages of development. He organizes his book around these stages. Each of the five Books in Emile deals with a distinct stage of Emile's development. [Book I: infancy (ages 0-2) - physical care and training; Book II: childhood (ages 2-12) - education of the senses; Book III: age of reason (ages 12-15) - education of the intellect; Book IV: age of passion (puberty and adolescence, ages 15-20) - education of the passions; Book V: onset of adulthood (age 20 on) - reintegration with society, finding a proper spouse.] Each stage has its own objective-the potential which it must realize-and each has its own accompanying set of dangers. The stages do not represent an immutable lock-step plan for growth. Instead, these stages represent the way human potentials and capacities are organized; they represent the natural fact that certain capacities rely on others, that certain strengths must be more fully developed before other strengths can even begin to develop. "Each age, each condition of life, has its suitable perfection, a sort of maturity proper to it." (158) These stages of natural development have to be respected:

Nature wants children to be children before being men. If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce pernicious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting.... Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling which are proper to it. (90)

Just as Piaget, much later, would think of development in terms of greater differentiation of cognitive activity accompanied by an integration and consolidation of the differentiated cognitive structures, Rousseau urged teachers to give their pupils time to consolidate all developmental gains: "...in the career of moral ideas one cannot advance too slowly nor consolidate oneself too well at each step." (99) Each stage in its own time, is Rousseau's overarching admonition. "Dare I expose the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to gain time but to lose it." (93) Do not "force one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another." (37) "Nature's instruction is late and slow; men's is almost always premature." (215)

The worst thing you can do is assume kids are reasonable. A good educator will know that a child must be trained to reason. "The masterpiece of a good education is to make a reasonable man, and they claim they raise a child by reason! This is to begin with the end, to want to make the product the instrument." (89) In these two sentences is compressed an entire developmental pedagogy.

How do you proceed in educating the naturally developing child. "I therefore closed all the books," says Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar. "There is one open to all eyes: it is the book of nature. It is from this great and sublime book that I learn to serve and worship its divine Author." (306-7) But this attention to Nature does not keep a good educator's eyes only on God in heaven; his attention must be directed to the nature of his particular, individual pupil.

One must know well the particular genius of the child in order to know what moral diet suits him. Each mind has its own form, according to which it needs to be governed; the success of one's care depends on governing it by this form and not by another. Prudent man, spy out nature for a long time; observe your pupil well before saying the first word to him. (94)

I will leave it for discussion for you to think about the question of whether the college pays proper attention to its proper subject.

Removal from Society

Jean-Jacques battles all that lies outside of Nature, that which "mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons," that which "mutilates [the] dog, [the] horse, [the] slave," that which "turns everything upside down," "disfigures everything," that which "loves deformity [and] monsters." (37) What does all this? Society, or man in civil society.

Society is the source of all the influences that lead educators and parents to try to induce premature development in youngsters. It is society that requires Emile know his right hand from his left at an early age. It is society that demands Emile learn to add and subtract, read and write, sit still and have good manners-all prematurely.

Emile will go with his tutor to a life in the country. Emile will not be distracted by aiming to become a good citizen or a civilized man. He will have the chance to aim for happiness. In Confessions, Rousseau talks about how bad he was at fencing, but adds, "I succeeded far better in a more useful art-that of being content with my lot." There, also, his teacher will be able to teach him through example and through his character. This is not unlike the "education" Rousseau himself experienced with a woman he lived with and who became his first mistress. "She devoted herself not only to forming my judgment but also my appearance and manners in order to make me amiable as well as estimable; and, if it is true that worldly success is compatible with virtue-which for my part I do not believe-I am at least convinced that there is no other way to such an end than that which she had taken and wished to teach me. For Madame de Warrens understood mankind, and understood, in a high degree, the art of dealing with them without falsehood and without indiscretion, without deceiving or offending them. But she taught this art rather by her character than be her lessons; she knew better how to practice than explain it, and I was of all men in the world the least capable of learning it." Away from society, a pupil's teacher will watch him, educate him and eventually aim toward getting him into society.

Supervision of the Environment

Rousseau may have characterized the pedagogical art he is preaching as the "difficult art ... of governing without precepts and doing everything by doing nothing," (119) but he makes Jean-Jacques more active than this espousal of "negative" education might suggest.

Emile's main teacher is the environment he interacts with. His constraints are set by its necessity, not by the arbitrary authority of a teacher. Emile does what he wants within the limits of what his natural environment will permit. But Jean-Jacques is not above tinkering with that environment, so that the constraints it sets serve pedagogical purposes. To be the supervisor of the child's environment is one of the teacher's main pedagogical functions.

