This romance, when it appeared in 1762, created a great noise and a great scandal. A mother having asked his advice, he took up the pen to write it and, little by little, his counsels grew into a book, a large work, a pedagogic romance. Rousseau, who had educated himself, and very badly at that, was impressed with the dangers of the education of his day. 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. Exercises of memory,-the science that consists of mere words,-pedantry, barren and vain-glorious,-held fast their bad eminence. No one followed out their suggestions, or even gave them a hearing. 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. In the eighteenth century they were unheard-of daring they were mere dreams. Many of the reforms so lauded by it have since then been carried into effect, and at this day seem every-day affairs. It had its share in bringing about the Revolution which renovated the entire aspect of our country. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s book on education has had a powerful influence throughout Europe, and even in the New World. 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. The eighteenth century translations of this wonderful book have for many readers the disadvantage of an English style long disused. 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.
Émile is like an antique mirror of brass it reflects the features of educational humanity no less faithfully than one of more modern construction.
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. Jules Steeg has rendered a real service to French and American teachers by his judicious selections from Rousseau’s Émile.
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