Rousseau Paper
...Rousseau describes a number of legitimate impressions that can be utilized by our modern education system. Although his beliefs are reasonable in conjunction with his ideas, his contradictions make it difficult to be realistically applied as education. The eighteenth century French philosopher argued that children should not be told what to learn, instead they should learn for themselves in the course of experiences and his teachings of the negative education, the moral education, the intellectual education and the use of habits in education. Rousseau believed that anything created by man would become corrupt and that children should be taught by nature. Rousseau thought that in order to preserve a child’s original nature, the child needs to be driven by his reason.
For Rousseau, there are three main components to education; the first from nature, the next is of men and finally education from things. In order for the man to be well educated, these components need to “coincide and lead to a common goal” (Emile 11). The components of education do not work in the same way. The form of education from things depends on man only to a limited degree. A nature education works independently of a man’s actions. The only education in his control is that from man. “The three educators must be mixed together for a perfect result” (Emile 12), Rousseau asserts that nature, which cannot be controlled by man, must shape and mold the course of man and things in the education of children. This is how he justifies his education theory.
As Rousseau defined, negative education is the process of educating children by using a method other than the typical educational system. Rousseau believed that we are inherently pure and good, but we become corrupted by the restrictions of our evil civilization. At birth, we enter this world pure. That is our natural state as that is how...
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