Rousseau does not want to bring up a savage who cannot read or write, who does not know the sciences and crafts. The art of the educator is to be able to evoke the necessary needs, interests and requests. This is how Jean Jacques does it with his Emile. Should Emil be accustomed to a normal, not too long sleep? “I would be too bad an educator if I could not make Emil wake up on his own and not get up, so to speak, according to my will, without saying a word to him. If he does not sleep enough, I give him a boring morning the next day, so that he will consider himself gained all the time that he can leave for sleep; if he sleeps too long, I show him, after getting up, an activity that fascinates him. Do I want him to wake up at a certain hour? I tell him: tomorrow at 6 o’clock fishing is arranged, we go here and there; want to take part? He agrees and asks me to wake him up; I promise or do not promise, depending on the circumstances; if he wakes up too late, he finds me already gone to the river.”
The time has come for teaching literacy: the corresponding organs have already developed, in fact, there is already a corresponding need, but Emil does not think about literacy. How to make Emil feel the need and become interested in literacy? “Emil sometimes receives invitations from his father, his mother, relatives, friends for dinner, for a walk, for a boat ride, for some public holiday. These notes are short, clear, precise, well written. It is necessary to find someone who would read them to him: this someone is not just at home at the right moment or responds to Emil with unkindness to Emil’s inattention to him yesterday. So the case, the moment is skipped. The note is finally read, but it’s already too late. Ah, if only I could read it myself! Meanwhile, new notes are being received: they are so short! There are so many interesting things in them. So I would like to read them; meanwhile you meet either help or rejection. All this, in the end, forces Emile himself to zealously take up the letter, the main instructions in which Jean Jacques gives him. — Or it’s time to study the sciences — cosmography, physics. Usually they take a book or a model and begin to study nature from the book or from an artificial model. They try in every possible way to facilitate learning, free learning from work, and shorten the duration of learning. Rousseau’s concern is the opposite: “There are so many amazing methods, he says, aimed at shortening the period of study in the sciences; it would be good if someone gave us another method, which, while making it difficult to teach the sciences, would require students to make an effort in learning. Not from books and models, but from nature itself, Emil must study nature. “We saw the sunrise on Midsummer Day; we’ll go see it at Christmas or some other winter day; for it is already known that we are not lazy and that the cold is nothing to us. I arrange it so that this second observation is made in the same place as the first, with the help of a clever move preparing a remark, one of us will not fail to exclaim: this is interesting! The sun rises in the wrong place! Here are our old signs, and now it has risen there, etc.” This is how Emile becomes interested in cosmography, he has relevant questions, to which Jean Jacques answers him. Or how to interest the power of magnetism when there is no magnetic ore around? You can come to an agreement with wandering magicians who, at a nearby fair, where Emil goes for a walk, will show him miracles in a tub of water: wax fish and geese moving at their orders. Amazed, Emile will be interested in the cause of this strange phenomenon, and Jean-Jacques will satisfy his curiosity. — In general, Jean Jacques also organizes the moral education of Emil, which, as you know, ends in an affair with Sophia and Emil’s marriage to her, played out like clockwork under the guidance of an experienced Jean Jacques.
Can such education in the true sense of the word be called natural and free? Emil does not know the words «duty» and «submission» — they are banished from his vocabulary. He does what he wants. The teaching of the sciences, as we have seen, is arranged in such a way that he asks and the teacher answers, and not vice versa, as is the case in an ordinary school. But what does Emil want? What is he asking? It is enough to think about the above examples and read the novel of Rousseau to see that Emile wants and asks exactly what he wants, that he wants and asks, his tutor Jean Jacques. Emile is under the relentless control of Jean Jacques, who, like a shadow, follows his every step, vigilantly protecting him from the harmful influences of culture and placing before him a network of skillfully rigged cases that should arouse certain needs in Emile and arouse certain questions in him. Each of Emile’s questions has long been foreseen by Jean Jacques, each of his «independent» actions is the fruit of the skillful machinations of his teacher, whom Rousseau calls in one place «Minister of Nature» not by chance. Is it possible, under such conditions, to speak of Emil’s freedom? In the following characteristic confession, Rousseau himself answers this question. “In the most careful education, the teacher commands and imagines that he controls. In fact, the child controls. He uses what you demand from him in order to get from you what he likes, and he always knows how to make you pay him one hour of perseverance with eight days of pleasure … Go with your pupil along the opposite path; let him think that he is always the master, and in fact you will be the way. There is no more complete submission than that which preserves the semblance of freedom; thus the will itself is imprisoned. The poor child who knows nothing, can do nothing, knows nothing, is he not entirely in your power? Don’t you dispose of everything that surrounds him in relation to him? Don’t you have the power to impress him however you please? His labors, his games, his pleasures, his misfortunes—are they not all in your hands, so that he does not even suspect it? No doubt he must do nothing but what he himself wants; but he must not want anything but what you would like him to do; he should not take a single step that you would not foresee. He must not open his mouth without you knowing what he will say.»
Emil’s freedom is thus reduced to the absence of consciousness of oppression on the part of the educator. But isn’t this the worst kind of slavery, when the victim of oppression is not even aware of it? The captivity of the will—is it not many times worse than the captivity of action? Isolated from all other influences except the constant and stubborn influence of the omnipotent and omnipresent Jean Jacques, Emile wants what he wants, that he wants, his tutor — up to marrying Jean-Jacques destined for his wife Sophia.