Emile; or On Education - Softcover

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140445633 ISBN 13: 9780140445633

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1991

Synopsis

In his pioneering treatise on education the great French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) presents concepts that had a significant influence on the development of pedagogy in the eighteenth century, and yet many of his ideas still sound radical today. Written in reaction to the stultifying system of rote learning and memorization prevalent throughout Europe at the time, Emile is a utopian vision of child-centered education, full of the sentiments of Romanticism, a movement that Rousseau inspired.

Imagining a typical boy named Emile, Rousseau creates an ideal model of one-on-one tutelage from infancy to manhood with himself as the child's mentor. As in so many of his other famous works, here, too, Rousseau asserts his main thesis that human beings are by nature good; it is only the distorting influences of civilization that have corrupted them.

About this title

About the Author

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU was born in Geneva in 1712. His remarkable novel La nouvelle Héloise (1761), met with immediate and enormous success. In this and in Émile, which followed a year later, Rousseau invoked the inviolability of personal ideals against the power of the state and the pressures of society. The crowning achievement of his political philosophy was The Social Contract, published in 1762. That same year he wrote an attack on revealed religion, the Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard. He was driven from Switzerland and fled to England where he only succeeded in making an enemy of Hume and returned to his continental peregrinations. In 1770 Rousseau completed his Confessions. His last years were spent largely in France where he died in 1778.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140445633
• ISBN 13: 9780140445633
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512