THINKING ABOUT THE NATURE AND ROLE OF AUTHORITY IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION WITH ROUSSEAU'S EMILE

Educational authority is an issue in contemporary democracies. Surprisingly, little attention has been given to the problem of authority in Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's Emile and his work has not been addressed in the contemporary debate on the issue of authority in democratic education. Olivier Michaud's goals are, first, to address both of these oversights by offering an original reading of the problem of authority in Emile and then to rehabilitate the notion of “educational authority” for democratic educators today. Contrary to progressive readings of Emile, he argues, Rousseau's position on this issue is not reducible to “education against authority.” What appears at first glance to be an education against authority is, in a deeper sense, an education toward and even within authority. Michaud contends that we have to embrace these complexities and contradictions that inform Rousseau's work in order to gain insights into the place and role of authority in democratic education. Michaud sheds light on Rousseau's stance on authority through a close study of specific topics addressed in Emile, including negative education, opinion, one's relation to God, friendship and loving relationships, and, finally, the relation Rousseau established with his reader.     

THE HAPPY AND SUFFERING STUDENT? ROUSSEAU'S EMILE AND THE PATH NOT TAKEN IN PROGRESSIVE EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT

One of the mantras of progressive education is that genuine learning ought to be exciting and pleasurable, rather than joyless and painful. To a significant extent, Jean‐Jacques Rousseau is associated with this mantra. In a theme of Emile that is often neglected in the educational literature, however, Rousseau stated that “to suffer is the first thing [Emile] ought to learn and the thing he will most need to know.” Through a discussion of Rousseau's argument for the importance of an education in suffering, Avi Mintz contends that the reception of Rousseau by progressives suggests a detrimental misstep in the history of educational thought, a misstep that we should recognize and correct today. We ought to revive the progressive tradition of distinguishing the valuable educational pains from the harmful ones, even if we disagree with the particular types of pain that Rousseau identified as educationally valuable.     

Unexamined lives: The case for philosophy in schools

Abstract

This paper assumes the significance of Rousseau's Emile for the practice of radical education in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s. It is argued that the educational philosophy espoused in Emile is far more conservative than that actually attributed to his inspiration by some radical educators.     

STATE POLICIES ON RELIGIOUS AND MORAL EDUCATION IN INDIA, 1765–1858

Our research concerns the genealogy of the modern peda‐gogical evaluation of the family. This study examines the place and significance of the family in Rousseau's writings. Following a brief review of the current Rousseau literature, resulting in a retrieval of the notion of pre‐Romanticism, a re‐interpretation of the two great pedagogical novels is presented, on the basis of the “Discourse” on inequality and the “Social Contract”. Rousseau touched on all the themes of the modern evaluation of the family as educational environment, without himself arriving at a coherent theory of family education. The reasons for this are discussed.

"Es ist eine Beschwerde vor den Verstand Geschmack zu haben. Ich muß den Rousseau so lange lesen bis mich die Schönheit der Ausdrucke gar nicht mehr stört und dann kann ich allererst ihn mit Vernunft untersuchen. “ (Kant)

     

Pity and Justice in Rousseau's Emile: Developing a Concern for the Common Good

Scholarly accounts of the training of pity in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile focus on how Emile's tutor activates the psychological mechanisms necessary for the feeling of pity in book 4 of the text. This account is inadequate, for it fails to show how Emile acquires the evaluative ability to make the judgment about who deserves pity as well as the willingness to adjudicate his own and others' interests. In this article, Wing Sze Leung argues that books 1 through 3 lay the foundation by developing in Emile the attitudes and dispositions that guide him in his judgment-making about which kind of life he should pursue. Books 4 and 5 then develop Emile's ability to make interpersonal judgments of pity through habituated practice. By gradually cultivating Emile's sensitivity to the potential conflict between his self-interests and others' well-being, as well as the resolution to refrain from infringing on others' interests and to pursue the common good, Rousseau's long-term educational project molds Emile's disposition to act as justice demands. The article concludes with a brief response to some criticisms about Rousseau's educational project.     

ROUSSEAU'S IMAGINARY FRIEND: CHILDHOOD,PLAY, AND SUSPICION OF THE IMAGINATION IN EMILE

In this essay Amy Shuffelton considers Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's suspicion of imagination, which is, paradoxically, offered in the context of an imaginative construction of a child's upbringing. First, Shuffelton articulates Rousseau's reasons for opposing children's development of imagination and their engagement in the sort of imaginative play that is nowadays considered a hallmark of early and middle childhood. Second, she weighs the merits of Rousseau's opposition, which runs against the consensus of contemporary social science research on childhood imaginative play. Ultimately, Shuffelton argues that Rousseau's work offers an important cautionary note to enthusiasts of children's imaginative play, due to the potentially disruptive influence of consumer capitalism, though she also notes that imagination may play a more redemptive role than Rousseau granted it.     

