Book One: Infancy

Preface

This collection of reflections and observations, without order and almost without connection, was begun to please a good mother who knows how to think. We know nothing of childhood: with the false ideas we have of it, the further we go the more we go astray. The wisest apply themselves to what it matters for men to know, without considering what children are capable of learning. They are always looking for the man in the child, without thinking of what he is before being a man. That is the study to which I have most applied myself, so that, even if my whole method were chimerical and false, my observations could still be of use. Begin, then, by studying your pupils better; for most certainly you do not know them at all.

Book One

Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another; he mixes and confounds climates, elements, seasons; he mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave; he turns everything upside down, disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters; he wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; man must be trained for him like a riding horse; he must be shaped to his fashion like a tree in his garden.

Without this, everything would be worse still; and our species does not want to be shaped by halves. In the present state of things, a man left to himself from birth among others would be the most disfigured of all. Prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social institutions in which we find ourselves submerged would stifle nature in him and put nothing in its place.

Plants are shaped by cultivation, and men by education. We are born weak, we need strength; we are born destitute of everything, we need help; we are born stupid, we need judgement. All that we lack at birth, and all that we need when grown up, is given us by education. This education comes to us from nature, or from men, or from things. The internal development of our faculties and our organs is the education of nature; the use we are taught to make of this development is the education of men; and the acquisition of our own experience of the objects that affect us is the education of things. Each of us, then, is formed by three kinds of masters. Since the education of nature does not depend on us at all, and that of things only in some respects, the other two must be directed towards it.

But what if these educations are opposed? We must choose between making a man or a citizen, for we cannot make both at once. Natural man is entirely for himself; he is the numerical unit, the absolute whole, who has relation only to himself or his like. Civil man is only a fractional unit, which depends on its denominator, and whose value lies in its relation to the whole, which is the social body. A Spartan woman had five sons in the army, and was awaiting news of the battle. A helot arrives; trembling, she asks him for news. "Your five sons have been killed." "Vile slave, did I ask you that?" "We have won the victory." The mother runs to the temple and gives thanks to the gods. That is the citizen.

Public instruction no longer exists, and can no longer exist, because where there is no longer a fatherland there can no longer be citizens. These two words, fatherland and citizen, should be struck out of modern languages. There remains domestic education, or the education of nature. Living is the trade I want to teach him. When he leaves my hands, he will be neither magistrate, nor soldier, nor priest; he will be a man first of all.

I have therefore decided to give myself an imaginary pupil, to suppose that I have the age, the health, the knowledge and all the talents suitable for working at his education, and for conducting him from the moment of his birth until the moment when, become a grown man, he will need no other guide than himself. Emile is an orphan. It does not matter whether he has his father and mother; charged with their duties, I succeed to all their rights. He must honour his parents, but he must obey only me. He is of good birth, healthy and robust, and rich — for the poor man has no need of education; his station gives him one he cannot do without. He is born in a temperate climate, in France. The tutor and the pupil must be inseparable; they must have their lot in common.

Man is born and dies in slavery: at his birth he is sewn into swaddling clothes; at his death he is nailed into a coffin; as long as he keeps the human form, he is chained by our institutions. The newborn child needs to stretch and move his limbs, to draw them out of the numbness in which they have been held so long; he is wrapped up tighter than ever, his head fixed, his arms and legs stretched out, so that he cannot move. This barbarous custom comes from the fact that mothers, despising their first duty, no longer wish to nurse their children, and must entrust them to hired women, who find it convenient that the child be tied up and hung on a nail while they go about their business.

But let mothers deign to nurse their children, and morals will reform themselves; the feelings of nature will awaken in all hearts; the state will be repopulated. This first point, this point alone, will bring everything back together. Where there is no mother, there is no child. And as the true nurse is the mother, the true teacher is the father. A father, when he begets and feeds his children, has done only a third of his task. He owes men to his species, social men to society, citizens to the state. He who cannot fulfil the duties of a father has no right to become one. Neither poverty, nor work, nor human respect can dispense him from feeding his children and raising them himself. Reader, you may believe me. I predict to whoever has a heart and neglects such holy duties that he will long shed bitter tears for his fault, and will never be consoled.

Rousseau, who had placed his own five children in the Paris foundling hospital, is thought to be speaking here of himself.

Raise the child in the country, far from the rabble of valets, the most depraved of men after their masters. Harden his body to the weather, to climates, to the elements, to hunger, thirst and fatigue; plunge him in the water of the Styx. Wash him often in cold water. Let him be used to seeing new objects, ugly, disgusting, strange animals — a spider, a toad, a mask — first at a distance, then nearer, until he can handle them without fear. Children who are raised without fear of anything are rarely afraid.

The first tears of children are prayers: if we are not careful, they will soon become commands. They begin by getting themselves helped; they end by getting themselves served. Thus from their own weakness, the source of the feeling of their dependence, is born the idea of empire and domination. When the child stretches out his hand to take something he cannot reach, do not carry him to the thing; carry the thing to him, or let him go to it. And never let him believe that his tears command. The surest way to make a child miserable is to accustom him to get everything he wants.