Émile de Rousseau: La pédagogie, la volonté, l’independence

Abstract

Émile ou de l’Éducation (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents an ideal world within which the relationship of the teacher and the student has been changed greatly from the contemporary norm. While society at the time suggested an educational system that treats the child as if they were young learning adults and encouraged reading the classics, Rousseau suggests an environment wherein the education of the student is centered around their volition to independently increase their own epistemological understanding of the world through physical experience and play. Drawing upon the works of Enit K. Steiner and Eliyah Rosenow and their theories on the totalitarian contradictions of Rousseau’s writings, I will be analysing the Bois de Montmorency episode from book 3 in the hopes of examining the role of the student and mentor in greater detail, showing the paradoxes between Rousseau’s ideals and his philosophical actions. This presentation represents a part of a larger project in which I am examining this student-mentor relationship across multiple episodes of Emile in the hopes of further elucidating the claims of Steiner and Rosenow and continuing this discussion of an anti-utopian system of concealed control by means of environmental conditioning.