Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Emile, or On Education
A natural education – for Emile; Sophie, by contrast, is raised to be his companion.
Introduction
A treatise on education in the form of a novel, published in 1762 in five books that follow the stages of a boy’s growth: infancy, childhood, during which nature and things rather than books should teach (“negative education”), the years of practical learning, when the only book allowed is “Robinson Crusoe”, adolescence with its moral and religious education, and finally marriage. Book IV contains the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”, a natural religion without revelation, which led the Parlement of Paris to condemn the book and order Rousseau’s arrest. Book V on Sophie set off a long debate about women’s education.
Read the full text
Free full text, often an older edition or translation
Connections
Taken up in
- Democracy and Education1916 · John Dewey
Criticized in
- Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects1790 · Catharine Macaulay
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman1792 · Mary Wollstonecraft
More works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- 1782Confessions
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made