However, immediately following the passage from Emile quoted above, Jean-Jacques indicates that he is no mere idealist he realizes that the child born into a highly structured society (like those of mid-eighteenth-century Europe) cannot remain in the state of nature. However, Jean-Jacques does not depict the process by which the blank sheet, or tabula rasa, is written on as a felicitous one: as soon the child begins the artificial (rather than “natural”) process of being “trained” in “the hands of man,” the child “degenerates” from a state of original goodness. Here as elsewhere, Emile echoes John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which argues that the mind does not possess innate ideas but instead resembles a blank sheet of paper on which impressions, and ideas deriving from them, are inscribed (121). At the beginning of Emile, the narrator Jean-Jacques (not to be identified with Rousseau the writer, as we will see) declares: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of” God, “the Author of things everything degenerates in the hands of man,” who “wants nothing as nature made it, not even man for him, man must be trained like a school horse” (37). Obsessed with origins, Emile in many ways follows from Rousseau’s 1755 work Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, which imagines a “state of nature” in which humans originally lived, so as then to identify how inequalities of wealth and power were instituted as a result of the process of “civilization.” Similarly, Emile seeks to pinpoint the moment at which children are first instructed in the social norms that will regulate their lives. Instead of resolving this contradiction by providing a tidy pedagogical formula, however, Emile asks to be read ironically, such that it reveals the ideal driving much thinking about education, in the Enlightenment and in post-Enlightenment modernity, to be unattainable, and even a danger. Emile poses as a treatise laying out a scheme for a new form of “natural” education designed both to shield children from this corruption and to prepare them for their inevitable entry into the social realm where it prevails. In Emile, Rousseau argues that the spread of “civilization” has not made human society more perfect but has instead corrupted it.

Rousseau’s work Emile: or On Education (1762) is concerned, like all of his major writings and like those of many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, with an inquiry into the notion of “progress” and the “perfectibility” of humankind.

The Geneva-born philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) has had a significant influence on thinking about childhood and education from the later eighteenth century until the present.

The emile of jean jacques rousseau