I'll be distributing this excerpt from Rousseau's Emile (1762) in class tomorrow, but if you'd like to get a head start on discussion, it's a quick (if complex) read. Rousseau opens the excerpt with this rather startling claim: "I find nothing more stupid than children who have been so much reasoned with." Based on the rest of the excerpt, what does he mean? How specifically does his critique of the educational assumptions of his time track with the examples of C18 children's literature that Rachel, Elise, Adam, and Lauren gave you to read?
Deadline: Wednesday (3/18), 10am.
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According to Rousseau, discipline is a stepping stone to reason. Developing a child's reasoning prematurely, leads to early onset disillusionment.
The 'reasonableness' of the goody two shoes story came under fire on Monday. Using fear tactics, overly fantastical twisted ideals, and agenda-pushing moral codes were all panned as terrible adult influences. But Rousseau would argue that without the fear of teachers, children would develop anarchical tendencies and always aspire to undermine their instructors. Thus, in effect, they'd become four-foot, beardless, prideful fifty year olds.
Rousseau would support the values of the good two shoes story. "Cherish childhood," he says, "look with favor on its games, its pleasures, its friendly instincts." The story is friendly. It pushes a friendly, moral value. And it jogs the imagination in favor of humility and charity, rather than selfishness and sloth.
PS:
"With children use force, with men reason; such is the natural order of things." Here's a bit by Russell Peters about beating your children. Watch it, if you haven't already: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn5jlrxcpkI
To "be reasonable, yet never reason" is explained by Rousseau in that children are not automatically reasoning beings. Because children cannot understand reason, stories created out of reason are pointless to write for children, "If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated" (229). Creating stories for children that are "reasonable" give children the chance to learn reasonable lessons, and they can address reasonable topics, but a reasonable story does not necessarily mean that a child must reason through it. By supporting imaginative stories with lessons to learn in a reasonable fashion, childrens books can be affective. In Monday's discussion, the letter of Jack the Giant Killer was a fantastical argument that is straightforward for the child. It is reasonable to teach children to behave, but it does not give a complex story that children cannot understand.
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