Émile; Or, Concerning Education; Extracts

M. Jules Steeg has rendered a real service to French and American teachers by his judicious selections from Rousseau's Émile. For the three-volume novel of a hundred years ago, with its long disquisitions and digressions, so dear to the heart of our patient ancestors, is now distasteful to all but lovers of the curious in books.
Émile is like an antique mirror of brass; it reflects the features of educational humanity no less faithfully than one of more modern construction. In these few pages will be found the germ of all that is useful in present systems of education, as well as most of the ever-recurring mistakes of well-meaning zealots.
The eighteenth century translations of this wonderful book have for many readers the disadvantage of an English style long disused. It is hoped that this attempt at a new translation may, with all its defects, have the one merit of being in the dialect of the nineteenth century, and may thus reach a wider circle of readers.

Jean Jacques Rousseau's book on education has had a powerful influence throughout Europe, and even in the New World. It was in its day a kind of gospel. It had its share in bringing about the Revolution which renovated the entire aspect of our country. Many of the reforms so lauded by it have since then been carried into effect, and at this day seem every-day affairs. In the eighteenth century they were unheard-of daring; they were mere dreams.
Long before that time the immortal satirist Rabelais, and, after him, Michael Montaigne, had already divined the truth, had pointed out serious defects in education, and the way to reform. No one followed out their suggestions, or even gave them a hearing. Routine went on its way. Exercises of memory,—the science that consists of mere words,—pedantry, barren and vain-glorious,—held fast their bad eminence. The child was treated as a machine, or as a man in miniature, no account being taken of his nature or of his real needs; without any greater solicitude about reasonable method—the hygiene of mind—than about the hygiene of the body.