Emile: On Education

The iconic tutor takes an oath to guide and instruct his pupil until he becomes a man. His purpose is to help the child learn not the dreary scholarship and social niceties taught to most high-born children but the more vigorous lessons imparted by the natural world. The purpose of this instruction is to develop in the student the traits of self-reliance, curiosity, and inventiveness which will afford him the freedom and independence of mind he would not acquire under the standard educational system. Rousseau sometimes inserts himself directly into Emile as the tutor, especially in Book 5, when he undertakes the difficult task of helping his student make his way safely through the dangers of the social passions. 

For the most part, Rousseau treats his tutor and pupil as generic characters, but he also imagines a specific child, Emile, who serves as an example of how a boy might properly grow up over time. Following along with Emile on his adventures, the reader becomes emotionally involved in his progress. This narrative tactic brings Rousseau’s philosophical ideas on education to life.

Emile studies nature and grows strong under its tutelage; his reflexes become sharp, his wit quick, his mind logical. Emile’s skills multiply until he can take care of himself in almost any situation. He has childhood friends but otherwise is not dependent on people for his happiness; this inures him to the need for approval or glory, and in later years he can navigate the social whirl with equanimity.

Emile finally awakens to his social passions and begins a search for a wife. Guided by Rousseau the tutor, Emile will find his heart’s desire in a young woman named Sophy.

Based on a real person—who dies tragically when her social education takes a wrong turn—Sophy is well brought up, pretty, bright, lively, well mannered, and a devoted helpmate to her mother and family. Sophy is, for Rousseau, an ideal of the young woman who knows her place at her man’s side yet has the wit to manage him for both their benefit.

Sophy’s ideal man is Telemachus, son of fabled Odysseus. Unlike the real Sophy, whose love for Telemachus prevents her from desiring any other man, the fictional Sophy sees her hero brought to life in Emile.

Sophy and Emile fall in love almost on sight, but their courtship takes more than two years as they learn, under tutor Rousseau’s guidance, to manage their emotions, treat each other wisely and with care, and build a deep foundation of love and friendship that can support them through the challenges of marriage and parenthood.

As a teenager, Rousseau falls in with a dissolute crowd and comes away penniless, cynical, and depressed. Wandering on his last legs in the Savoy, a region just south of his Swiss homeland on the border between France and Italy, Rousseau is given refuge by a priest who helps him heal his emotional wounds and teaches him a new attitude of self-reliance. The priest also presents to Rousseau a kind of natural religion that depends, not on arbitrary beliefs, but on reason.

The priest, having broken his vows to get married, is punished with exile to the remote Savoy region. He resolves his own crisis of faith by determining to look to his own heart and mind as the sources of his spirituality while continuing to observe the Catholic rite; he also dedicates himself to helping others, come what may.

The priest’s creed, presented in Book IV of Emile, forms the foundation for Rousseau’s educational theories. The creed also becomes the focus of accusations against the book’s rather heretical views that (a) children should not be indoctrinated into Catholicism at a young age, as they can’t understand it, and (b) religion shouldn’t come from authority but from private introspection. Effectively, then, it is the heretical Savoyard priest’s beliefs that are banned, while the book itself is burned in Paris.