Rousseau’s Errors: They Persist Today in Educational Theory   

Pity poor Émile!  

Published on February 12, 2009 by Peter Gray in Freedom to Learn 

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200902/rousseau-s-errors-they-persist-today-in-educational-theory 

"……The book [Émile] is partly a novel and partly a philosophical treatise on the natural goodness of human beings and how to preserve that goodness through an education that does not corrupt.…."

"…what I see to be the primary fallacies of Rousseau's educational theory. The fallacies are important as a critique not just of Rousseau but of a whole line of educational theories following him that are very much alive today.

1. The vulnerable-child fallacy: The idea that children must be protected from learning the wrong things.

2. The stage-of-development fallacy: The idea that children can learn only certain kinds of things at certain ages.

3. The lone-child-in-nature fallacy: The idea that children learn mostly or entirely from acting on natural objects in their environment.

4. The controllability fallacy: The idea that it is possible to know a child so well as to be able to control, through subtle means, what the child learns.