Principles of Teaching and Learning

Rousseau’s On the Origin of the Inequality of Mankind and The Social Contract condemned social inequalities based on birth, wealth, and property.6 In the original state of nature, Rousseau asserted, people were “noble savages,” who were innocent, free, and uncorrupted by socioeconomic artificialities. Rousseau is often criticized for his personal inconsistency regarding children. Although he championed children’s rights in his books, he abandoned his own children in orphanages instead of rearing and educating them himself.

Rousseau conveyed his educational philosophy in 1762 through his novel Emile, the story of a boy’s education from infancy to adulthood.7 Rousseau’s highly controversial novel rejected the principle that education should socialize the child. Attacking the child-depravity doctrine and book-dominated education, he argued that children’s instincts and needs are naturally good and should be satisfied rather than repressed by authoritarian schools and coercive teachers. He wanted to liberate people from society’s imprisoning institutions, of which the school was one of the most coercive, in that it prepared people to accept the restrictions imposed by other institutions.

4-2a Principles of Teaching and Learning

Like Comenius, Rousseau emphasized the crucial importance of stages of human development. In Emile, he identified five developmental stages: infancy, childhood, boyhood, adolescence, and youth. Each stage is sequential, exhibiting its own conditions for readiness to learn and leading to the next stage.8 To preserve the child’s natural goodness, a tutor homeschools Emile on a country estate away from the conformity and role-playing of artificial and corrupt society and schools. Homeschooling is preferred to schools that miseducate children to follow social conventions rather than their own natural instincts.

In Rousseau’s first stage, infancy (birth to age 5), his fictional character, Emile, constructs his initial impressions about reality; he learns directly by using his senses to examine the objects in his environment.

During childhood (from age 5 to 12), Emile constructs his own personal self-identity as he learns that his actions cause either painful or pleasurable consequences. Naturally curious, Emile continues to use his senses to learn more about the world. Calling the eyes, ears, hands, and feet the first teachers, Rousseau judged learning through sensation to be much more effective than teaching children words they do not understand. The tutor deliberately refrains from introducing books at this stage so Emile will not substitute reading for direct experience with nature.

During boyhood (from age 12 to 15), Emile learns natural science by observing how plants and animals grow. He learns geography by directly exploring his surroundings rather than from studying maps. Emile also learns a manual trade, carpentry, to connect mental and physical work.

When he reaches adolescence (from age 15 to 18), Emile is ready to learn about the broader world of society, politics, art, and commerce. Visits to museums, theaters, art galleries, and libraries cultivate his aesthetic tastes. During the last stage

6Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy and the Social Contract (trans. Christopher Betts) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ethan Putterman, Rousseau, Law, and the Sovereignty of the People (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffman, Rousseau and Freedom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 7Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or on Education (includes Emile and Sophie; or the Solitaries). Christopher Kelly ed., Allan Bloom, trans. (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2009); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, with an introduction by Gerald L. Gutek (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005). For a critique of Emile by a contemporary of Rousseau, see H. S. Gerdil, The Anti-Emile: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Education against the Principles of Rousseau (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine Press, 2011). 8Christopher Winch, “Rousseau on Learning: A Re-Evaluation,” Educational Theory (Fall 1996), pp. 424–425. For a commentary on the role of parents and the state in education, see Laurence B. Reardon, The State as Parent: Locke, Rousseau, and the Transformation of the Family (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2011).