In the first place, you should be well aware that it is rarely up to you to suggest to him what he ought to learn. It is up to him to desire it, to seek it, to find it. It is up to you to put it within his reach, skillfully to give birth to this desire and to furnish him with the means of satisfying it. It follows, therefore, that your questions should be infrequent but well chosen. (179)

Rousseau was the first in our tradition to articulate the educational commonplace, "Present interest--that is the great mover, the only one which leads surely and far." (117) A teacher asks few, but well chosen questions because the natural environment he artificially constructs engages his student and teaches everything.

An astronomy lesson (169 ff.) starts with their observing the rising sun. The following paragraph, which introduces this example, shows how well Jean-Jacques follows not only the letter but also the spirit of the advice to present "objects opportunely" and to follow up with "some laconic questions."

On this occasion, after having contemplated the rising sun with him, after having made him notice the mountains and the other neighboring objects in that direction, after having let him chat about it at his ease, keep quiet for a few moments like a man who dreams, and then say to him, "I was thinking that yesterday evening the sun set here and that this morning it rose there. How is that possible?" Add nothing more. If he asks you questions, do not respond to them. Talk about something else. Leave him to himself, and be sure that he will think about it. (169)

From this beginning a lengthy but leisurely inquiry begins. Emile and Jean-Jacques hammer stakes into the ground to mark the placements of the setting and rising sun on different days and in different seasons. From the pattern of the stakes, Emile eventually works out the course of the earth's and sun's relative movements.

Later, Emile is lost in the woods and finds his way out by looking at the sun.

Raising Emile naturally does not mean Emile will become only a natural scientist. His environment has its social elements and so his inquiries must venture into the social realm. The difference between Emile and other children is that Emile's encounters with the social world will be as carefully controlled as his encounters with the course of the sun or with the stick in its bucket. In one such encounter, Jean-Jacques conspires with the gardener, Robert, to hatch a "lesson" on the meaning of "property." In this case, Jean-Jacques encourages Emile to plant and tend some beans on land that, as Emile learns only later, belongs to Robert. When Emile, one day, comes to find his carefully nurtured bean plot upturned and destroyed, he faces a social puzzle not unlike the earlier puzzle of the bent stick. Robert has destroyed Emile's beans and, when confronted with this fact, Robert tells Emile and Jean-Jacques that, in fact, they had destroyed his garden on his property where he had planted some irreplaceable "exquisite melons." A new element in this encounter is that this puzzling situation not only provokes Emile's interests, it also provokes his anguish. "Tears flow in streams. The grieving child fills the air with moans and cries." (99) This lesson in the concept of "property" makes it plain that Jean-Jacques will not ignore society in his tutoring of Emile. On the contrary, he will make Emile ready for his inevitable, painful socialization. Jean-Jacques will plant many social "seeds" in Emile so that, when it comes, the final shock of encountering society face to face is not too great for his charge.

"Let him see this necessity in things, never in the caprice of men. Let the bridle that restrains him be force and not authority." (91)

"Keep the child in dependence only on things." (85)

"One of the errors of our age is to use reason in too unadorned a form, as if men were all mind. In neglecting the language of signs that speak to the imagination, the most energetic of languages has been lost. The impression of the word is always weak, and one speaks to the heart far better through the eyes than through the ears.... Reason alone is not active. It sometimes restrains, it arouses rarely, and it has never done anything great. Always to reason is the mania of small minds. Strong souls have quite another language. It is with this language that one persuades and makes others act." (321)

Human interaction, especially between intimates, is intellectual and emotional in a way that brooks no separation. A teacher divests himself of most of his power to influence if he only engages students intellectually. To be potent, the relationship between teacher and pupil must be as emotionally rich as it is intellectually substantive. A joke, a smile, a failure to smile when expected, an encouraging word, an omitted encouraging word, any of these at the right moment with the right person may do more to shape character than the delivery of a moral precept or a properly reasoned argument.

Emile will return to society, but he will never be at home in society. At most, he will be at home with just a few friends. The ideal setting for sociality would be a moderately endowed farmyard and house. "There I would gather a society that was select rather than large, composed of friends who love pleasure and know something about it." (351) This select group would be chosen only according to "mutual attachment, agreement of tastes, suitableness of characters." (348) And among people who are "chosen ... carefully," Emile will grow to think "well of those who live with him" at the same time he is taught "to know the world so well that he thinks ill of all that takes place in it." (236-7) "If a return to nature is impossible and if society proves incorrigible, then the man who sees clearly how things are is condemned to solitude." (but solitude among a few friends).

