ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, self-taught genius of the Age of Enlightenment, was born in 1712 in Calvinist Geneva to parents of the bourgeois class. His father was a feckless watchmaker. His mother died a few days after his birth. Rousseau's personal qualifications as an educational theorist were minimal. Emile consolidated Rousseau's fame, but led to his banishment and exile after it was condemned by the Paris Theology Faculty and then by the Paris Parlement, which ordered his arrest. Rousseau's goal was to show how it is possible to raise an individual who could function as an autonomous agent even in the illegitimate political order of his time. Rousseau took a consistently naturalistic approach to education in the Emile, maintaining that the child is naturally good and made wicked only by its environment. Thus Rousseau was hostile to swaddling infants and to controlling toddlers with leading reins.
