



Produced by Al Haines










Heath's Pedagogical Library--4




EMILE:

OR, CONCERNING EDUCATION


BY

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU


EXTRACTS

_CONTAINING THE PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS OF PEDAGOGY FOUND IN THE FIRST THREE
BOOKS; WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY_


JULES STEEG, DEPUTE, PARIS, FRANCE



TRANSLATED BY

ELEANOR WORTHINGTON

FORMERLY OF THE COOK COUNTY (ILL.) NORMAL SCHOOL




D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS

BOSTON -- NEW YORK -- CHICAGO




Entered, according to Act of Congress, In the year 1888, by

GINN, HEATH, & CO.,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.



Printed in U. S. A.




TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

M. Jules Steeg has rendered a real service to French and American
teachers by his judicious selections from Rousseau's Emile.  For the
three-volume novel of a hundred years ago, with its long disquisitions
and digressions, so dear to the heart of our patient ancestors, is now
distasteful to all but lovers of the curious in books.

"Emile" is like an antique mirror of brass; it reflects the features of
educational humanity no less faithfully than one of more modern
construction.  In these few pages will be found the germ of all that is
useful in present systems of education, as well as most of the
ever-recurring mistakes of well-meaning zealots.

The eighteenth century translations of this wonderful book have for
many readers the disadvantage of an English style long disused.  It is
hoped that this attempt at a new translation may, with all its defects,
have the one merit of being in the dialect of the nineteenth century,
and may thus reach a wider circle of readers.




INTRODUCTION.

Jean Jacques Rousseau's book on education has had a powerful influence
throughout Europe, and even in the New World.  It was in its day a kind
of gospel.  It had its share in bringing about the Revolution which
renovated the entire aspect of our country.  Many of the reforms so
lauded by it have since then been carried into effect, and at this day
seem every-day affairs.  In the eighteenth century they were unheard-of
daring; they were mere dreams.

Long before that time the immortal satirist Rabelais, and, after him,
Michael Montaigne, had already divined the truth, had pointed out
serious defects in education, and the way to reform.  No one followed
out their suggestions, or even gave them a hearing.  Routine went on
its way.  Exercises of memory,--the science that consists of mere
words,--pedantry, barren and vain-glorious,--held fast their "bad
eminence."  The child was treated as a machine, or as a man in
miniature, no account being taken of his nature or of his real needs;
without any greater solicitude about reasonable method--the hygiene of
mind--than about the hygiene of the body.

Rousseau, who had educated himself, and very badly at that, was
impressed with the dangers of the education of his day.  A mother
having asked his advice, he took up the pen to write it; and, little by
little, his counsels grew into a book, a large work, a pedagogic
romance.

This romance, when it appeared in 1762, created a great noise and a
great scandal.  The Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, saw in
it a dangerous, mischievous work, and gave himself the trouble of
writing a long encyclical letter in order to point out the book to the
reprobation of the faithful.  This document of twenty-seven chapters is
a formal refutation of the theories advanced in "Emile."

The archbishop declares that the plan of education proposed by the
author, "far from being in accordance with Christianity, is not fitted
to form citizens, or even men."  He accuses Rousseau of irreligion and
of bad faith; he denounces him to the temporal power as animated "by a
spirit of insubordination and of revolt."  He sums up by solemnly
condemning the book "as containing an abominable doctrine, calculated
to overthrow natural law, and to destroy the foundations of the
Christian religion; establishing maxims contrary to Gospel morality;
having a tendency to disturb the peace of empires, to stir up subjects
to revolt against their sovereign; as containing a great number of
propositions respectively false, scandalous, full of hatred toward the
Church and its ministers, derogating from the respect due to Holy
Scripture and the traditions of the Church, erroneous, impious,
blasphemous, and heretical."

In those days, such a condemnation was a serious matter; its
consequences to an author might be terrible.  Rousseau had barely time
to flee.  His arrest was decreed by the parliament of Paris, and his
book was burned by the executioner.  A few years before this, the
author would have run the risk of being burned with his book.

