Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment

3. Books and Experience in the Education of Judgment

To substitute books for [experience] is not to teach us to reason. It is to teach us to use the reason of others. It is to teach us to believe much and never to know anything. (E, 125; 4:370) I have argued that the issue of learning (growing, changing) while staying in place, or combining integrity and change, is a fundamental challenge of Emile’s education—and, more broadly for Rousseau, the fundamental challenge of what it means to be truly human, insofar as human beings are understood to possess both an original nature and the quality of perfectibility. This issue is present in Emile from the outset, but from the moment that Rousseau shifts focus from the child to “the child whom one wants to make wise” (166; 4:428), the task of combining integrity and change dominates his educational project. In this chapter I explore this issue in a new register, focusing directly on Rousseau ’s opposition to the practice of using books to teach children to think. Specifically , he denounces the tendency to substitute books for direct experience in the education of children; children should learn from the world around them. “Reading is the plague of childhood and almost the only occupation we know how to give it” (116; 4:357). Emile is shielded even from La Fontaine’s fables, which, as Susan Shell notes, was in Rousseau’s time “the most popular French literary work for children (outside of the Bible).”1 3 Books and Experience in the Education of Judgment I 64 L Rousseau on Education, Freedom, and Judgment “I hate books,” Rousseau insists, because books “only teach one to talk about what one does not know” (184; 4:454). In other words, they do not really teach one to know, but only to pretend to know. Moreover, they invite one to substitute the judgments of the author for one’s own. Such arguments are familiar to readers of the First Discourse. There is ample evidence to suggest that Rousseau sees books as detrimental to the development of good judgment, especially in children. As Emile matures, however, Rousseau draws on some of the very same reading material that he rules out in Emile’s earlier years, in order to teach Emile about his fellow human beings. We might explain this shift simply in terms of timing: what was inappropriate for Emile at one age is appropriate at another. But the sharp contrast between Rousseau’s general remarks about fables and history in the early and later stages of Emile’s education is not adequately accounted for by the age of his pupil. Rather, what emerges from this contrast is insight into Rousseau’s considered view of what it means to read, and to write, well—that is, in a manner that contributes to the development of good judgment. In light of Rousseau’s scathing critique of books in early childhood, it is somewhat puzzling that in the next breath he makes an exception to his own rule and permits Emile to read a single book: Robinson Crusoe. This concession occurs well before the introduction of other reading material in Emile’s adolescence . Many commentators take for granted that Defoe’s novel merits exception to Rousseau’s rule against books because it is about a man who interacts with his surroundings as the tutor wishes Emile to do.2 Because Crusoe is marooned on an island and must focus on his physical survival, his story is understood as proper reading material for Rousseau’s “natural” man. Defoe’s novel, it seems, unlike other books, does not take Emile outside of himself. “[Rousseau] gives Emile Robinson Crusoe, who is not an ‘other’ but only himself .”3 On this understanding, Rousseau’s rule against books in general remains intact, and Robinson Crusoe is explained away as an exception to the rule. One might cast Rousseau’s own books in the same light, as exceptions, and thus rescue him from the charge of inconsistency. Books are permissible as long as they do not do what books usually do, which is to deprive us of an authentic experience of the world by mediating between the individual and the world. However, Rousseau does not concede the point about the utility of Defoe’s novel in a grudging or qualified manner. In fact, he introduces his discussion of the novel with the comment, “Since we absolutely must have books” (184; 4:454, emphasis added). The question, then, is not only why...