Rousseau et l’idée d’éducation: essai suivi de ‘Pestalozzi juge de Jean-Jacques’ by Michel Soëtard (review)

Michel Soëtard presents two ways of looking at Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile. The first approach, which occupies the larger part of his study, examines how Rousseau’s educational treatise complements his other major essays to create a vision of a new political regime. The second, much shorter part focuses on one of Rousseau’s many followers, the Swiss activist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who attempted to apply his ideas literally. Soëtard begins with the philosophe’s announcement, in a letter to Malesherbes, that Émile was meant to be read together with the Discours sur les sciences et les arts, the Discours sur l’iné-galité, and the Contrat social. But if we assume that the educational plan described in Émile was meant to mould boys into competent future citizens, several paradoxes remain to be resolved. Soëtard addresses these in his first four chapters. First of all, if education corrupts, as Rousseau had established in his first Discours, why should young Émile be educated at all? Secondly, how can the child grow up to be a free man yet live in a society in which he has certain obligations to his fellow humans? (Since Soëtard is concerned throughout his study with the issue of liberty, it would have been helpful if he had defined the term more precisely.) A similar question arises concerning religion, with the contradiction between freedom of action and external constraint. Soëtard searches for the answer in the Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard, which appears in the middle of Émile. Finally, Soëtard addresses the paradoxical role of the tutor, who must guide the boy yet allow his mind to develop on its own. Rousseau solves these problems with an educational plan based on the concept, derived from Montaigne, of a tête bien faite rather than a tête bien remplie. In order to form a citizen, the tutor should first teach him how to be a proper human being (at least in terms of what Rousseau defines as such). Furthermore, the pupil’s free, spontaneous feelings should coincide with his obligations to his fellow citizens; these obligations would be institutionalized into law by an ideal government. Of course, the perfect government was nowhere to be found in Rousseau’s day, so he admits that his ideas must remain theoretical. This discrepancy between theory and practice brings us to the unfortunate Pestalozzi, Rousseau’s Zurich disciple, who established a workhouse to train poor children in a useful profession — spinning and weaving. Pestalozzi’s project ended in financial ruin and in his own disillusionment with regard to human nature. While Soëtard could have concluded his book on a pessimistic note, he is still able to find a means of redemption through pedagogy. One almost wonders whether the book is in dialogue with an invisible interlocutor — namely the France of 1968, which saw educational institutions as enemies of freedom — when Soëtard claims that, while a corrupt world can make an ideal education impossible to implement, pedagogy remains, even now, a privileged space for transmitting a humanistic vision.