Rousseau and the image of 'modern education'

The concept of 'modern education' is directly connected with Rousseau's theory of education. It is often said that Rousseau 'founded' modern education, or at least was its most influential predecessor. The paper argues that 'modern learning' or 'experimental education' was discussed within the late-17 th century 'quarrel of the ancients and moderns'. After this historically important debate, education and learning could be connected with the open experience of modern science. When compared to this tradition, Rousseau was not a modern writer. His concept of education has been far too paradoxical to serve as a groundwork for what was considered to be 'modern' or 'progressive education' at the end of the 19 th century. The image of progressive education was strengthened by child psychology, especially by theories of learning and development. Rousseau's stoic concept of 'negative education' is in many respects the opposite to such a viewpoint.     

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? JEAN‐JACQUES ROUSSEAU ON LISTENING EDUCATION

In this essay Megan J. Laverty argues that Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's conception of humane communication and his proposal for teaching it have implications for our understanding of the role of listening in education. She develops this argument through a close reading of Rousseau's most substantial work on education, Emile: Or, On Education. Laverty elucidates Rousseau's philosophy of communication, beginning with his taxonomy of the three voices—articulate, melodic, and accentuated—illustrating the ways in which they both enhance and obfuscate understanding. Next, Laverty provides an account of Rousseau's philosophical psychology, with specific reference to amour‐propre and amour de soi. Listening plays a central role in Rousseau's philosophy of communication, Laverty maintains, because it is in the act of listening that humans fulfill, or fail to fulfill, the imperative that we seek to understand others.     

Poverty and Childhood∗

ABSTRACT

The child‐centred theme of natural development in Rousseau's Emile has exercised a powerful and benign influence on education. Rousseau's proposed curriculum for girls, however, seems extraordinarily illiberal, requiring as it does a rigorous preparation for playing the traditional female role in a male‐dominated society.

It is argued here that such a conservative policy on the education of girls is inevitable in an educational theory which makes a virtue of its empirical foundations. Observational studies of the female's nature and of her needs and interests portray her as society permits or requires her to be rather than as she could or should be. This is a dangerous weakness in influential twentieth‐century versions of child‐centred theory which have embraced a scientific approach in the hope of enhancing their credibility. The full educational development of girls, however, requires a distinctive vision of how things ought to be, a willingness to defend such value judgments, and a determination to intervene positively in the classroom.     

马克思对卢梭人民主权思想的继承与超越

人民主权是政治哲学研究的核心内容,也是社会发展和政治文明进步的标志。卢梭从资本主义私有制造成人类社会不平等的角度提出了人民主权理论,强调了人民主权的不可分割、不可代表和至高无上性。卢梭的人民主权思想对马克思权力思想的形成产生了重要影响,其关于法律、政府和主权的论述是马克思建立人民主权国家的理论基础。但是,卢梭的人民主权思想并未跳出时代的限制,本质上是一种抽象的、理想主义的设想。马克思的人民主权思想从物质生产和物质生产关系中现实的人出发,对实现主权在民的社会理想提出了现实的方法论指导,是对卢梭思想的超越和发展。     

Education for Sustainable Development: past experience., present action and future prospects

Rousseau's philosophy of education is contained not only in Emile (1762), but also in The Government of Poland (1772). In each of them he emphasises different aspects of education: How to be a human being? And: How to be a citizen? The main theme investigated by Rousseau in The Government of Poland, is how a minor nation surrounded by such major powers as Russia, Prussia and Austria can ensure its survival? Not having the option of defending itself against its powerful neighbours by military means, Rousseau's advice is to found the Polish nation in the hearts of the Polish people, primarily through citizenship education. However, Poland was finally divided between its neighbours in 1795. Rousseau's writing The Government of Poland can shed some light on the Danish situation after losing the war to Prussia and Austria in 1864. With its defeat Denmark did not disappear, as did Poland, but the territory of the United Monarchy was almost halved by the loss of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. After the war some of the same defence strategies and educational ideas as Rousseau had recommended to Poland became important in Denmark. In light of Rousseau's ideas about citizenship education this article will explore the Danish way of trying to establish the nation in the hearts of the people throughout the 20th century. Today the question is: How to understand the conception of self‐determination in the context of establishing European political unity? In his analysis Habermas directs our attention to some of the same dilemmas that Rousseau had dealt with 200 years earlier. Habermas’ advice is to give the European spirit a republican form.     

