What Rousseau Got Right - Almost
Nobody has impacted American pedagogical theory more than Jean Jacque Rousseau, a french philosopher of the 18th century. In his day, the rationalism of Descartes and his heirs and the Empiricism of Bacon and his heirs had produced what came to be called a “neo-classical” era in which the goal of human activity came to be to overcome nature with reason. Nature was the realm of danger and of disorder and of limitation. Reason, on the other hand, promised a new and unlimited world of human progress.
But Rousseau sensed something that many felt but could not put into words. He realized that nature was not only dangerous, disorderly, and limiting. It is also powerful, noble, and, most of all, alive.
Neo-classical educators worked to overthrow the nature of their students with reason. Rousseau demanded that the students’ natures be honored. And this is where he was right.
The error was in accepting the Enlightenment dualism - he seemed to accept that nature and reason are in conflict. And indeed, in the modern world, they do tend to be. We use lights so we can overcome what nature has determined to be the end of the day. We get food from the grocery store instead of the garden. And the reaction of the back to nature folks is intense.
What must be retained at every level of our thought is that reason is the instrument by which we are called upon to be effective stewards of nature. This applies to gardens as much as it does to kindergarten.
February 14th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
I am new to reading this blog, and I’m really enjoying it. I like what you have to say here about Rousseau. He was such an interesting character. I’ve recently had quite a debate with my brother over whether or not we in the modern world owe Rousseau any respect or gratitude (I said yes). So many people seem to have so many different opinions about him, but he appears to me to think that, instead of reason, being good, needing to supplant nature, being bad, that nature, being good, needs to be left alone. I think you are correct that neither of these are the case. It reminds me of Richard Mitchell saying that true education does not make you good, but only able to do good.