At a distance of a century and a half we can
hardly estimate how powerful a blow Rousseau struck for the rights of
the child in his educational romance, "Emile." It was a sort of gospel
in its day. Rousseau once arrested and exiled, his book burned by the
executioner (a few years before he would have been burned with it),
his ideas naturally became a craze. Many of the reforms for which he
passionately pleaded are so much a part of our modern thought that we
do not realize the fact that in those days of routine, pedantry and
slavish worship of authority, they were the daring dreams of an
enthusiast, the seeming impossible prophecy of a new era. Aristocratic
mothers were converts to his theories, and began nursing their
children as he commanded them. Great lords began to learn handicrafts;
physical exercise came into vogue; everything that Emile did, other
people wanted to do.
With all Rousseau's vagaries, oddities, misconceptions, posings, he
rescued the individuality of the child and made a tremendous plea for
a more natural, a more human education.
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