Emile: On Education

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

49 pages 1-hour read

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Emile: On Education

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1763

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Essay Topics

1.

Who are the better educators of children, the urban rich or the country poor, and why? 

2.

Why is nature a better teacher than book learning?

3.

Rousseau believes a woman should be trained to be subservient to her husband in such a way that she ends up running the household. How does this come about?

4.

What is wrong with society, and how does it damage a young person?

5.

Why should the student avoid searching for a mate for as long as possible?

6.

The Savoyard priest believes people can know God through what human faculty? How does this contrast with standard church teachings?

7.

Rousseau trains carefully his student Emile so that he is ready to appreciate Sophy when he meets her. Yet Rousseau also convinces Emile to leave Sophy for a couple of years of travel. What is Rousseau trying to accomplish?

8.

What about travel books makes it hard to learn from them about other countries, and what is the remedy?

9.

Rousseau declares that the people may choose among three basic types of governance. Describe briefly each, and name the one that most closely resembles the representative democracies common to the Western world. EXTRA CREDIT: Describe how modern democracies resemble that one type of governance. 

10.

How does the general will protect humans and their freedom?

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