Jean‐Jacques Rousseau,the Mechanised Clock and Children's Time

This article explores a perplexing line from Rousseau's Emile: his suggestion that the ‘most important rule’ for the educator is ‘not to gain time but to lose it’. An analysis of what Rousseau meant by this line, the article argues, shows that Rousseau provides the philosophical groundwork for a radical critique of the contemporary cultural framework that supports homework, standardised testing, and the competitive extracurricular activities that consume children's time. He offers important insights to contemporary parents and educators wishing to reimagine an educational system that is currently fuelled more by familial and international amour propre than by children's interests and needs. Not the least of these is his recognition that to reimagine children's education would require a new configuration of the very terms of modern life. Problematically, however, Rousseau's alternative to mechanised clock‐time depends on the labour of Sophie, whose time is also reconfigured. For the next generation of children to be educated according to natural time, Sophie's labour needs to be off the clock too, which is just as much a linchpin of her removal from the public sphere of citizenship and the paid workforce as it is of Emile's education for public life, or so the final section of this paper argues.     

The Praxis of Art's Deschooled Practice

Art's relationship with education is often characterised by paradox. Yet art is often reified within an education system that refuses to see the pedagogical strengths of paradox. This article approaches art education from three positions. The first is that art is a construct that is neither natural nor necessary. The second is that there are no aesthetic or pedagogical imperatives, but that art education is the recognition of groundlessness where paradox facilitates learning. The third approach is to reposition art with regards to its relationship with learning, education and schooling. Here it is argued that art's only choice is to deschool learning. The latter is moved by an underlying dilemma as to whether art, considered as an autonomous human act, could ever engage with systems of learning without being turned into a tool or a thing. Unless art education is deschooled, the teaching and learning of art remains trapped between the assumptions of process and product. So the idea of art and education as shared practices within schooling remains somewhat dubious unless art's practices are recognised in parts perceived as wholes and where conclusions are marked by open‐endedness. No possibilities for art or learning could ever emerge unless a radically different set of conditions give way to a state of affairs where knowledge is a matter to be discovered but never determined, and where a fixed ground is transformed into a wide horizon.     

Condorcet's education: haunted by the ghost of Rousseau

The Marquis de Condorcet was a man of talent and vision. He was the youngest of the ‘philosophes’ who centred their activities on 18th‐century Paris. His age kept him clear of actual confrontation with the renegade philosopher of the era: Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. This situation would change, however, as the Jacobin party posthumously adopted Rousseau to be the ideologue of their bloody power‐lust. As educational spokesman for the Girondin party Condorcet proposed a wholesale restructuring of French schools and colleges. His initiatives could be labelled as progressive even in our own era, particularly with regard to his provisions for lifelong learning. However, Condorcet was thwarted by the spectre of Rousseau's paradoxical ideas; selected by the Jacobins more for their offensive value than for general enlightenment.     

ROUSSEAU,HAPPINESS, AND THE ECONOMIC APPROACH TO EDUCATION

Since the 1960s, the influence of economic thought on education has been steadily increasing. Taking Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's educational thought as a point of departure, Tal Gilead critically inquires into the philosophical foundations of what can be termed the economic approach to education. Gilead's focus in this essay is on happiness and the role that education should play in promoting it. The first two parts of the essay provide an introduction to Rousseau's conception of happiness, followed by an examination of the economic approach to education and the notion of human capital. In the course of this discussion, Gilead shows that increasing happiness is one of the economic approach's major aims. In the third part of the essay, he uses Rousseau's views to interrogate significant aspects of the economic approach to education. He then continues by highlighting some of the educational implications that stem from Rousseau's critique. Gilead maintains that Rousseau's ideas can provide valuable suggestions regarding how education might contribute to the promotion of happiness. The article concludes by proposing that while Rousseau's ideas on the matter should not necessarily be embraced, contemporary policymakers can learn some important lessons from them.     

HENRI ROORDA VAN EYSINGA AND THE PEDAGOGY OF ÉDUCATION LIBERTAIRE

The anarchist‐inspired pedagogy of Henri Roorda van Eysinga (1870‐1925) had an important, and critical, influence on the contemporary theory of “education libertaire” ‐ a theory Inextricable from practice, and illuminated in the experience of the ‘Ecole Ferrer de Lausanne”, with which he was associated.. Roorda's role in promoting the “modern school’ principles of Francisco Ferrer is generally acknowledged. His reputation as “the soundest revolutionary of our age’ on the education of children, however, is largely unknown or forgotten.

