Adapted by Sherry Walton
from Don Finkel's workshop on The Emile
You are not required to use this study guide, though I think it will be useful for helping you clarify central concepts in Rousseau's book, The Emile.In addition, whether you use the study guide or not, you will be expected to help seminar members who read another portion of the book to also understand the portion you read. If you want to use this study guide, first read the sections for which you are responsible, making your own notes and diagrams. Then, working alone, with a partner, or a study group, try answering the questions that follow about the sections of the book you read.
3) After reading Book
I, outline the major pieces of advice Rousseau offers.
4). Rousseau is the master
of "the maxim." To get into the proper Rousseauian spirit, quickly compose,
and write down, 3 maxims which express in your own words what you presently
think are the fundamental ideas behind Rousseau's educational philosophy.
Now quickly look over your notes or highlighting, locate 3 of Rousseau's
maxims, and write them down.
2. For folks who read Books II and III.
1)Below are 6 pairs of quotes taken from Book II of Emile.Spend of few minutes thinking/talking about each pair.OR, select several quotes from the book that interest you and attempt to pair them up.What is Rousseau getting at in each pair? (unpack the quotes)What are some practical implications of the quotes?
a)The truly free man only wants what he can do and does what he pleases. (p.84)
Our unhappiness consists, therefore, in the disproportion between our desires and our faculties.A being endowed with senses whose faculties equaled his desires would be an absolutely happy being. (p. 80)
b)To suffer is the first thing he ought to learn and the thing he will most need to know. (p.78)
What, then, must be thought of that barbarous education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, which burdens a child with chains of every sort and begins by making him miserable from afar for I know not what pretended happiness . . . Men, be humane.This is your first duty . . . . Love childhood; promote its games, its pleasures, its amiable instinct . . . arrange it so that at whatever hour God summons them they do not die without having tasted life.(p. 79)
c)Keep the child in dependence only on things.(p.85)
Let him see necessity in things, never in the caprices of men.Let the bridle that restrains him be force and not authority. (p. 91)
d)The
masterpiece of a good education is to make a reasonable man, and they claim
they raise a child by reason!This
is to begin with the end, to want to make the product the instrument. (p.
89)
With each lesson that one wants to put into their heads before its proper time, a vice is planted in the depth of their hearts.(p. 92)
e)Do not give your pupil any kind of verbal lessons; he ought to receive them only from experience. (p. 92)
All the instruments have been tried save one, the only one precisely that can succeed: well-regulated freedom. (p.92)
f)Dare I expose the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of all education?It is not to gain time but to lose it. (p.93)
If
one ought to demand nothing of children through obedience, it follows that
they can learn nothing of which they do not feel the real and present advantage
in either pleasure or utility. Present interest - that is the great mover,
the only one which leads surely and far.(p.116-17)
a)Why
are Stages 1 & 2 so dangerous?
b)For Rousseau, what makes Stages 1 & 2 so different?What do you think of his contrasting advice about the use of time during these two stages?(Feel free to look back in the book - in fact, it's a very good idea!)
3) During Stage 2, Rousseau shifts from making necessity the great teacher of Emile, to making utility the teacher.The favorite question becomes ''What is that good for?" (p.179) "Up to now we have known no law other than that of necessity.Now we are dealing with what is useful.We shall soon get to what is suitable and good." (p. 167) Rousseau thus presents us with a developmental/pedagogical sequence:the necessary, the useful, the good.
a)What is it about the third stage that makes utility such a good instructor?Why is utility precededby necessity?Why is utility followed by goodness?
4) Four "lessons" are described in Book III:astronomy (p. 169 to end of example), encounter with the magician (p. 172 bottom to end of example), lost in the woods (p. 180 to end of example), and the bent stick (p. 205 to end of example).However, Rousseau makes several comments about giving such examples to the reader.
