How Rousseau's Ideas from Emile can be applied in my life.

In Rousseau’s Emile, a number of points of instruction are given as to how to raise and educate a child in order for him to develop into the man that he should be. Many of his ideas were contrary to what was typically taught in his period. The people were “always looking for the man in the child without considering what he is before he becomes a man.” I have seen some of these philosophies used in my own education and growth from a child into a man and others I have seen neglected. Three points in particular are the idea that we are taught by three masters and only when these teachings coincide can we live in harmony, the idea that children should be allowed to solve problems themselves without the answer being given to them, and the idea that children should be taught to enjoy life now and that their years of gaity should not be taken away from them.

The first idea is that we are taught by three masters: nature, man, and things. Nature teaches us through our own body and faculties. Man teaches us through other people and education. Things teaches us through our observations of our surroundings. Rousseau says that if the lessons we learn from these masters conflict, then we will not be in harmony with ourselves. If instead they all work together to point us in the same direction, then our lives will be consistent. Drawing from my own life experiences, I have had times when these three have contradicted each other and times when then have agreed. One particular lesson is when I learned how to ride a bicycle. There was a hill in my neighborhood known as “chicken hill”. Early in my childhood I went with some of the big kids riding their two wheelers to ride down this hill. I had not yet learned to ride a bicycle so I brought my three-wheeled plastic Big Wheel. I saw the other kids going down and decided that if they could do it then I could too. I ended up toppling over and scraping myself badly. Because of this experience, I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle for a number of years after most kids my age. Nature had taught me that riding a bicycle like the big kids results in pain and suffering, but man and things were telling me that riding a bicycle was liberating and fun. I was in conflict over my desire to ride and my fear of pain. Eventually I learned how to ride a bicycle, and one of the first things I did was go down that hill again without crashing.

Rousseau also comes back often to the point that children should be allowed to figure things out for themselves. Parents and teachers should give them guidance when the questions of ‘why’ start coming rather than just giving the answer. I do not know if my mother is a student of Rousseau or if she just couldn’t think of anything to say to my own ideas on nature as a child, but she employed this practice very well. I think I was mostly afraid to ask ‘why’ questions because I didn’t want to bother my mother, so instead I learned to think about these questions myself and come up with answers. I would present my answer to her, and based on her reaction I could usually tell if I was right or wrong. For example, when faced with the question of why the sky was blue, I compared my notes to personal experience and told my mom that the sky was blue because God loved his blue crayon the best. My mother would roll her eyes and smile, or in some way or another let me know that I was wrong. I would then go back to work tweaking my theories until I figured out something that fit. This helped me develop problem-solving skills early on and helped me to learn how to figure out and understand how things work on my own.

Finally, I love Rousseau’s comments about allowing kids to be kids while they still can. He says that we so often try to urge them to grow up so fast and be adults that “the age of gaity is spent in tears, punishment, threats, and slavery.” That is too often exactly the way that many people would describe their childhood. Even if they are exaggerating, it is sad that so many feel that their days of happiness were stolen from them so that they could be “prepared for some far off happiness that [they] may never enjoy.” Too often in life we focus on working now to be happy later instead of being happy now in the work we are doing. This is a lesson that I have learned only recently. As a child I constantly looked toward adolescence and in adolescence toward adulthood as the time when I would finally be free from constant demands of others and be able to enjoy life. I have now learned that the demands and responsibilities only increase as one gets older and the trick to obtaining happiness is not to prepare to receive it but to find it in one’s present state of being.

I think Rousseau’s ideas on raising children are very well advised. I feel that the areas of my life in which my education has followed the guidelines set forth in these readings have been the ones that I have excelled at and have ultimately helped me learn to deal with life as an adult. Our public education system seems to have taken a lot of this into account in the way our grade system works and the subject matter that is taught in school. Unfortunately there still seem to be a lot of lessons that are not taken into account or that somehow fall through the cracks, but I believe that we will learn from our mistakes in these regards. If the study of Rousseau is not currently required in becoming an educator, then it ought to be.