Rousseau on Education

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) on the education of children, as set out in his novel or treatise Emile, published in 1762. He held that children are born with natural goodness, which he sought to protect as they developed, allowing each to form their own conclusions from experience, avoiding the domineering influence of others. In particular, he was keen to stop infants forming the view that human relations were based on domination and subordination. Rousseau viewed Emile as his most imporant work, and it became very influential. It was also banned and burned, and Rousseau was attacked for not following these principles with his own children, who he abandoned, and for proposing a subordinate role for women in this scheme.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Richard Whatmore 6 episodes
  Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History
• Caroline Warman 4 episodes
  Professor of French Literature and Thought at Jesus College, Oxford
• Denis McManus 2 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton

Reading list

• Letters from Mistress Henley Published by Her Friend
  Isabelle de Charriere (trans. Joan Stewart Hinde) (Modern Language Association of America, 1993) Google Books →
• Letters from Mistress Henley Published by Her Friend
  Isabelle de Charriere (trans. Caroline Warman) (Penguin, 2012) Google Books →
• Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work
  Maurice Cranston (Norton, 1982) Google Books →
• The Noble Savage
  Maurice Cranston (University of Chicago Press, 1991) Google Books →
• The Solitary Self
  Maurice Cranston (University of Chicago Press, 1997) Google Books →
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
  Leo Damrosch (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005) Google Books →
• Rousseau
  Nicholas Dent (Routledge, 2005) Google Books →
• Rousseau: Emile
  Peter Jimack (Grant and Cutler, 1983) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau
  Patrick Riley (Cambridge University Press, 2001) Google Books →
• Emile, or On Education
  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (trans. Allan Bloom) (Penguin, 1991) Google Books →
• Paul et Virginie
  Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (trans. Helen Maria Williams) (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012) Google Books →
• Rousseau
  Celine Spector (Polity, 2019) Google Books →
• Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction
  Robert Wokler (Oxford University Press, 2001) Google Books →

Related episodes

• The Social Contract
  
  7 Feb, 2008 320 Political science
• Education
  
  4 Nov, 1999 370 Education
• Simone de Beauvoir
  
  22 Oct, 2015 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Emilie du Châtelet
  
  4 Feb, 2021 510 Mathematics
• Kant’s Categorical Imperative
  
  21 Sep, 2017 170 Ethics
• Montesquieu
  
  14 Jun, 2018 320 Political science
• Rawls’ Theory of Justice
  
  19 Jan, 2023 320 Political science
• Empiricism
  
  10 Jun, 2004 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• The Infant Brain
  
  4 Mar, 2010 150 Psychology
• Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality
  
  12 Jan, 2017 100 Philosophy

---

Programme ID: m00094kn

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00094kn

Auto-category: 370 (Education)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Émile or On Education, which he considered his greatest work.