“You
will never succeed in making wise men if you do not first make little imps of
mischief.”
It is the
300th anniversary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s birth, and his home
city of Geneva has decided to bury the hatchet.
Well, mostly. Exhibits around the
city honor his legacy, but I did notice one video series titled “Blame It On
Rousseau.” Curious to know more about
this object of admiration and scorn, I decided to revisit his treatise on
education, Emile. After reading it, I too have mixed
feelings about the hometown hero.
He’s an
easy target. First off, the hypocrite
argument. Rousseau wrote a 500-page book about how
to bring up an ideal child, but he dropped all five of his actual offspring off
at an orphanage. No way of sugar-coating
that. Then, the idealist argument. His teacher-student ratio of 1:1 extending
all the way to Emile’s marriage has been called impractical to the point of
insane. Rousseau is defiant in the face of this criticism. He knows some will say, “This is not so much
a treatise on education as the visions of a dreamer with regard to education,”
and replies, “What can I do?...Why should I profess to suggest as doubtful that
which is not a matter of doubt to myself?
I say just what I think.” While
this self-confidence is inspiring, unfortunately, much of what he thinks is
downright embarrassing, which brings us to argument three: just plain wrong. His opinion on reading – “the curse of
childhood” – is unlikely to be revived today, and in the spirit of his own
willful denial, I will ignore every mention of women in the book.
But, enough
Rousseau-bashing. What I mean to say in
this post in that fully enmeshed with the most ridiculous aspects of this text
are powerful pedagogical ideas that undergird our best educational practices
today. And it was Rousseau’s naïve, stubbornly idealistic vision that made this
so. Revisiting them was, for me, invigorating,
and a reminder of why it is good, sometimes, to step outside the realm of the
probable, and think about the remotely possible. Below, I’ve chosen four ways in which Rousseau
was right then, and is right now.
1.
The
purpose of education is to prepare people to live good lives.
Not to
prepare workers, or thinkers, but to develop happy, engaged people. Well, okay, he would say men. He writes, “There is only one science for
children to learn – the duties of man.”
And what does this mean? Rousseau
would have the first several years of school be phys ed (“What! Is it nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life
long.”) and science experiments. As the
child becomes a teenager, he could take on a trade that helped him to feel
engaged. Learning a trade is not a way
of avoiding higher thinking, but of creating a healthy balance. He writes of Emile at this stage, “While he
fancies himself a workman he is becoming a philosopher.” The purpose of this slow and student-led
introduction to the world is that the student may discover her own talents and
interests, and then pursue them.
There is
never, in Emile, a mention of any
specific curriculum that completes an education. And god forbid the student becomes
“cultured”! For Rousseau, many
pleasantries and customs of the elite are superficial masks, hiding a lack of
virtue or learning. (#unemployedandovereducated). So what’s Rousseau’s “actionable
objective”? His fundamental maxim is:
“That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what
he desires.” That man is…wait for
it…happy! What would a school look like
that made this its fundamental goal?
2.
Children
should be anxious to learn.
Teachers
like to say they want to instill a “love of learning.” That sounds really nice, but Rousseau has a
better idea. He wants children to feel
anxious when they don’t understand something.
Here’s a lovely example. He imagines
being on a morning walk with Emile, and letting the child chatter freely about
the sunrise.
“Keep
quiet for a few minutes as if lost in thought and then say ‘I think the sun set
over there last night, it rose here this morning. How can that be?’ Say no more; if he asks questions, do not
answer him…Let him alone, and be sure he will think about it. To train a child to be really attentive so
that he may be really impressed by any truth of experience, he must spend
anxious days before he discovers the truth.”
The idea here is to situate a child within a problem that
they want to solve – a sort of mental foe that annoys them until they have
conquered it. He would not, for example,
have Emile practice geometry inside, but rather asks Emile how he might reach
peaches growing on a tree, and then leaves his student to mull it over. He is not hoping to instill a love of the
problem, but a desire to escape from ignorance.
This is why Emile is allowed to say “I don’t know,” but only if it
inspires an investigation. Rousseau
understands that “I don’t know” when given as an answer is a convenient means
of avoidance, and the dulling of the anxious desire to understand.
What does
it take to foster this “need to know”?
