Jean-jacques rousseau education philosophy

Characteristics of modern writing such as an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection are exemplified in his final work Reveries of the Solitary Walker. His major works such as Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and The Social Contract can be seen as foundational to the modern political as well as social thoughts. As we have seen in the last module, Emile: or on Education henceforth referred to as Emile is a treatise written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the nature of jean-jacques rousseau education philosophy. It was originally written in French and was published in the year During the period of French Revolution, Emile became inspiration for the formation of a national system of education.

Emile is both political and philosophical in nature. It deals with the question of what is the relationship between an individual and the society. The book revolves around the fictional character of Emile a boy and his female counterpart named Sophie. He has a final section on the education of girls which is centered on the character of Sophie.

Needless to say the book provoked responses and criticism from both men and women of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Emile is structured as five books. These five books also stand for five developmental stages of the main character of the book. The first three books are devoted to the infancy, childhood and boyhood of the character.

The fourth one is an exploration of his youth. In the fifth and most controversial book he brings the jean-jacques rousseau education philosophy Sophie. In addition to outlining her education, Rousseau talks in detail about the civic and domestic life of Sophie in the fifth book. Thus, through the life of the fictional student Emile, Rousseau talks about how children should be trained and educated.

In it he shows how education should minimize the drawbacks of civilization and bring man as closer to nature as possible. His ideas aimed at replacing the formal education with an education that is both natural and spontaneous. The entire book is partly novelistic and partly dialectic in nature. Rousseau undertakes to describe the education of Emile in a way that is appropriate to his ideal society.

The character Emile is taken away from his parents and school and is put into the hands of a tutor. Education according to nature is an idea that finds forms the center of this work. According to him the aims of education change during different stages because the needs and interests of the child change. This in many ways is considered as the inauguration of child-centered education which became popular in the modern era.

This concept was further taken up by Pestalozzi and Froebel. The period of infancy is chiefly concerned with the physical growth, motor activities, feelings and sensory perception. All wickedness comes from weakness. Give his body constant exercise, make it strong and healthy. On the other hand, he accepted the importance of the hardening process of the body against the intemperance of season, climates, elements, hunger, thirst and fatigue.

The free and unhindered expression of the natural activities is the first education of a child. So an infant should be allowed to act on his inner impulses and he should be allowed to experience the direct results of his behavior. He recommended negative education during the stage of infancy. He criticized the then prevalent practice of swaddling children in tight clothes.

In his opinion, this prevents the child from moving his body freely. He should be taken care of by his mother and should be given adequate protection. This is an important period of human development. Rousseau proposed two principles for this stage of development. Firstly, education should be negative. Secondly, moral training should be made through natural consequences and through activities.

He heavily criticized the then existing practices of teaching and training. He threw harsh criticism against teachers for imparting education through mere reading and memorizing. The development of the senses and the ability to draw inferences from them should be given more attention. This approach, in some ways, can be taken as the predecessor of the Montessori Method.

Thus in the stage of childhood, a child should be given the freedom to develop his sense organs through experience and observation. It follows that the aim of education at this stage should be to help the child observe and experience. However, he recommends geometry to be taught during childhood. At this stage of development the strength and powers of a child is greater than his needs.

The emergence of reason is one of the key characteristics of this stage and he developed a theory around why rapid development of rational judgment happens at this stage. During the stage of infancy his needs are simple and a few and his strength is delicate. But by the time he turns twelve or thirteen, his strength develops much rapidly than his needs.

This surplus strength causes the reason to emerge. InRousseau the child was quite unknown. Rousseau had went to Paris to become a musician and voiced his strong protest against the composer. They had five In the words of R. Rousseau adopted Revolutionists afterwards did in the world of many occupations like private tutor, music politics; he made a clean sweep and teacher, composer, secretary and dramatist.

It was at the age of 38 that he became a Life History famous writer. Inhe began a series of personal adventures which are recorded in the Confessions. Inhe became music critic to the Encyclopedie four years later. He then remained busy from to in writing works of educational interest. He believed that the child was necessarily good but he was made bad when he came in touch with his society and environment.

Rousseau preached for a life according to nature which was simple, real and free from all customs, traditions and conventions. He wanted to educate the child for manhood and good citizenship. Naturalism Rousseau had typical philosophical ideology so far as his educational principles were concerned. He was born at a time when there were two classes of people in the society - the ruler and the ruled, the dominating and the dominated class.

It was in this social set up that Rousseau was born and brought up. He was neglected by his parents and the society in his childhood stage. This had given birth to a sense of revolution in his mind towards the existing social situation. He saw that the society was full of sins and immoral activities, where the sense of values did not prevail upon.

