Rousseau’s Natural Child

1762

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

The Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau drew upon a variety of sources, including travelers’ reports from the Americas, to imagine the human condition prior to society. He thought that humans lived in noble simplicity in that earlier state: the natural child is born good and corrupted by society. He asked, “What type of misery there can be for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is healthy?” For Rousseau, human behavior is best guided by our emotions rather than by reason. In this, he is a forerunner of romanticism, with its emphasis on subjectivity.

The emphasis on an original human state of goodness led Rousseau to propose in The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762) that although humans are oriented to their own well-being, they also do not wish to see their fellows suffer. Social life is thus possible because of sentiment or fellow feeling, even though social life does not accord with the freedom of the individual.

Because we are born good but must live in society, Rousseau argued that education was the only route to minimize corrupting social influence and perfect our natures. Thus he became an advocate of developmentally appropriate education for children, rather than one that treated them as little adults. In his novel Émile, or On Education (1762), Rousseau divided human development into three stages, each with unique age-related characteristics. In doing so, Rousseau rejected the educational practices of his day with their emphasis on rote learning and argued instead for education based on the natural curiosity of the child. In this approach, education stimulates the mental and moral development of the child.

Rousseau’s educational model is clearly psychological. His ideas influenced the nineteenth-century educational psychologies of Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel and, through them, the innovative twentieth-century educational psychologies of Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner.

SEE ALSO Victor, the Wild Boy of Averyon (1801), Kindergarten (1840), Casa dei Bambini (1907)

An engraving of Rousseau, 1833.

Statue of Rousseau in Geneva, Switzerland.