ABSTRACT
What, according to Rousseau, is the aim of education? Who should be its ultimate beneficiary? How should it be designed? The aim is set by our natures: we are active, independent beings who are transformed (and readily malformed) by culture and social hierarchies; but we are also capable of autonomous critical rationality in the service of civic harmony. Education should be designed to preserve that activity, to bypass a natural tendency to dependency and the ills it produces. It should enable us to be freely and rationally self-legistating, actively participating in the construction of the political arrangements that form our character, our sentiments and motives. Education is in the first instance moral education: that is, education of a person’s active psychology: his fundamental needs, the habitual direction of his imagination and sentiments, his ability to reason and to act from reason.
