In this particular section, appearing in the work’s fifth volume, we are introduced to Emile’s future wife Sophie, encapsulating Rousseau’s vision of the ideal woman, as Emile is his ideal man. It was also the most widely read of Rousseau’s works in his lifetime. It was originally published in 1762, just several months after Rousseau’s Social Contract, and both were immediately banned by Paris authorities – Emile being placed on the Index, and simultaneously condemned by the Sorbonne, the General Assembly of the Clergy and the Parlement of Paris, although on religious, rather than pedagogic grounds.
It is written as part novel, part treatise, and describes the education of protagonist Emile from birth to adulthood through the eyes of his tutor. Mary Wollstonecraft dismissed his views on female education as “the reveries of fancy” and a “refined licentiousness” by which woman is falsely made “the slave of love.” “According to the tenour of reasoning, by which women are to be kept from the tree of knowledge, the important years of youth, the usefulness of old age, and the rational hopes of futurity, are,” she claims, “all to be sacrificed, to render women an object of desire for a short time.Emilius and Sophia: or, a New System of Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s self-proclaimed ‘best’ and ‘most important’ work, from which today’s source originates details Rousseau’s philosophy of education. Spock.Īlmost from Émile's first appearance, Rousseau's treatment of the ideal education of women has provoked charges that it is both unjust and inconsistent with his own underlying principles.
It's a Phenomenology of the Mind posing as Dr. Émile is the canvas on which Rousseau tried to paint all of the soul's acquired passions and learning in such a way as to cohere with man's natural wholeness. From this conjunction results the clearest insight and the most complete science regarding itself that the human mind can acquire - in a word, the surest knowledge of oneself and others available to our species. Woman has more wit, man more genius woman observes, and man reasons.
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