If a man were born tall and strong, his size and strength would be of no good to him till he had learnt to use them they would even harm him by preventing others from coming to his aid left to himself he would die of want before he knew his needs. Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. From the outset raise a wall round your child’s soul another may sketch the plan, you alone should carry it into execution. You can remove this young tree from the highway and shield it from the crushing force of social conventions. She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.

Prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her place. Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves. He destroys and defaces all things he loves all that is deformed and monstrous he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master’s taste like the trees in his garden. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit. God makes all things good man meddles with them and they become evil. In addition to his translation of this classic of Enlightenment philosophy, Bloom offers an incisive introduction that connects the structure and themes of Rousseau’s book to timeless questions about teaching children which have persisted in the field of education, helping readers understand how to implement the philosopher’s broader insights into the possibilities-and limitations-of human nature.

Initially published in 1763 at the height of the Enlightenment, Emile articulates Rousseau’s philosophy of education through the novelistic device of a fictional tutor’s encounters with his pupil from infancy to adolescence, illustrating how ideal citizens can be raised to survive in a corrupt society. Widely hailed as the most accessible and authoritative edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education, this acclaimed translation by bestselling author Alan Bloom elevates what Rousseau considered to be the “best and most important” of his published writing into something more: a prescription, fresh and dazzling, for the education of autonomous, responsible-and truly democratic-human beings. The definitive translation of Rousseau’s Emile, a foundational text in the philosophy of education

Emile allan bloom