As a fugitive, Rousseau did not find a safe retreat even in his own
country.  He was obliged to leave Geneva, where his book was also
condemned, and Berne, where he had sought refuge, but whence he was
driven by intolerance.  He owed it to the protection of Lord Keith,
governor of Neufchatel, a principality belonging to the King of
Prussia, that he lived for some time in peace in the little town of
Motiers in the Val de Travera.

It was from this place that he replied to the archbishop of Paris by an
apology, a long-winded work in which he repels, one after another, the
imputations of his accuser, and sets forth anew with greater urgency
his philosophical and religious principles.  This work, written on a
rather confused plan but with impassioned eloquence, manifests a lofty
and sincere spirit.  It is said that the archbishop was deeply touched
by it, and never afterward spoke of the author of "Emile" without
extreme reserve, sometimes even eulogizing his character and his
virtues.

The renown of the book, condemned by so high an authority, was immense.
Scandal, by attracting public attention to it, did it good service.
What was most serious and most suggestive in it was not, perhaps,
seized upon; but the "craze" of which it was the object had,
notwithstanding, good results.  Mothers were won over, and resolved to
nurse their own infants; great lords began to learn handicrafts, like
Rousseau's imaginary pupil; physical exercises came into fashion; the
spirit of innovation was forcing itself a way.

It was not among ourselves, however, that the theories of Rousseau were
most eagerly experimented upon; it was among foreigners, in Germany, in
Switzerland, that they found more resolute partisans, and a field more
ready to receive them.

Three men above all the rest are noted for having popularized the
pedagogic method of Rousseau, and for having been inspired in their
labors by "Emile."  These were Basedow, Pestalozzi, and Froebel.

Basedow, a German theologian, had devoted himself entirely to dogmatic
controversy, until the reading of "Emile" had the effect of enlarging
his mental horizon, and of revealing to him his true vocation.  He
wrote important books to show how Rousseau's method could be applied in
different departments of instruction, and founded at Dessau, in 1774,
an institution to bring that method within the domain of experience.

This institution, to which he gave the name of "Philanthropinum," was
secular in the true sense of the word; and at that time this was in
itself a novelty.  It was open to pupils of every belief and every
nationality, and proposed to render study easy, pleasant, and
expeditious to them, by following the directions of nature itself.  In
the first rank of his disciples may be placed Campe, who succeeded him
in the management of the Philanthropinum.

Pestalozzi of Zuerich, one of the foremost educators of modern times,
also found his whole life transformed by the reading of "Emile," which
awoke in him the genius of a reformer.  He himself also, in 1775,
founded a school, in order to put in practice there his progressive and
professional method of teaching, which was a fruitful development of
seeds sown by Rousseau in his book.  Pestalozzi left numerous
writings,--romances, treatises, reviews,--all having for sole object
the popularization of his ideas and processes of education.  The most
distinguished among his disciples and continuators is Froebel, the
founder of those primary schools or asylums known by the name of
"kindergartens," and the author of highly esteemed pedagogic works.

These various attempts, these new and ingenious processes which, step
by step, have made their way among us, and are beginning to make their
workings felt, even in institutions most stoutly opposed to progress,
are all traceable to Rousseau's "Emile."

It is therefore not too much for Frenchmen, for teachers, for parents,
for every one in our country who is interested in what concerns
teaching, to go back to the source of so great a movement.

It is true that "Emile" contains pages that have outlived their day,
many odd precepts, many false ideas, many disputable and destructive
theories; but at the same time we find in it so many sagacious
observations, such upright counsels, suitable even to modern times, so
lofty an ideal, that, in spite of everything, we cannot read and study
it without profit.  There is no one who does not know the book by name
and by reputation; but how many parents, and even teachers, have never
read it!

This is because a large part of the book is no longer in accordance
with the actual condition of things; because its very plan, its
fundamental idea, are outside of the truth.  We are obliged to exercise
judgment, to make selections.  Some of it must be taken, some left
untouched.  This is what we have done in the present edition.

