Read along with the 10 great books series

Volume 10 Number 2 February 10 - March 9 2014

A book originally banned and burnt by French authorities but went on to inspire that nation’s education system will be the first text analysed in the University of Melbourne’s 10 Great Books series.

Émile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, charts the ideal education of an imaginary pupil from birth to adulthood in the mid-1700s. 

This month’s public masterclass by celebrated French historian and academic Peter McPhee will investigate how Rousseau’s controversial text portrayed education as a mechanism to prepare children for effective citizenship and a fulfilling life.

The issues and questions raised in Émile remain “very pertinent today”, according to Professor McPhee.

Below is an edited extract of Professor McPhee in conversation with Ryan Sheales. (Listen to the full interview here.)

 

Why is Émile so significant?

Émile was controversial at the time because it was a statement on the belief that education should be child-centered, in the sense of being geared to the capacity of the child to benefit from education rather than the idea that children should be instructed in things that they ‘ought to know’. So it’s a text at the origins of the idea that children should learn at their own pace. Rousseau was a great believer that the stimulation children should receive – in terms of intellectual stimulation as well as stimulation of the senses – should be very carefully controlled at the particulate period of their own personal development. Crucial in what he said was to ensure that children grew up into adults who had fulfilled lives and very importantly that they grew up into adults who were good citizens.

And this argument wasn’t received well by the authorities?

No. Rousseau was scathing about the way small children were taught to read by reciting the catechism, which he thought was ridiculously difficult for them to comprehend. One of the reasons why Émile remains controversial is that it’s very much about the education of an imaginary child named Émile and his development into a happy and fulfilled, civic-minded adult. Of course, Rousseau was not the first person to criticise the way children were educated, but this was an astonishingly powerful volume (which he regarded as the most important of all the books he ever wrote) and certainly one that had a dramatic impact among educated people at the time. And along the way Rousseau seems to prescribe a particular role for women, so that when Émile needs a partner he meets a young woman named Sophie, and Rousseau is seen to have very clear ideas about what we would call ‘sexual stereotyping’, which were controversial even at the time.

What lessons might today’s educators and policymakers take from the text?

One of the issues that is still very pertinent today is that we are consumed with indecision and anxiety about what our children are exposed to; from advertisements for alcohol during afternoon sports matches to pornography on the internet being just a couple of clicks away. One of the consuming issues for parents and educators today is what is appropriate for children to learn and when? What can they cope with? And Rousseau was effectively saying the same thing, although for him the issue was related more to what he saw as the problem of children being indoctrinated with what he regarded as superstition by the Catholic church. But it remains a very pertinent question.

The 10 Great Books series will be the highlight of this year’s Melbourne Masterclasses, the Faculty of Arts flagship community education program. The texts analysed will range from classic novels to philosophical and political treatises, from antiquity to modernity.  


www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/masterclasses/10-great-books

Next up is Machiavelli’s The Prince, presented by Vice-Chancelllor Glyn Davis