He also viewed the nature of the child from the true prospective. He had therefore totally rejected the human society which was of old and degenerated traditions, customs and social conventions that were likely to cause harm to the innate nature of the child. He maintained that nature was pure and holy because it was created by the author of God and not by men.

His thought of education may be found to be more inclined towards Idealism, but his means of education and its methods were more inclined towards Naturalism.

Jean-jacques rousseau education philosophy: Rousseau's educational philosophy emphasized educating

So, Rousseau had emerged as the most controversial philosopher in education. By negative education, Rousseau did not mean that there should be no education at all. It did not imply that Rousseau was against any education of the child. In reality, it means that there should be provision for education, very different in kind from that of the prevailing system of education.

He prescribed physical exercises from childhood because development of intellect is based on training of the senses. No habit formation: According to Rousseau, children should be given to learn from the nature rather than from the books, social rules, customs and habits. Habit formation only kills the native creative power of the child and makes him mechanical.

No formal discipline: Rousseau was totally against the authoritarian rule of the teacher and his disciplinary method. He believes that nature is the most worthy author to educate, to discipline and also to punish the child.

Jean-jacques rousseau education philosophy: The complexity of Jean Jacques Rousseau

So, the child should be disciplined according to nature and in accordance with the own natural consequences of his act. No moral education: Rousseau was of the view that no direct, moral lesson should be given to the child. Emile, or On Education The Government of Poland Julie, or the New Heloise The Social Contract Confessions Reveries of a Solitary Walker Essens Book Summaries.

Rousseau also takes this freedom to choose to act as the basis of all distinctively moral action. In Book I chapter 8 of The Social ContractRousseau tries to illuminate his claim that the formation of the legitimate state involves no net loss of freedom, but in fact, he makes a slightly different claim. The new claim involves the idea of an exchange of one type of freedom natural freedom for another type civil freedom.

Since all human beings enjoy this liberty right to all things, it is clear that in a world occupied by many interdependent humans, the practical value of that liberty may be almost nonexistent. Further, inevitable conflict over scarce resources will pit individuals against each other, so that unhindered exercise of natural freedom will result in violence and uncertainty.

The formation of the state, and the promulgation of laws willed by the general will, transforms this condition. With sovereign power in place, individuals are guaranteed a sphere of equal freedom under the law, with protection for their own persons and security for their property. Provided that the law bearing equally on everyone is not meddlesome or intrusive and Rousseau believes it will not be, since no individual has a motive to legislate burdensome laws there will be a net increase in freedom compared to the pre-political state.

On the face of it, this claim looks difficult to reconcile with the fact of majorities and minorities within a democratic state, since those citizens who find themselves outvoted would seem to be constrained by a decision with which they disagree. Many commentators have found this argument unconvincing. The picture is further complicated by the fact that he also relies on a fourth conception of freedom, related to civil freedom but distinct from it, which he nowhere names explicitly.

This hostility to the representation of sovereignty also extends to the election of representatives to sovereign assemblies, even where those representatives are subject to periodic re-election. Even in that case, the assembly would be legislating on a range of topics on which citizens have not deliberated. Laws passed by such assemblies would therefore bind citizens in terms that they have not themselves agreed upon.

Not only does the representation of sovereignty constitute, for Rousseau, a surrender of jean-jacques rousseau education philosophy agency, the widespread desire to be represented in the business of self-rule is a symptom of moral decline and the loss of virtue. The practical difficulties of direct self-rule by the entire citizen body are obvious.

Such arrangements are potentially onerous and must severely limit the size of legitimate states. It is noteworthy that Rousseau jean-jacques rousseau educations philosophy a different view in a text aimed at practical politics: Considerations on the Government of Poland. Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear that the widespread interpretation of Rousseau as rejecting all forms of representative government is correct.

One of the key distinctions in The Social Contract is between sovereign and government. The sovereign, composed of the people as a whole, promulgates laws as an expression of its general will. The government is a more limited body that administers the state within the bounds set by those laws, and which issues decrees applying them in particular cases.

In effect, while the sovereignty of the people may be inconsistent with a representative model, the executive power of the government can be understood as requiring it. Although a variety of forms of government turn out to be theoretically compatible with popular sovereignty, Rousseau is sceptical about the prospects for both democracy where the people conduct the day to day running of the state and the application of the laws and monarchy.

