9 - Émile: Learning to Be Men, Women, and Citizens

Summary

In the history of the philosophy of education, Rousseau is renowned as one of the founders of what is often both admired and vilified as “progressive” education. Yet Rousseau remains the most vehement critic of the idea of progress that he so rapidly identified as having become the new received wisdom of the forces of modernity that had set themselves to overturn the authority of tradition. That he should readily and persuasively be interpreted both as a voice of liberation and of conservatism is one reason for the perennial fascination with an author whose very paradoxes have a quality of consistency throughout his apparently varied output. Within education his fame rests on his contribution to the development of “child-centred” education with its attendant emphasis on the freedom of the child to develop at its own appropriate pace and on learning by discovery rather than by forms of imposition. His belief that in education the guiding principle should be to do the opposite to what was the prevailing method of schooling has often seemed to be the inspiration of many of the radical experiments in the rearing of children over the succeeding period. Yet any examination of Rousseau's writings on education will demonstrate that this advocate of child liberation was as deeply concerned with discipline, albeit in a different manner, as the most conservative of writers.