on Rousseau

what was truly original

was his claim that each person has a unique temperament that

needs freedom to flourish. His concern was not with methods of instruction

but with its purpose. Plenty of writers had criticized the

mindless memorization and brutal discipline of conventional teaching.

The historian Gibbon, for example, wrote bitterly, "A school is the cavern

of fear and sorrow. The mobility of the captive youths is chained to

a book and a desk ... They labor, like the soldiers of Persia, under the

scourge." But the usual solution was only palliative, recommending reforms

whose goal was still to produce docile members of society. John

Locke in his influential Thoughts Concerning Education stressed the

malleability of young minds, which resembled "white paper or wax, to

be molded and fashioned as one pleases," and he placed heavy emphasis

on discipline. "Those that intend ever to govern their children should

begin it whilst they are very little, and look that they perfectly comply

with the will of their parents. Would you have your son obedient to you

when past a child? Be sure then to establish the authority of a father as

soon as he is capable of submission, and can understand in whose power

he is." Recommendations like these seemed self-evidently correct not

just to conservatives but to progressive thinkers too, including Mme

d'Epinay, who wrote a didactic treatise of her own called Letters to My

Son, in which she argued for rigorous discipline.

In Rousseau's view it was a disastrous mistake to teach children to

fear authority. He held that the only power they should face was brute

necessity, the obstacles to freedom that are inherent in the very nature of

things. They would then choose their actions because they understood

what needed to be done, not to please adults or to escape punishment.

Locke recommended influencing children by alternating doses of "esteem

and disgrace," but Rousseau wanted to protect his imaginary child

from the pressure of other people's expectations. His intention was to

show how a person might prepare for life in society without sacrificing

integrity, "seeing with his own eyes, feeling with his own heart, and

governed by no authority except his own reason." In another formulation,

"He is a savage made to live in cities"; or again, "He is not the man

of man but the man of nature."

As for the usual content of education, Rousseau held that it was

worth having but was not an end in itself, and he challenged conventional

pedagogy with insights that have been renewed and forgotten by

every subsequent educational estabiishment. Like Socrates, he believed

that true knowledge flowed from asking questions, not from memorizing

answers. "I am teaching my pupil an art that is very long, very painful,

and assuredly not what your pupils have, the art of being ignorant

... You impart knowledge, well and good; I am concerned with the

means of acquiring it." Underlying the entire work was the insight that

had burst upon Rousseau on the road to Vincennes. As he ringingly declared

at the beginning of Emile - all of his books are remarkable for

memorable opening sentences - "Everything is good as it comes from

the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands

of man."

Years after Emile became a success, Rousseau restated his position

more fully: "This book ... is simply a treatise on the natural goodness of

man intended to show how vice and error , are foreign to his constitution,

invade it from outside, and imperceptibly alter it." Traditional religious

teaching held that each person enters the world already infected

by sin and needs to be forcibly shaped into a moral agent. Enlightenment

theory held that each person enters the world a blank slate-

Locke's famous tabula rasa - waiting to be written on by sensory experience

and by parents and teachers. Rousseau believed that each person

enters the world with a disposition that needs to grow according to its

own nature. The child has much to learn, but only if he learns it in his

own way, and most of what usually passes for education is counterproductive.

"Dare I expound the greatest, most important, and most useful

rule in all of education? It is not to gain time but to lose it."

Most compelling of all in Emile is the deep note of sadness over the

waste in life and the insistence that education shouldn't make it worse.

"How rapidly.we pass our time on this earth!" Rousseau exclaims. "The

first quarter of life flows away before we know what to do with it, and

the last quarter after we have ceased to enjoy it. At first we don't know

how to live, soon we're no longer able to, and in the space that separates

these two useless extremes, three-quarters of our time is consumed by

sleep, labor, pain, constraint, and distress of every kind. Life is short, not

so much because it lasts such a short time as because we have almost

none of that time to enjoy it." Close to half of the children born in the

eighteenth century died before reaching adulthood, and their all too

brief existence was being poisoned by needless constraint and beatings

(a tutor in Fielding's Tom Jones is expressively named Thwackum).

"Even ifI were to suppose that this education had reasonable objectives,

how can one see without indignation the poor unfortunates subjected to

an intolerable yoke and condemned to continual labor like galley slaves,

with no assurance that so much effort will ever do them any good? The

age of gaiety goes by amidst tears, punishments, threats, and slavery."

To encourage Emile to think for himself, the tutor presents him with

a series of covertly orchestrated challenges. When he figures out how

to grow beans, he is in raptures over his achievement, but is thunderstruck

afterward when the family gardener rudely wrecks hishandiwork.

Robert, the gardener, then explains that when Emile was digging

he unknowingly ruined a crop of melons, and from this blunder he

learns the value of private property. The point is that children need to

grasp ethical principles through concrete experience, something very

different from memorizing verbal formulas. "It is easy to put into their

mouths words such as kings, empires, wars, conquests, revolutions, and

laws, but when it becomes a question of attaching distinct ideas to these

words, it will be a long distance from the conversation with Robert the

gardener to all of these explanations."

On another occasion Emile is astounded when a conjurer gets a

floating wax duck to follow a piece of bread in his hand. After he returns

home, the tutor helps him make a duck of his own and explains

the mystery by demonstrating what happens if a magnet is hidden inside.

There must have been a magnet in the duck and a piece of metal in

the bread. Swollen with pride at his own cleverness, Emile hurries back

to the conjurer, whom he publicly embarrasses by duplicating the trick

with some bread of his own that contains metal. "The boy cries out and

shivers with pleasure. The clapping and acclamation of the crowd make

him dizzy and he is beside himself." But the lesson is not over. The next

time Emile shows up, the duck inexplicably recoils from his bread, but

responds with alacrity to the conjurer's bare hand and even to the sound

of his voice. The crowd jeers, and Emile returns home baffled and humiliated.

Invited by the tutor, the conjurer drops by to explain how it

was done: he had an accomplice hidden under the table with a powerful

magnet of his own. The experience teaches Emile "how many mortifying

consequences are attracted by the first movement of vanity," and he

has thus learned two things at once, the principle of magnetism and the

principle that pride goes before a fall.

When Emile learns to reason, then, it is in the context of immediate

self-interest. Whereas writers on education normally thought of children

as rational beings, Rousseau put emotions first, suggesting that the

age of nature lasted until the age of twelve and that the age of reason

did not begin until then. Since children are necessarily self-centered,

they keep on pushing until they get what they want, and they need to

learn that limits are imposed by existence itself, not just by the arbitrary

decrees of adults. Rousseau describes another boy, more willful than

Emile, who would insist on going for walks whenever it was most inconvenient

for his tutor. The solution was to let him go off by himself,

whereupon he got lost, was jeered at by passersby, and became seriously

scared. An accomplice of the tutor's, following to make sure the boy

came to no harm, then brought him home chastened and repentant.

Such a scenario is obviously manipulative, especially when Rousseau

adds that the neighbors had all been coached to play their parts. At

times the tutor's satisfaction at his power almost deserves to be called sadism;

Starobinski does call it that. But manipulativeness is the point.

Growing up in society, no one can possibly live as a natural man, and

the tutor's role is to create artificial situations in which Emile will develop

properly without realizing it, just as the servants at Clarens believe

they are following their own wishes when they carry out Wolmar's.