Emile -Or- Concerning Education; Extracts: Extracts from Rousseau's Classic Treatise on Education - Paperback

by Jean Jacques Rousseau (Author), Eleanor Worthington (Translator)

Emile -Or- Concerning Education; Extracts presents key selections from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's landmark work on childhood, learning, moral development, and the formation of the individual. First published in 1762, Emile, or On Education became one of the most influential and controversial books in the history of educational philosophy. Rousseau rejected much of the artificial schooling and social conditioning of his age, arguing instead for an education shaped by nature, experience, observation, freedom, and the gradual development of the child's own faculties.

These extracts introduce readers to Rousseau's central educational ideas in a more accessible form. Through the imagined education of Emile, Rousseau explores childhood as a distinct stage of life, the importance of sensory experience, the dangers of premature instruction, the relation between individual freedom and social life, and the moral responsibilities of education. His arguments helped reshape later thinking about childhood, pedagogy, developmental education, romanticism, and modern educational reform.

Translated by Eleanor Worthington, this SMK Books edition is suited to readers of classic educational theory, philosophy of education, Enlightenment thought, childhood studies, political philosophy, and the history of ideas. Rousseau's work remains provocative because it is not merely about schooling, but about what kind of human being education is meant to form.