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Daily · Philosophy

Emile, or On Education

Jean-Jacques Rousseau · philosophy, 1762·19 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version19 hrs → 50 sec
  • Nature makes children right, adults corrupt them Rousseau opens Book I flatly: God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. The whole treatise follows from that one claim about who is really at fault.
  • He attacked midwives for reshaping infant skulls He attacks midwives who rub a newborn skull into a better shape, calling it moulding the head outside by the nurse and inside by the philosopher, then says swaddled European infants are worse off than free-limbed Caribs.
  • He locks a window-breaking child in the dark When a boy smashes his room windows out of temper, Rousseau has the tutor let him feel the cold, then lock him in a windowless dark room until the child proposes the peace terms himself and is embraced for it.
  • Robinson Crusoe is the only book Emile gets Stripped to the shipwreck and the rescue, the novel becomes Emile's only library for years: he is meant to picture himself in skins with a cutlass, checking whether Crusoe made any mistake worth avoiding.
  • Conscience, not the pastor, is the true guide In the Savoyard priest's creed Rousseau writes, Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body, arguing a child should trust felt right and wrong over any pastor's doctrine.
  • The tutor hands his authority to Sophy at the wedding After coaching Sophy on keeping a husband content at home, Rousseau turns to Emile and says, To-day I abdicate the authority which you gave me; henceforward Sophy is your guardian, ending the tutorship at the wedding.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the book that invented childhood as its own stage of life rather than a defective draft of adulthood, and its Savoyard Vicar chapter got the whole work condemned and burned in Paris and Geneva within weeks of publication.

Rousseau spends five books arguing that the fastest way to ruin a child is to start teaching him too soon.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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