This is very different from Plato, and not just in the scope of the project or the size of the social unit in which one can aspire to happiness. Rousseau's happy many finds happiness in opposition to society and in the common, grounded life. In Confessions, he writes about one of the men who became, in Emile, the "Savoyard Vicar." Of M. Gaime, Rousseau writes, "He put before me a true picture of human life, of which I had only false ideas; he showed me how, in the midst of contrary fortune, the wise man can always strive after happiness and sail against the wind in order to reach it; that there is no true happiness without prudence, and that prudence belongs to all conditions of life. He damped my admiration for external grandeur, by proving that those who ruled others were neither happier nor wiser than the ruled. He told me one thing, which I have often remembered since then-that, if every man could read the hearts of all other men, there would be found more people willing to descend than to rise in life." (C: 93)

The impossibility of the project

In all of his works, Rousseau can seem paradoxical. He appeals, "Common reader, pardon me my paradoxes. When one reflects, they are necessary and, whatever you may say, I prefer to be a paradoxical man than a prejudiced one." (93) His work is devoted to an elaboration of an essentially paradoxical concept, "well regulated freedom." Emile must be trained to be free. He must be educated to live and think for himself, but he will be taught by a master who is absolutely in charge.

Let him always believe he is the master, and let it always be you who are. There is no subjection so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom.... Doubtless he ought to do only what he wants; but he ought to want only what you want him to do. He ought not to make a step without your having foreseen it; he ought not to open his mouth without your knowing what he is going to say. (120)

Not only is the whole project rife with paradox; it is impossible too. By making his proposal so extreme, Rousseau forces on his readers the awareness that Emile's education is impossible. We are supposed to devote our entire professional life to teaching one child? We are supposed to give up any kind of private life in order to live constantly with this child? We are supposed to retire from society for the better part of the duration to accomplish this education? It is, in fact, worse than that. The good master would himself have to have been raised by a good master, and so on back through time.

It would be necessary that the governor had been raised for his pupil, that the pupil's domestics had been raised for their master, that all those who have contact with him had received the impressions that they ought to communicate to him. It would be necessary to go from education to education back to I know not where. How is it possible that a child be well raised by one who was not well raised himself? (50)

The whole educational project would have to be preformed or else it could not proceed.

In fact, it is worse than that. Rousseau's book, which is subtitle "On Education," is not about an education or about the education of a particular student or even about how to teach. In the same way he is not, in The Social Contract, a politician who is aiming toward running a state but he can still write a book about the nature of the state, he is not a teacher but he can still write a book about education. (We might even argue he could write a book on education only because he is NOT a teacher.)

He was not even a parent even though he fathered five children. He gave them all up to the Foundling Hospital. He says this about that decision, "If I were to state my reasons, I should say too much. Since they were strong enough to mislead me, they might mislead many others, and I do not desire to expose young people, who may read my works, to the danger of allowing themselves to be misled by the same error. I will content myself with observing, that my error was such that, in handing over my children to the state to educate, for want of means to bring them up by myself, in deciding to fit them for becoming workmen and peasants rather than adventurers and fortune-hunters, I thought that I was behaving like a citizen and father, and considered myself a member of Plato's Republic" (C: 367). Near the end of the book: "The course of action I had taken in regards to my children, however rational it had appeared to me, had not always left my heart in peace. While thinking over my On Education, I felt that I had neglected duties from which nothing could excuse me. My remorse at length became so keen that it almost extorted from me a public confession of my error at the beginning of Emile..." (C:617).

He reminds readers that if they want to teach (or, I suppose, be good parents), that is their business. He is only a writer, a dreamer. He suggests that our own intelligence, not his, will have to bear the main burden of our becoming good teachers: "If you have to be told everything, do not read me;" (137) "The reader does not expect me to despise him so much as to give him an example of every kind of study;" (182) "But, on the other hand, how many times have I declared that I did not write for people who have to be told everything?" (487, fn 6) Rousseau reminds the reader that it is he, not Rousseau, who, in the end, must do the hard work of teaching.

Rousseau would make no compromise with his actual social circumstances, which he viewed as evil, nor would he suggest a return to a state of nature, which he knew was impossible. Rousseau lived his life as a philosopher, a writer, a dreamer, a solitary walker who finally shows you nothing but his back.

Here is the way to understand Rousseau:

Fundamentally, Rousseau is a critic. Man is naturally good. Society enslaves him and makes him bad. But only society (not a return to natural goodness) has any chance of saving him. Changing society is necessary, desirable, and possible. Rousseau's books, however, contain absolutely nothing that shows you how to reach the desireable end. If you are going to think about making things better, you had better get started because you are going to have to do it all on your own. Rousseau won't help you get things right. He'll only show up when you get it all wrong the next time.