Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Emile: Or, On Education by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Allan Bloom ISBN: 0465019315 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 1979 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3
Rating: 5
Summary: Nature, Education and Democracy
Comment: Heersink's distillation of the "essence" of Rousseau's Emile is so bazaar, tendentious and misleading that I am left to wonder whether he has read a single page of the book that he finds so tedious and banal. Nature, for Rousseau, is not the vast open spaces of the great outdoors; it is rather, the totality of created beings such as they exist prior to their being worked over by human artifice, and, in particular, the inner, inborn nature of human beings before it has been deflected, distorted, and perverted through their reciprocal, social interaction. In Emile, Rousseau sets out to show how, even in the midst of the corrupting forces of society, it might still be possible to raise a healthy, fully-actualized, harmonious individual; a human being whose inner nature is developed and realized in its potentialities. Such an education is not possible under the instruction of trees, bears and geysers, but only through the most exquisite attentiveness of the tutor, who, through constant vigilance, tries to develop the mind and sentiments of his pupil without giving a foothold to the social passions that make children vain, greedy, manipulative, and deceitful. This requires, above all, that at every moment, the child should learn to judge its actions by their natural effects, and feel its own will limited by the resistance of the nature without it, rather than by the will of other human beings. For whereas the child will submit easily to the force of nature, it will do everything to overcome the force that oppose it once it regards them as expressions of a human will.
I disagree with Rousseau about many things, even about the most fundamental issues. Most of all, I do not think that what it means to be human should be thought limited by a pre-existing, and pristine human nature. Yet I also believe that, now more than ever, we must take Rousseau seriously, and read him rigorously - not merely as an antiquarian piece, but as a profound challenge to our conceits and myopias. There can be no true democracy without citizens who are free not only in the eyes of the law, but in their own eyes; yet we cannot recognize others as free, unless we have eyes for our own freedom. This demands nothing less than a liberal education. In place of this, we have entrusted our children to those whose seek only their own gain and who profit by tapping into human desires, dissociating them from the whole, and crystalizing them into a form in which it seems as though they could be satisfied through some given commodity. As a result, we have become, in the words of my friend, the social critic Dan A. Leythorn, "a nation of slaves - to our desires, to our whims, to money, to power, to each other"
Rating: 1
Summary: Not the Best Rousseau
Comment: Three works mark Rousseau: Confessions, Social Contract, and Inequality. "Emile" is a tedious tome that espouses at great, if not banal, length the issues he has more adequately and eloquently addressed in his major works. The premise is simple: Let nature be the educator. Imagine a kid dropped in the middle of Yosemite National Park, revisit him at age 20, and the kid will know everything he needs to know. Now, you know the substance of the book. If you think nature alone without a preceptor or teacher other than nature alone is sufficient, you'll be bored with the redudancies and polemics against "this" and "that" institution that has developed over the centuries. The core of the book is a vain effort to show that these institutions have corrupted the student, and ergo, society. If only nature could be allowed to "speak," so to speak, then men everywhere would be better off. Right!
Rating: 1
Summary: Advice on raising children from a really nice guy
Comment: Rousseau himself had five children. He deposited all of them at the door of an orphanage in Paris, against the protests of their mother and his mistress. Modern historians estimate that the mortality rate at such an institution was nearly 100 per cent, so it is no exaggeration to state that Rousseau packed all of his own children off to die in a home for foundlings.
That such a monster would then turn around and proceeed to pretend to instruct the rest of the world in the art of raising children -- well, it's just one of those things to take the breath away.
 |
Title: The Republic of Plato by Plato, Allan Bloom ISBN: 0465069347 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 1991 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
 |
Title: Experience And Education by John Dewey ISBN: 0684838281 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 1997 List Price(USD): $8.00 |
 |
Title: Confessions (Oxford World's Classics) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Patrick Coleman, Angela Scholar ISBN: 0192822756 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 2000 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
 |
Title: Democracy And Education by John Dewey ISBN: 0684836319 Publisher: Freer Gallery of Art Pub. Date: 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: The Social Contract (Penguin Classics) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Cranston ISBN: 0140442014 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 1968 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