Instead, he favors some form of elective aristocracy: in other words, he supports the idea that the day-to-day administration should be in the hands of a subset of the population, elected by them according to merit. The first of these concerns his political pessimism, even in the case of the best-designed and most perfect republic. Just as any group has a collective will as opposed to the individual private will of its members, so does the government.

As the state becomes larger and more diffuse, and as citizens become more distant from one another both spatially and emotionally, so the government of the republic will need a proportionally smaller and more cohesive group of magistrates if its rule is to be effective. The second issue concerns how democratic Rousseau envisaged his republic to be.

He sometimes suggests a picture in which the people would be subject to elite domination by the government, since the magistrates would reserve the business of agenda-setting for the assembly to themselves. In other cases, he endorses a conception of a more fully democratic republic. For competing views of this question see Fralin and Cohen He rejects the idea that individuals associated together in a political community retain some natural rights over themselves and their property.

Rather, such rights as individuals have over themselves, land, and external objects, are a matter of sovereign competence and decision. Contemporary readers were scandalized by it, and particularly by its claim that true original or early Christianity is useless in fostering the spirit of patriotism and social solidarity necessary for a flourishing state.

In many ways the chapter represents a striking departure from the main themes of the book. First, it is the only occasion where Rousseau prescribes the content of a law that a just republic must have. Second, it amounts to his acceptance of the inevitability of pluralism in matters of religion, and thus of religious toleration; this is in some tension with his encouragement elsewhere of cultural homogeneity as a propitious environment for the emergence of a general will.

Third, it represents a very concrete example of the limits of sovereign power: following Locke, Rousseau insists upon the inability of the sovereign to examine the private beliefs of citizens. In addition, the civil religion requires the provision that all those willing to tolerate others should themselves be tolerated, but those who insist that there is no salvation outside their particular church cannot be citizens of the state.

The structure of religious beliefs within the just state is that of an overlapping consensus: the dogmas of the civil religion are such that they can be affirmed by adherents of a number of different faiths, both Christian and non-Christian. Rousseau argues that those who cannot accept the dogmas can be banished from the state. This is because he believes that atheists, having no fear of divine punishment, cannot be trusted by their fellow citizens to obey the law.

He goes even further, to suggest the death penalty for those who affirm the dogmas but later act as if they do not believe them. In the EssayRousseau tells us that human beings want to communicate as soon as they recognize that there are other beings like themselves. But he also raises the question of why language, specifically, rather than gesture is needed for this purpose.

Jean-jacques rousseau education philosophy: Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains an important

The answer, strangely enough, is that language permits the communication of the passions in a way that gesture does not, and that the tone and stress of linguistic communication are crucial, rather than its content. This point enables Rousseau to make a close connection between the purposes of speech and melody. Such vocabulary as there originally was, according to Rousseau, was merely figurative and words only acquire a literal meaning much later.

Theories that locate the origin of language in the need to reason together about matters of fact are, according to Rousseau, deeply mistaken. While the cry of the other awakens our natural compassion and causes us to imagine the inner life of others, our purely physical needs have an anti-social tendency because they scatter human beings more widely across the earth in search of subsistence.

Although language and song have a common origin in the need to communicate emotion, over time the two become separated, a process that becomes accelerated as a result of the invention of writing. In the south, language stays closer to its natural origins and southern languages retain their melodic and emotional quality a fact that suits them for song and opera.

Northern languages, by contrast, become oriented to more practical tasks and are jean-jacques rousseau education philosophy for practical and theoretical reasoning. Rousseau proposes need as the cause of the development of language, but since language depends on convention to assign arbitrary signs to objects, he puzzles about how it could ever get started and how primitive people could accomplish the feat of giving names to universals.

This is in contrast to a model of education where the teacher is a figure of authority who conveys knowledge and skills according to a pre-determined curriculum. Up to adolescence at least, the educational program comprises a sequence of manipulations of the environment by the tutor. The child is not told what to do or think but is led to draw its own conclusions as a result of its own explorations, the context for which has been carefully arranged.

Though the young child must be protected from physical harm, Rousseau is keen that it becomes accustomed to the exercise of its bodily powers and he therefore advises that the child be left as free as possible rather than being confined or constrained. From the age of about twelve or so, the program moves on to the acquisition of abstract skills and concepts.

This is not done with the use of books or formal lessons, but rather through practical experience. The third phase of education coincides with puberty and early adulthood. The period of isolation comes to an end and the child starts to take an interest in others particularly the opposite sexand in how he is regarded. At this stage the great danger is that excessive amour propre will extend to exacting recognition from others, disregarding their worth, and demanding subordination.