Crousaz, however, had some good ideas. He criticised the old methods, which make “of the knowledge of Latin and Greek the principal part of education”; and he preached scientific instruction and moral education.
In the Spectacle of Nature, which was so popular in its day, the Abbé Pluche also demanded that the study of the dead languages should be abridged[172]:—
“Experience with the pitiable Latinity which reigns in the colleges of Germany, Flanders, Holland, and in all places where the habit of always speaking Latin is current, suffices to make us renounce this custom which prevents a young man from speaking his own tongue correctly.”
The Abbé Pluche demanded that the time saved from Latin be devoted to the living languages. On the other hand, he insisted on early education, and on this point he was the complement to his master, Rollin, who, he said, wrote rather “for the perfection of studies than for their beginning.”
Still other writers were able to suggest to Rousseau some of the ideas which he developed in the Émile. Before him, La Condamine declared that the Fables of La Fontaine are above the capacity of children.[173] Before him, Bonneval, much interested in physical education, violently criticised the use of long clothes, and claimed for children an education of the senses. He demanded, besides, that in early instruction, the effort of the teacher should be limited to the keeping of evil impressions from the childish imagination, and that instruction in the truths of religion should be held in abeyance.
We shall discover in the Émile all these ideas in outline revived and developed with the power and with the brilliancy of genius, sometimes transformed into boisterous paradoxes, but sometimes, also, transformed into solid and lasting truths.
306. Publication of the Émile (1762).—Rousseau has made striking statements of nearly all the problems of education, and he has sometimes resolved them with wisdom, and always with originality.
Appearing in 1762, at the moment when the Parliament was excluding the Jesuits from France, the Émile came at the right moment in that grand overthrow of routine and tradition to disclose new hopes to humanity, and to announce the advent of philosophic reason in the art of educating men. But Rousseau, in writing his book, did not think of the Jesuits, of whom he scarcely speaks; he wrote, not for the man of the present, but for the future of humanity; he composed a book endowed with endless vitality, half romance, half essay, the grandest monument of human thought on the subject of education. The Émile, in fact, is not a work of ephemeral polemics, nor simply a practical manual of pedagogy, but is a general system of education, a treatise on psychology and moral training, a profound analysis of human nature.
307. Was Rousseau prepared to become a Teacher?—Before entering upon the study of the Émile, it is well to inquire how the author had been prepared by his character and by his mode of life to become a teacher. The history of French literature offers nothing more extraordinary than the life of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Everything is strange in the destiny of that unfortunate great man. Rousseau committed great faults, especially in his youth; but at other moments of his life he is almost a sage, a hero of private virtues and civic courage. He traversed all adventures and all trades. Workman, servant, charlatan, preceptor, all in turn; he lodged in garrets at a sou, and experienced days when he complained that bread was too dear. Through all these miseries and these humiliations a soul was in process of formation made up, above all else, of sensibility and imagination.