Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and grew up motherless. He received no systematic education; instead his father provided him with various kinds of lectures. Sent to an engraver to learn a profession, Rousseau ran away in 1728 to Turin and later France. In France he pursued his self-education, supported by a noblewoman. Rousseau was a man of many professions and many failures. He acquired his first public recognition as a musicologist and composer. In his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the sciences and the arts [1750/1751]) he criticized the conviction of the Enlightenment that knowledge and science would bring progress to mankind. In 1755 he published his Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the origin and the foundations of inequality among men). Because of his wayward opinions, difficult character, and a supposed persecution complex, Rousseau more and more came into conflict with other intellectuals, among them his friend Denis Diderot, his lifelong enemy Voltaire, his later defender David Hume, and even French musicians. In 1761 Rousseau's novel Julie, ou laNouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise) was a best-seller in Paris and made him popular all over Europe. A year later Du contrat social (The Social Contract) was published, and a year later Émile, ou Traité de l'éducation (Émile, or A Treatise on Education) appeared. Both works were banned and burned in public, both in Catholic France and in Calvinist Geneva. To make things worse, Voltaire accused Rousseau of severe neglect of his wife and children in the pamphlet Sentiments de citoyen (Sentiments of a citizen [1764]). Rousseau wrote several apologies, including Lettres écrites de lamontagne (Letters written from the mountain [1764]). Condemnation of Rousseau's publications, especially of Émile, forced him to flee to Switzerland in 1762 and to England in 1766, where Hume gave him shelter. Rousseau returned to France the following year under a false name–Jean-Joseph Renou. In the last years of his life he wrote his Les Confessions and two other autobiographical works: Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. Dialogues (Rousseau, judge of Jean-Jacques. Dialogues [1775]) and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (The reveries of a solitary walker [1776]). He died July 2, 1778 in Erenonville, France.

Ideas

Today Rousseau is considered one of the pivotal figures in the history of education and of childhood. More specifically, he is credited with the discovery of the distinctive character of the unique viewpoint of the child; the modern practice of educating in accordance with nature; the recognition of the child as a valuable person; and the cult of emotion–that is, that emotion is central in life and for learning–and the importance of the child's internal motivation. This image of the romantic Rousseau led to the conviction that Rousseau is one of the founding fathers of anti-authoritarian education. This interpretation is supported by the first three books of Émile. Here, indeed, the child grows up as an isolated individual with an uncorrupted nature and without any intervention by the educator. The educator safeguards the child from social influences (negative education), for nature is good and perfect, whereas society can only bear evil. Rousseau describes the developmental stages of the child's inner nature and the way the child learns from the external nature (natural education, or education "by things").

However, this picture is incomplete and presents a rather superficial comprehension of Rousseau's work. The central problem of Rousseau is that man is not only an individual, but that he is also condemned to live in society. Man's original and benevolent nature (natural state) is an intellectual experiment, a theoretical construction, not a reality. Central to Rousseau's philosophy is how man can cope with the break between nature and society, between individuality and sociality, between humankind and citizenship, and remain happy. Émile has to learn to function in society. This is the theme of the two last books of Émile, which deal mainly with the problem of Émile's relationship with another character, Sophie. Through negative education, the educator earns the confidence of the child; this trust is used to urge the child toward the goal of virtuousness.

In accordance with this social education are Rousseau's proposals for the organization of public education in Corsica and Poland. According to Rousseau, the gap between individual and public education is bridged by moral education: the education of virtue. The key feature of this education is self-limitation: if man wants to approach the (imaginary) happiness of the natural order, then he has to limit his desires (vouloir ) to his power and ability (pouvoir ). However, virtuousness is always threatened by the social condition of man. It is not surprising that Rousseau planned to write another novel in which the fate of Sophie and Émile would be described as a continuous and vain battle for virtuousness. The struggle for virtue is also the main theme of Rousseau's other educational novel–Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. Contrary to Émile, the protagonist here is a girl and the educational setting is the family.

Influence

The impact of Rousseau on educational theory cannot be underestimated. Rousseau romanticized the idea of childhood. Indeed, according to Rousseau, the main educational question should not be how to bring the child as fast as possible to adulthood, but rather how to do justice to the specificity of childhood. The characteristics of childhood, according to Rousseau, are the features of "natural man." Just like man in the original condition, the child is not yet corrupted by society. As such, childhood is linked with the promise of a perfect world and the possibility to make mankind better. Rousseau therefore argued that the child be kept away from society as long as possible, so that the child can develop according to his or her own needs and in accordance with nature.

This image of the child as inherently good has inspired a number of romantic educational theories. For example, Friedrich Froebel's founding of the kindergarten system is a practical translation of Rousseau's idea of education. Kindergarten is an isolated and safe place where children, as young as possible, can develop without being disturbed by adults. In this natural condition the educator is only stimulating the child by things, which in turn stimulate the child's innate possibilities. Rousseau inspired also the English romantic poet William Wordsworth and the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who refers explicitly to Rousseau in his educational writings, established a school (Yasnaya Polyana School) for peasant children on his estate between 1859 and 1862.

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Rousseau's idea of childhood was revisited through many educational experiments labeled as éducation nouvelle in France and reformpedagogik in Germany. The Swedish social reformer Ellen Key, whose Barnetsarhundrade (1900; Century of the child, 1909) is about the natural rights of the child, forever linked Rousseau with the art of education. In the second half of the twentieth century the anti-authoritarian movement and its pedagogy claimed to be the real inheritors of the ideas of Rousseau by stressing the idea of the original goodness of the child, as exemplified by A. S. Neill's Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960).

This reception, however, is mostly one-sided and historically problematic. In the first place, contrary to the romantics (e.g., Froebel, Wordsworth), Rousseau was very much opposed to imagination as a key feature of childhood and education. According to Rousseau, imagination is a social dynamic that causes unhappiness and as such is not an element of the natural state of man and childhood. In the second place, there are a number of individuals who have put forth educational theories–including the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Johann Friedrich Herbart and the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi–that do not cultivate a romantic image of the child even though these individuals claim to be inheritors of Rousseau's ideas. Instead of cultivating the idea of the original goodness of the child, they are inspired by Rousseau's insight that children have to become adults and have to function in a society, and that the educator has to make use of the child's naïveté to impose moral principles and social skills.

Currently in educational historiography, Rousseau is recognized for exploring and rejecting several educational ideas. What is more, there is a growing awareness that in Rousseau's philosophy several contradictory traditions of educational thought come together. Given that Rousseau used the ideas of Plato, Quintilian, FranÇois de Salignac de La Mothe-FÉnelon, John Locke, and many others, his own contradictions are understandable.