"The reader does not expect me to despise him so much as to
give him an example for every kind of study." (p.182)
"But, on the other hand, how many times have I declared that
I did not write for people who have to be told everything?" (p. 487)
"If you have to be told everything, do not read me." (p. 137)
a)Aside from expediency or natural preference of the author in the writing of the book, there is a deeper principle here for those who aspire to be teachers.What is it?Do you agree with it?
b)Now select one of the four lessons listed above.Study it carefully and pull out the general principles Rousseau is using the example to illustrate.Give a detailed look and don't stop with just the obvious principles.After the magician example, Rousseau says, "Each detail of this example is more important than it seems.How many lessons in one."Adopt this spirit as you study your choice of lessons.
c)Using the principles you extracted from the example, construct a totally new learning experience for a student in this age range (12 - 15).Follow as closely as possible the principles you arrived at in b).
5) On pages 98-99, Rousseau provides a concrete teaching example in which he teaches Emile the meaning of the concept of 'property.'Look over the example.
a)What are the general principles that lie behind this teaching example?
b)Rousseau
provides another example on page 100 in which he teaches Emile not to break
windows.Test this example against
the general principles you formulated above.Decide
whether the two examples really are examples of the same set of educational
principles (perhaps revising your list of principles as you proceed.)
3.
For folks who read Books IV and V.
There are three interconnected
concepts we need to understand to see the great perils of Stage 4.They
are: weakness, passion, and imagination.
1)Read the quotes below or find similar ones that interest you (not all these quotes are in books IV and V but they address the central concepts of these books.)Work out the interconnected meanings and relationships of weakness, passion, and imagination in the quotes.
a)All wickedness comes from weakness.The child is wicked only because he is weak.Make him strong; he will be good.(p.67)
b)From where does man's weakness come?From the inequality between his strength and his desires.It is our passions that make us weak, because to satisfy them we would need more strength than nature gives us. (p.165)
c)Our passions are the principal instruments of our preservation.It is, therefore, an enterprise as vain as it is ridiculous to want to destroy them - it is to control nature, it is to reform the work of God. (p. 212)
d)Our natural passions are very limited.They are the instruments of our freedoms . . .(p. 212)
e). . . for only by the fire of the imagination are the passions kindled. (p. 135)
f)Nature's instruction is late and slow; men's is almost always premature.In the former case the senses wake the imagination, in the latter the imagination wakes the senses; it gives them a precocious activity which cannot fail to enervate and weaken individuals first and in the long run the species itself. (p. 215)
2) To understand Rousseau's ideas regarding this stage, and, in fact, the entire education of Emile, we need to get clear on the tricky and subtle distinction between 'amour de soi' and 'amour-propre.'Both of these French phrases translate as 'self-love,' but Bloom translates only the first one as self-love and always leaves the second one untranslated, using the French phrase itself.
Some
of the passages in the text where Rousseau discusses these two ideas and
their relationship can be found on the following pages:
Page 92 bottom and next page, see also footnote 17 on p. 483-4Page 212 bottom to top of 213Page 213 bottom to top of 214Page 252 bottom to top of 253See also the helpful discussion by Bloom in the Introduction
Using these passages in the text, clarify the two terms and work out the difference and the connection Rousseau sees between them.In the course of doing this work, try to pull in concrete examples of both kinds of self-love from your own personal experience.
3) As a result of new challenges heralded by the onset of the passions (puberty) during this stage, Rousseau announces, "it is therefore time to change method." How does Rousseau change method?
4) Read aloud the final paragraph in quotes on page 186.Rousseau calls these words 'the specious maxims which guide the false prudence of fathers . . ." (p. 187)He concludes:"to get to know man, how many things must be known before him.Man is the last study of the wise, and you claim to make it a child's first.'"(p. 187)
a)Why does Rousseau make this surprising claim? Do you agree with his claim?
5) Diagram Rousseau's vision of the roles of men and women and their relationship.What do you think of his vision? Of his argument?