Thinking Back (and Forward) to Rousseau’s Emile

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which Rousseau’s Emile continues to speak to us in the twenty-first century. In the first part, I examine the concept at the heart of Rousseau’s theory of education: “negative education” or the process of de- or unsocializing individuals and of putting them in touch with the nature of things rather than with the various distortions produced by traditional education. I then describe and reflect upon a course that Emile inspired me to teach, one in which I remained silent for the entire semester. I conclude with a much broader exploration of the light this text sheds on our current educational landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Active learning
• Emile
• negative education
• Rousseau
• student-centered learning

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Katherine Nelson, Hannah Wild, the reviewers for JPSE, and the Georgia State colleagues who took part in the colloquium on Rousseau’s Emile.

Contributor

Peter Lindsay is Associate Professor of Political Science and Philosophy and the former Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Georgia State University. He is the author of Creative Individualism: The Democratic Vision of C. B. Macpherson (SUNY Press, 1995), and his articles on various subjects in political philosophy and higher education have appeared in journals such as History of Political Thought, Political Studies, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, The Journal of Faculty Development and Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. He has lectured in the U.S. and abroad on a number of topics, including the ethics of health care, just war theory, property rights and university education.

Notes

The effect, he tells us, must become the cause (Rousseau 1947, 216).

Cf. Oelkers (2008, 87). Rousseau compares his educational philosophy to the methods of Thucydides who “reports the facts without judging them” (Rousseau, 1979, 239).

There is a tension here, of course, as Rousseau himself mediates nature for Emile (cf. Bantock 1980, Vol. I, Ch. 12 and Vol. II, Ch. 1).

Cf. Parry (2001).

Cf. Scott (2012).

The modern version of this question is “Will this be on the test?”

Rousseau followed Plato (cf. 2004, 378 DE) in his concern for the use of fables for children, deconstructing one of them — “The Crow and the Fox” — to a devastating effect.

See Fink (2013).

I have in mind the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

Cf. Felder and Brent (2007).

The key here is that (1) the feedback is in the form of questions, not statements (e.g., “Does the author really say that?”; “Are you sure this conclusion follows from what you have just argued?”) and (2) I do not offer concrete advice on how to correct the problem. Sometimes even a simple “I’m confused” suffices, as it subtly shifts the blame onto me, thereby making the criticism easier to accept.

For my somewhat skeptical view of student evaluations, see [Citation redacted].

I am one such advocate. Cf. [Citation redacted].

Weimer (2002) is the classic text in this area. See also Fink (2013, Ch. 4) and Brookfield (1999).

In this model, “education … becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (Freire 1993, 58).

Bligh’s (2000) classic text of college teaching — McKeachie’s Teaching Tips — has been quite clear on this point through all 15 of its editions.

While there is some debate about how many students are currently taking online courses (Kolowich 2014), the number is large and growing.

Cf. Means et al. (2010).

To be fair, active learning is not without its critics. Cf. Andrews et al. (2011). For an overview of the evidence, see Prince (2004).

However, I would suggest that many trends are troubling (cf. Baker, Lusk, and Neuhauser 2012; Kuznekoff and Titsworth 2013; Tindell and Bohlander 2012; Wei, Wang, and Klausner 2012).

I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting I acknowledge this difference between Rousseau and Finkel.