Rousseau says knowledge. “It is
knowledge,” he says, “that makes us curious.”
Completely ignorant people are not anxious to know more, because they do
not know there is more to know. These
are the type of people who can blithely say “I don’t know,” and move on with
their days.
But,
importantly, we cannot care about things that do not concern us. That is why, introduced too early, an
onslaught of information can leave a child disinterested in education. However, if information is portioned so as to
provide a balance of challenge and success, Rousseau is confident any student
will want to move forward. He asks, “Is
there a mind so dead that…has never said in his pride, ‘How much have I already
done, how much more may I achieve?’”
3.
Lesson-planning
is all about timing, and then letting go.
Rousseau,
in all probability, would have been a terrible teacher. He was petulant, overly sensitive, and had a
weakness for long-winded tangents. But
he would have been a remarkably savvy lesson planner.
His first
rule was to limit the information on the table in a given lesson. Vocabulary should be limited to what the
child can actually understand and therefore use functionally. He writes, “Let the child’s vocabulary…be
limited; it is very undesirable that he should have more words than ideas, that
he should be able to say more than he thinks.”
When the material is not within the student’s ability to actually use,
the challenge becomes to memorize and parrot, rather than synthesize and
create.
The next
step is to try and bridge the link between images and ideas, which is to take
the raw material of information and to begin to form judgments with it. He writes:
“Before
the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this
difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects,
while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations. An image when it is recalled may exist by
itself in the mind, but every idea implies other ideas. When we image we merely perceive, when we
reason we compare. Our sensations are
merely passive, our notions or ideas spring from an active principle which
judges…In the sensation the judgment is purely passive; it affirms that I feel
what I feel. In the percept or idea the
judgment is active; it connects, compares, it discriminates between relations
not perceived by the senses.”
And,
finally, crucially, before students make the leap between images and ideas,
Rousseau pleads with teachers to stop talking.
He writes:
“If you
talk much you will say little, for at last no one will listen to you…I do not
like verbal explanations. Young people
pay little heed to them, nor do they remember them. Things! Things! I cannot repeat it too often. We lay too much stress upon words; we
teachers babble, and our scholars follow our example.”
Rousseau unfortunately never learned to follow his own
advice, but it is good advice nonetheless.
The learning happens in that silent space, because if your student is
anxious to learn she will begin to ask questions. And that is when you have her in pedagogical
checkmate. Here’s Rousseau: “Your questions should be few and
well-chosen, and as he will always have more questions to put to you than you
to him, you will always have the advantage and will be able to ask all the
oftener, ‘What is the use of that question?’”
Beauty.
4.
To
prevent bias, teach facts.
Rousseau
spent his last years on the run largely because of the religious ideas in Book
IV of Emile, in which he proposes
that no good God would reveal Himself to some and not others, and so students
should not be culturally indoctrinated with the nearest local religion, but
allowed to discover spirituality at their own pace and decide for themselves
(#secretUUs). This idea extends beyond
religion. He seemed to know any generation
is wrong about some things, and was concerned to avoid passing along the
mistaken opinions of any given age.
Therefore,
Rousseau shunned teaching opinions, and promoted teaching only facts. He writes, “Facts! Facts! And let him decide
for himself; this is how he will come to know mankind. If he is always directed by the opinion of
the author, he is only seeing through the eyes of another person, and when
those eyes are no longer at his disposal he can see nothing.” Rousseau took this idea pretty far. In another section, he writes, “As a general
rule – never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is
impossible to show the thing itself.” I
like this idea – give the child the raw materials and let her build
understanding, and inevitably, her own judgments. Indeed, that is how Rousseau views the
student’s primary task: “No man is free from a man’s first duty; no one has a
right to depend on another’s judgment.”
In this, at
least, Rousseau had a rare moment of personal integrity. For all his faults, Rousseau was a man who
gathered his own facts, and trusted in his own judgments. In his lifetime, this did not win him
popularity. He was ostracized and
publicly heckled. In Geneva, his books
were burned. Yet today, his statue
stands in the middle of the city, and guidebooks boast of the connection. Here, perhaps, is the most important lesson
Rousseau has for our students: Observe
the world carefully, and then trust yourself.
