Jean-Jacques Rousseau on nature, wholeness and education

[Skip Zilla]

InfEd feature article on Jean-Jacques Rousseau considers how "drawing from a broad spectrum of traditions including botany, music and philosophy, his thinking has influenced subsequent generations of educational thinkers - and permeates the practice of informal educators. His book Émile was the most significant book on education after Plato's Republic, and his other work had a profound impact on political theory and practice, romanticism and the development of the novel (Wokler 1995: 1)."

[Ian Carmichael]

And there it is! Case proven!! I was just opining elsewhere about the need for breadth - to gather from a broad range of expertise in order to provide some coherent sense, unity, or at least some integrative questions. It's a easy thing to become a 'Johnny one-note' - the caricature is that the expert knows more and more about less and less, until they reach the pinnacle of knowing everything about nothing.
In the complex and real world, there's a symphony to be played - or jazz if you must, or harmony to be made out of the 'one-notes' and here's where the breadth skills are important, and here's also where the networks are important, for breadth has long escaped the capacities of a single mind. I think it was Thomas Young who was described as the 'last man who knew everything' - if that's more than a catchy book title, he left us in 1829 so there's even less chance of knowing everything in this subsequent 180 years.
Dilettantes we can do without (imho), so the only way to grow strong (and timely) breadth is through collaborations of experienced competent practitioners whose competence, experience and practice overlap, but don't replicate each other.

I have a mental image of a bridge - the individual is like a pylon - anchored deep through their expertise, yet reaching out in collaborative interest - and needing another close pylon, reaching out sufficiently to connect, and as the bridge is built through the connecting pylons it can hold, and carry traffic, unlike the solitary guru.

[Skip Zilla]

I recently retweeted a quote that was tweeted by a Twitter friend which cuts to the core of knowing anything. Here's the quote which I have inscribed on my laptop case so that I can read it every day: "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance...it is the illusion of knowledge." Stephen Hawking. Conventional teachers may throw bricks at me, but I see that "illusions of knowledge" are rampant in classrooms of all subjects and age groups. The corrective is simply to enlist everyone's curiosity in discoveries that are tentative and refinable over time, giving great respect to and staying connected with more serious and authentic investigators/detectives/questioners, but taking confidence in even tentative, even faulty beginnings and self-respecting oneself for the intelligence to move forward to more complete and personally significant results.

[Vincent Mespoulet]

One of the best book i know about Jean-Jacques Rousseau is: Jean Starobinski "Jean-Jacques Rousseau - La transparence et l'obstacle". Maybe you can check out if there is (and i'm sure there is) an english translation of this book. Actually, Rousseau is not a Romantic, he belonged totally to the spirit of the "Lights Century" (le siècle des Lumières) but he is the founder of a new vision of the world. For example, in one of his books i prefer, "Rêveries du promeneur solitaire" (Reveries of a Solitary Walker) a kind of very original autobiography, you can maybe understand more easily what i mean about this new perception. For example, he gave a new way to feel nature, landscapes, and also relationships between men and women, inspiring all the romanticism of the beginning of the 19th century...
If you follow this link, you can read both in french/english a good study about the work of Jean Starobinski.

[Skip Zilla]

Thank you, Vincent, for the recommendation of Jean Starobinski's specific study of Rousseau. His general studies of the le siècle des Lumières are attractive, too. Revolution has been misunderstood by those who see the status-quo as the only possible "reality." While there is much of value to conserve from generation to generation, even Thomas Jefferson understood that revolution is ultimately about sustaining "liberty, equality and fraternity" through authentic public education--that as sheer political imagining and sloganeering their fundamental importance is gravely diminished.

[Vincent Mespoulet]

About the period of Revolution, you have an essential contribution on education by the french mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet with his "Rapport et Projet de décret sur l'Organisation générale de l'Instruction Publique" i.e. Report and Draft decree on the general organization of public instruction

For the first time in history of education, you have a global project about education at school. O don't know if you can find an english translation of this text, but be sure it is a fundamental document for anyone interested by history of education...

[Skip Zilla]

This quote from the InfEd article is the reason I started this discusssion:

"We may well disagree with various aspects of his scheme - but there can be no denying his impact then - and now. It may well be, as Darling (1994: 17) has argued, that the history of child-centred educational theory is a series of footnotes to Rousseau."

[Vincent Mespoulet]

i agree about the importance of Rousseau about an history of child-centred educational theory. But there is also in the histpry of education an older great period: 16th century and the publishing of the first "Traités de civilisation puérile" i.e. Essays on children education. Of Course you have the great Erasmus "On Civility in children", but when i was student i read dozens of theses essays: i think you can find here the roots of child-centred educational theory. In France, the famous writer about this topic was François Rabelais. In his famous burlesque novels Gargantua and Pantagruel you have a very contemporary program about what is good in education for children... If you are really interested, i can find for you texts in english...

[Skip Zilla]

The thread of awareness of children as developmental human beings vital to positive social and economic outcomes, and as persons worthy of social esteem for their individual natural gifts, in the ways these earlier European thinkers and advocates envisioned is one that cannot be left out of sewing of progressive thinking on and practices of education.