Dutch by birth, Roorda grew up and remained in the “Suisse romande”, where his early exposure to the revolutionary intellectual idealism of post‐Commune exiles like Kropotkin and (notably) Elisée Reclus had lasting consequences. Cited in “libertarian” and “new” education circles alike, his writing effectively addressed the twin “scientific” and “revolutionary” facets of Rousseau's pedagogical‐critical discourse. The dichotomies engendered by this Juxtaposition of a child‐centred ‘education intégrate” with a revolutionary‐fraternal ‘mentalité anarchiste” richly nuanced his contribution to the pedagogy and the idiom of “education libertaire”.     

THE SWEET TYRANNY OF CREATING ONE'S OWN LIFE: RETHINKING POWER AND FREEDOM IN ENGLISH TEACHING

In this historical study of English teaching, Jory Brass adopts a governmentality perspective to highlight the contingency and limits of pedagogical arguments that construct an oppositional relation between power and freedom. In the first part of the essay, Brass historicizes contemporary critiques of transmission pedagogies by comparing them with touchstone pedagogical texts of the 1890s through the 1920s. Next, he revisits two early twentieth‐century pedagogical frameworks to identify links among power, freedom, choice, and social norms that are obscured in contemporary pedagogical writing. Finally, Brass examines a popular contemporary text, Deborah Appleman's Critical Encounters in High School English, to highlight how its strategy to foster adolescents' freedom and empowerment inscribes social patterns of power and regulation. The study denaturalizes oppositional accounts of power and freedom so that scholars and teachers may scrutinize how power circulates when English is positioned to govern how students understand and conduct themselves as free, responsible, and empowered subjects.     

CRITICAL LISTENING AND THE DIALOGIC ASPECT OF MORAL EDUCATION: J.F. HERBART'S CONCEPT OF THE TEACHER AS MORAL GUIDE

In his central educational work, The Science of Education (1806), J.F. Herbart did not explicitly develop a theory of listening, yet his concept of the teacher as a guide in the moral development of the learner gives valuable insight into the moral dimension of listening within teacher‐student interaction. Herbart's theory radically calls into question the assumed linearity between listening and obedience to external authority, not only illuminating important distinctions between socialization and education, but also underscoring consequences for our understanding of the role of listening in educational relations. In this inquiry, Andrea English argues that critical listening in teaching contributes to the moral education and development of the learner. To do this, she examines Herbart's view of the teacher's task as a moral guide in the realm of moral education. English contends that reexamining Herbart's theory of education (a theory that is, for the most part, no longer discussed in Anglo‐American educational philosophy) can productively inform our understanding of moral education in democratic and pluralist societies.     

The third place from truth: Plato's paradoxical attack on writing

This paper examines Eric Havelock's view of Plato's works as a turning point in the transition from a predominantly oral society to a predominantly written culture. There is a paradox between the influence of written abstraction on Plato's thought and the Platonic attack upon writing in the Phaedrus. Havelock's consideration of the influence of written technology upon Plato's thought is outlined and is contrasted with the view of writing expressed by Socrates in the Phaedrus and elsewhere. The essential paradox in associating Plato with the written tradition is that Plato criticizes the written word in the Phaedrus for the same faults attributed to the poets in the Republic. The dimensions of the paradox are considered along five lines. First, it is clear that writing and abstract thought are related in Havelock's view, and yet Plato attacks writing for being “the third place from truth.”; Secondly, memory is associated with the oral tradition which Plato attacks so strongly in the Republic, and yet memory is vital to Plato's epistemology. A third paradox is that Plato condemns the self‐identification of the individual with the poets of the oral tradition, and yet the dialectic which is the approved approach to truth takes place in oral dialogue. In addition, while Plato clearly expected his attack upon poetry to be unpopular, there is evidence that his attack on writing—on the same epistemological grounds—was an accurate reflection of popular sentiment. Finally, the poets appear to have been singled out in the Republic for special attention due to their relationship with the oral tradition, but the rhetoricians, logographers, and sophists associated with writing are criticized upon the same grounds as the poets and rhapsodes. The study concludes that these apparent paradoxes are consistent with Plato's pivotal position in the transition from a predominantly oral to a predominantly written culture as outlined by Havelock. Plato's paradoxical attack upon writing provides a remarkable paradigm of the employment of the strengths of both the written and the oral traditions, and urges us by example to consider the impact of modern media upon the quality of our thought.     

Plato's view of rhetoric

A basic factor of Chaim Perelman's rhetorical theory is the concept of the universal audience. Unfortunately, the concept of the universal audience, which follows in the tradition of Rousseau's general will and Kant's categorical imperative, is open to many of the same criticisms leveled against the general will and the categorical imperative.