Many mothers tend to feel sorry for their child, but the idea of free education with this desire not to overwork the child and create comfortable living conditions for him is in no way connected.
Rousseau’s views
As an ideologue of free education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau opposes the pampered female culture, where it is customary to feel sorry for the child, to yield to the child, to do for the child, to create comfortable living conditions for him.
“Don’t overwork the child, he is still a child!”
No, according to Rousseau, natural education is a direct encounter of a child with a tough and difficult life, with cold and hunger, with deprivation and death. Rousseau is against medicine, it makes a person pampered. Let him catch a cold, but not become a madman. Rousseau is exacting in the upbringing of the child’s resilience, and accustoming the child to the harsh reality of life is quite compatible with the idea of free education.
They only think about how to protect their child; this is not enough: one must teach him how to save himself when he grows up, to endure the blows of fate, to despise excess and poverty, to live, if necessary, in the ice of Iceland or on the red-hot cliff of Malta. The point is not to prevent him from dying, but to make him live.
Rousseau’s free upbringing is not about the fact that the child does not have to learn.
Rousseau is against the scholastic, dead, formal teaching of unnecessary sciences that litter the child’s head, but at the same time he is for persistent teaching of the child what is timely for him, what will be necessary and useful for him in life. According to Rousseau, such persistent training is quite compatible with the idea of free education.