Sentimentalism

and career. From his father he inherited a mercurial temperament, love of pleasure, and irresponsibility, and from his mother a morbid and emotional disposition. His tendency toward sentimentalism, idleness, and want and want of of control was also strengthened by the indulgent aunt control. that brought him up, and by low companions during his trade apprenticeships in the city of Geneva. At sixteen he ran away from the city, and spent several years in vagrancy, menial service, and dissoluteness. A love of Love of nature. nature was impressed upon him by the wonderful scenery of the country in which he spent his boyhood and his years of wandering. He also learned to sympathize with with poor. the poor and oppressed, whose condition was at this time forced upon his attention. He received some spo- Sporadic radic instruction, but his education was inaccurate and unsystematic.

Sympathy

education.

Blended well with inchoate

the period.

At twenty-nine Rousseau settled down in Paris, but his days of vagabondage had left an ineffaceable stamp upon him. His sensitiveness, impulsiveness, love of nature, and sympathy for the poor were ever afterward in evidence. These characteristics blended well with a body of inchoate sentiments and vague longings of this sentiments of period. It was the day of Louis XV and royal absolutism, when affairs in the kingdom were controlled by a small clique of idle and extravagant courtiers. A most artificial system of conduct had grown up in society. Under this veneer the degraded peasants were ground down by taxation and forced to minister to the pleasure of a vicious leisure class. But against this oppression there had gradually arisen an undefined spirit of protest and a desire to return to the original beneficent state of nature from which it was felt that man had departed. Hence

New Heloise,

it happened that Rousseau, emotional, uncontrolled, and half-trained, was destined to bring into consciousness and give voice to the revolutionary and naturalistic ideas and tendencies of the century.

Rousseau's Works.-In 1750 he first crystallized this spirit of the age and resultant of his own experience in a His discourses, discourse on The Progress of the Arts and Sciences. In this he declared with much fervor and conviction, though rather illogically, that the existing oppression and corruption of society were due to the advancement of civilization. Three years later he wrote his discourse on The Origin of Inequality among Men. Here again he held that the physical and intellectual inequalities of nature which existed in primitive society were scarcely noticeable, but that, with the growth of civilization, most oppressive distinctions arose. This point of view in a somewhat modified form he continued in his remarkable romance, The New Heloise, published in 1759, and three years afterward in his influential essay on political ethics, Social Contract, known as the Social Contract, and in that most revolutionary treatise on education, the Emile. The New Heloise commends as much of primitive conditions as the crystallized institutions of society will permit. In the Social Contract, Rousseau also finds the ideal state, not in that of nature, but in a society managed by the people, where simplicity and natural wants control, and aristocracy and artificiality do not exist. But the work that has made the name of Rousseau famous is the Emile. This, while an outgrowth of his naturalism, assumes the modified position of the later works, and undertakes to show how education might minimize the drawbacks of civilization and bring man as near to nature

and Emile.

as possible. But the educational influence of the Emile has been so far-reaching that we must turn to another chapter to study the positions of Rousseau and the effects of naturalism in education.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

Graves, During the Transition (Macmillan, 1910), pp. 311-313; History of Education in Modern Times (Macmillan, 1913), pp. 1– 10; and Great Educators (Macmillan, 1912), pp. 77-85; Monroe, Text-book (Macmillan, 1905), pp. 533-542. See also Boyd, W., The Educational Theory of Rousseau (Longmans, Green, 1911); Morley, J., Voltaire and Rousseau (Macmillan).

CHAPTER XIX

NATURALISM IN EDUCATION

Zne Emile

OUTLINE

Rousseau attempts in the Emile to outline a natural education from birth to manhood. The first book takes Emile from birth to five years of age, and deals with the training of physical activities; the second, from five to twelve, treats of body and sense training; the third, from twelve to fifteen, is concerned with intellectual education in the natural sciences; the fourth, from fifteen to twenty, outlines his social and moral development; and the fifth describes the parasitic training of the girl he is to marry.

The Emile is often inconsistent, but brilliant and suggestive; and, while anti-social, the times demanded such a radical presentation. Through it Rousseau became the progenitor of the social, scientific, and psychological movements in education.

The first attempt to put the naturalism of Rousseau into actual practice was made by Basedow. He suggested that education should be practical in content and playful in method, and he produced texts on his system, and started a school known as the 'Philanthropinum.' He planned a broad course, and taught languages through conversation, games, and drawing, and other subjects by natural methods. The Philanthropinum was at first successful, and this type of school grew rapidly, but it soon became a fad.

The Influence of Rousseau's Naturalism.-The inforced educa- fluence of Rousseau's Emile upon education in all its tional thinking. aspects has been tremendous. It is shown by the library of books since written to contradict, correct, or disseminate his doctrines. During the quarter of a century fol

lowing the publication of the Emile, probably more than twice as many books upon education were published as in the preceding three-quarters of a century. This epochmaking work forced a rich harvest of educational thinking for a century after its appearance, and has affected our ideas upon education from that day to this.

for the conven

Naturalistic Basis of the Emile. In the Emile Rousseau aims to replace the conventional and formal education of the day with a training that should be natural and spontaneous. Under the existing régime it was customary for boys and girls to be dressed like men and women of fashion (Fig. 25), and for education to be largely one of deportment and the dancing master. On the intellectual side, education was largely traditional and consisted chiefly of a training in Latin grammar, words, The substituand memoriter work. Rousseau scathingly criticises these ural education practices, and applies his naturalistic principles to an tional type in imaginary pupil named Emile "from the moment of his vogue. birth up to the time when, having become a mature man, he will no longer need any other guide than himself." He begins the work with a restatement of his basal principle that "everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature; but everything degenerates in the hands of man." After elaborating this, he shows that we are educated by "three kinds of teachers— nature, man, and things, and since the coöperation of the three educations is necessary for their perfection, it is to the one over which we have no control (i. e., nature) that we must direct the other two." Education must, therefore, conform to nature.

The Five Books of the Emile.-Now the natural objects, through which Emile is to be educated, remain the