Education, history of philosophy of

7. Rousseau and Kant

The concern that animates the educational and political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the preservation of the freedom and goodness which he took to define human nature, in opposition to the Enlightenment conception of humanity as essentially rational, progressing towards happiness and the perfection of its nature through the cultivation of reason. Rousseau argued in his first and second Discourses that what the arts and sciences encourage are sentiments of self-love and ambition which are destructive of our goodness and freedom, leading us to an insatiable pursuit of private gain at the expense of the common good. To this image of fallen humans, rooted in the orthodox identification of pride as the ‘root of all evil’, he coupled a further challenge to the hope that progress might be achieved through the ascendancy of reason, observing that in such a state of society the voice of individual reason will counsel free-riding, the unjust enjoyment of the rights of citizenship without the discharge of corresponding duties.

Rousseau held in his Émile, the most influential educational tract of the modern era, that in order to educate a boy both for himself and for society, one must preserve his natural freedom and goodness by conforming the education of ‘humans’ and ‘things’ to nature’s timetable for the development of his faculties and motives. Children are moved first by the expectation of pleasure and pain, later by a grasp of what is useful, and finally by reason; and they should learn at each stage through experience and feeling, not through books or the imposition of discipline or teaching. The tutor need do little but shield the child from the corrupting influence of society and organize his activities (and thereby his experiences and feelings) in order to nurture the growth of moral sentiments and conscience, of a self-sufficiency grounded in prudence and mastery of a craft, and of his faculties and knowledge of the world, God and moral law. Freedom from material reliance on others and from the domination of excessive desires is thus assured.

By contrast with Locke, Rousseau held that freedom from domination by others requires that the child’s behaviour be corrected solely by the experience of the natural consequences of actions, and that adults make law for themselves through a form of democracy in which the citizens retain and exercise direct legislative sovereignty. Good citizenship requires, however, that they aim at the common good when it conflicts with their private ends, and Rousseau envisages in On The Social Contract a ‘Great Legislator’ who proposes good laws and persuades the public to enact and obey them through neither force (which would negate freedom) nor rational argument (which wouldn’t solve the free-rider problem). The legislator must teach by example and through a ‘natural’ civil religion, established not as dogma but as sentiments of sociability (see Rousseau, J.-J. §3).

Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of education is like Rousseau’s in being grounded in a philosophy of history, but it reaffirms not only the essential rationality of human nature, but also original sin and the naturalness of discord and competitive self-love. His conception of the end for which we were created is that our rational nature should find full expression, that we should achieve moral perfection through effort and the grace it occasions, and that we should thereby become both happy and worthy of that happiness. This future kingdom of heaven on earth is what children should be educated for, but the stages of their education must first recapitulate the stages of human history already traversed. The first of these is nurture; the second discipline, to counterbalance natural unruliness; the third is culture (information and instruction), to develop ability and prudence; the last (for the world order yet to come) is moral training, to encourage respect for moral law and an acceptance of its priority over self-love as the principle of one’s will.