Émile; Or, Concerning Education; Extracts

M. Jules Steeg has rendered a real service to French and American teachers by his judicious selections from Rousseau's Émile. For the three-volume novel of a hundred years ago,...

The new-born child needs to stretch and to move his limbs so as to draw them out of the torpor in which, rolled into a ball, they have so long remained. We do stretch his limbs,...

As the first state of man is wretchedness and weakness, so his first utterances are complaints and tears. The child feels his need and cannot satisfy it; he implores aid from ot...

Émile shall have no head-protectors, nor carriages, nor go-carts, nor leading-strings. Or at least from the time when he begins to be able to put one foot before the other, he s...

It is marvellous that in undertaking to educate a child no other means of guiding him should have been devised than emulation, jealousy, envy, vanity, greed, vile fear,--all of...

There are two kinds of falsehood; that of fact, which refers to things already past, and that of right, which has to do with the future. The first occurs when we deny doing what...

In any study, words that represent things are nothing without the ideas of the things they represent. We, however, limit children to these signs, without ever being able to make...

There is a kind of exercise, purely natural and mechanical, that renders the body robust without injuring the mind. Of this description are swimming, running, leaping, spinning...

Our pupil will have even a simpler and more uniform mode of speaking, because his passions, not yet aroused, will not mingle their language with his. Do not, therefore, give him...

[12] From this passage, it is plain that the objections lately raised by intelligent persons against the abuse of Latin conversations and verses are not of recent date, after all.

There is a chain of general truths by which all sciences are linked to common principles and successively unfolded. This chain is the method of philosophers, with which, for the...

The next morning I proposed a walk before breakfast. Nothing could have pleased him better; children are always ready to run about, and this boy had sturdy legs of his own. We w...