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Émile, or On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is a difficult book to read. For a start, it’s quite long at 500+ pages, and it’s a task made more challenging because in amongst his insights for which he is lionised, Rousseau had some very odd ideas which I suspect may make many readers abandon him in dismay. You can get a glimpse of how I felt about Rousseau’s attitudes to women from my recent snippet and yes, tested well beyond the limits of my patience, I nearly abandoned this book when I came to Book 5 and found reading at the top of his list of Five Perilous Paths to be avoided by adolescents. (The other four are solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life and intercourse with women and young people) (p.335).

In Book 1 he rants about the evils of swaddling clothes; mothers who won’t do their duty by nursing their own children; and eating meat. (Nursing mothers should not eat meat, he says, because decaying animal matter swarms with worms and so children who are nursed on human milk from meat-eating women, get worms. But curdled milk is fine, ok?)

He thinks that only Frenchmen can travel where they like and be citizens of the world but that people of colour should stay where they are because they’re not as wise as Europeans. He thinks they have an inferior sensibility too:


Savages suffer less than other men from curiosity and from tedium; everything is the same to them–themselves, not their possessions–and they are never weary. (p. 225).

While he devotes this book to his daft theories of education, he believes that there’s no point in educating the poor because the education of his own station in life is thrust upon him, he can have no other.

In Book 2 we learn that children need lessons in courage, and bearing pain. So they should not be coddled because bearing pain is the first, most useful lesson they can learn. He rants about doctors all being quacks and he is especially cross about exposing children to fables because they will copy the folly rather than the moral lesson. (Trust me, there is no sign of this among our little Preps, to whom I read Aesop’s Fables every year in first term.) There is more, lots more, of this nonsense, but I think I’ve made my point.

So why was I reading it?

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