future or a figment of fiction, he asks himself how to endure the natural man in the actual conditions of existing society.
Originality of ‘Émile’s’ Educational Theory
It has indeed often been doubted whether this man who, on his own admission, was a second-rate teacher and an unworthy father, was qualified to speak on education. Others, more straightforwardly, have condemned the Utopian and artificial character of his work. ‘I have read your romance on the subject of education,’ wrote one female correspondent; and in the Preface Rousseau himself fully expects to be told that ‘this is not so much a treatise on education as the visions of a dreamer with regard to education.’ The obvious reply to this must be that no intelligent person accepts Rousseau’s teaching in its literal sense; it is only necessary to recall his own retort to an admirer who took credit for educating his son on the lines suggested in Émile: ‘Good heavens! so much the worse for you, sir, and so much worse still for your son.’ The fact is that Émile should be read as a speculation on principles, not as a guide to practical methods. Those parts of the book which seem artificial or fantastic are usually no more than the romantic and impassioned rendering of an original theory in Rousseau’s characteristic style.
It is a fact, however, that his passion for truth and hatred of prejudice frequently bordered on an obsession. ‘Take the opposite course to that prescribed by custom,’ he wrote, ‘and you will almost always do right.’ We may doubt whether this blind approach is sound. His opponents are still more doubtful of his confidence in Nature; they question whether his conviction that ‘there is no original perversity in the human heart’ can really be upheld. At all events, it must be borne in mind that this unreasoning assertion is linked, in his doctrine, with an extremely fertile intuition, viz. that the whole duty of education is to discover human nature, particularly as it exists in the child, and be guided by its dictates. ‘We know nothing of childhood,’ he writes in the Preface; and later on: ‘We receive education from nature, from men, or from things… Now of these three modes of education the first depends in no way on ourselves… it is towards this, to which we can contribute nothing, that we must direct the other two.’ This means to say that from the biological as well as from the psychological point of view, the educator must consider the child as a little human animal destined for the spiritual and moral life; and this animal develops according to certain laws whose natural progression must be respected above all. Rousseau would fain liken the pedagogue to a stock-breeder whose first aim must be to keep contact with physiological reality. But he neglected to follow up his thesis with sufficient observation. In particular, the three stages of development mentioned in his treatise—purely physical and sensory up to the age of twelve, intellectual from twelve to fifteen, and moral from fifteen onward—appear to