We have not, indeed, the presumption to correct Rousseau, or to
substitute an expurgated "Emile" for the authentic "Emile."  We have
simply wished to draw the attention of the teachers of childhood to
those pages of this book which have least grown old, which can still be
of service, can hasten the downfall of the old systems, can emphasize,
by their energy and beauty of language, methods already inaugurated and
reforms already undertaken.  These methods and reforms cannot be too
often recommended and set in a clear light.  We have desired to call to
the rescue this powerful and impassioned writer, who brings to bear
upon every subject he approaches the magical attractiveness of his
style.

There is absolutely nothing practicable in his system.  It consists in
isolating a child from the rest of the world; in creating expressly for
him a tutor, who is a phoenix among his kind; in depriving him of
father, mother, brothers, and sisters, his companions in study; in
surrounding him with a perpetual charlatanism, under the pretext of
following nature; and in showing him only through the veil of a
factitious atmosphere the society in which he is to live.  And,
nevertheless, at each step it is sound reason by which we are met; by
an astonishing paradox, this whimsicality is full of good sense; this
dream overflows with realities; this improbable and chimerical romance
contains the substance and the marrow of a rational and truly modern
treatise on pedagogy.  Sometimes we must read between the lines, add
what experience has taught us since that day, transpose into an
atmosphere of open democracy these pages, written under the old order
of things, but even then quivering with the new world which they were
bringing to light, and for which they prepared the way.

Reading "Emile" in the light of modern prejudices, we can see in it
more than the author wittingly put into it; but not more than logic and
the instinct of genius set down there.

To unfold the powers of children in due proportion to their age; not to
transcend their ability; to arouse in them the sense of the observer
and of the pioneer; to make them discoverers rather than imitators; to
teach them accountability to themselves and not slavish dependence upon
the words of others; to address ourselves more to the will than to
custom, to the reason rather than to the memory; to substitute for
verbal recitations lessons about things; to lead to theory by way of
art; to assign to physical movements and exercises a prominent place,
from the earliest hours of life up to perfect maturity; such are the
principles scattered broadcast in this book, and forming a happy
counterpoise to the oddities of which Rousseau was perhaps most proud.

He takes the child in its cradle, almost before its birth; he desires
that mothers should fulfil the sacred duty of nursing them at the
breast.  If there must be a nurse, he knows how to choose her, how she
ought to be treated, how she should be fed.  He watches over the
movements of the new-born child, over its first playthings.  All these
counsels bear the stamp of good sense and of experience; or, rather,
they result from a power of divination singular enough in a man who was
not willing to take care of his own children.  In this way, day by day,
he follows up the physical and moral development of the little being,
all whose ideas and feelings he analyzes, whom he guides with wisdom
and with tact throughout the mazes of a life made up of convention and
artifice.

We have carefully avoided suppressing the fictions of the gardener and
of the mountebank; because they are characteristic of his manner, and
because, after all, these pre-arranged scenes which, as they stand, are
anything in the world rather than real teaching, contain, nevertheless,
right notions, and opinions which may suggest to intelligent teachers
processes in prudent education.  Such teachers will not copy the form;
they will not imitate the awkward clap-trap; but, yielding to the
inspiration of the dominant idea, they will, in a way more in
accordance with nature, manage to thrill with life the teaching of
facts, and will aid the mind in giving birth to its ideas.  This is the
old method of Socrates, the eternal method of reason, the only method
which really educates.

We have brought this volume to an end with the third book of "Emile."
The fourth and fifth books which follow are not within the domain of
pedagogy.  They contain admirable pages, which ought to be read; which
occupy one of the foremost places in our literature; which deal with
philosophy, with ethics, with theology; but they concern themselves
with the manner of directing young men and women, and no longer with
childhood.  The author conducts his Emile even as far as to his
betrothal; he devotes an entire book to the betrothed herself, Sophie,
and closes his volume only after he has united them in marriage.

We will not go so far.  We will leave Emile upon the confines of youth,
at the time when he escapes from school, and when he is about beginning
to feel that he is a man.  At this difficult and critical period the
teacher no longer