Jean Jaques Rousseau

• In the same year (1762), he published Emile, or On Education. It was banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned.
• He considered it his “best and most important” work, and it inspired a new approach to education in France.
• In The Social Contract he identifies the idea of the ‘natural man’: that we are born with innate human goodness.
• He believed that man was born with the potential for goodness and argued that civilization, with its envy and self-consciousness, has made men bad
• Emile focuses on the relationship between the individual and society: how the individual might retain this innate human goodness when faced with the corrupting influence of wider society.
• It begins “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
• Book 2 of Emile deals with the way a child first interacts with the world. Rousseau believed that at this phase the education of children should be derived less from books and more from the child's interactions with the world, with an emphasis on developing the senses, and the ability to draw inferences from them.
• This idea of nature as an educator fed into Romantic ideas of the power of nature as a way of experiencing and making sense of the world.
• In part 4 of Emile Rousseau says that men and women should be educated differently and says that women should be “passive and weak”, “put up little resistance” and are “made specially to please man.”
• This was met with heavy criticism from Mary Wollstonecraft, who dedicated a significant portion of her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to attacking Rousseau’s views on this.