综合英语.西方思想经典选读(常俊跃黄滔)_Text B On Education（1 / 1）_综合英语.西方思想经典选读最新章节免费阅读无弹窗

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Pre-reading

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the Enlightenment in France and across Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the overall development of modern political and educational thought.

èmile,or On Education, Rousseau’s masterpiece,is a kind of half treatise, half novel that tells the life story of a fictional man named èmile. In it, Rousseau traces the course of èmile’s development and the education he receives, an education designed to create in him all the virtues of Rousseau’s idealized “natural man”, uncorrupted by modern society.

The following passage is an excerpt from Book 1 of Rousseau’s èmile, or On Education.

Prompts for Your Reading

1.According to Rousseau, why is Man in need of education?

2.What are the three categories in Rousseau’s notion of education?

3.How does Rousseau describe the dynamics among the three factors in education?

4.What is Rousseau’s definition of nature?

5.What is the major argument in Paragraph 11 concerning habits?

6.What are those prejudices that Rousseau has mentioned in Paragraphs 12 and 13?

7.Which does Rousseau believe to be more essential, to do well in a calling or to be a man?

8.How should a child be taught according to Rousseau?

9.Make a list of the ideas expressed in this passage. Can this list help you figure out the essence in Rousseau’s philosophy of education?

[1] God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master’s taste like the trees in his garden.

[2] Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves1. Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her place. She would be like a sapling chance2 sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.

[3] Tender, anxious mother, I appeal to you. You can remove this young tree from the highway and shield it from the crushing force of social conventions. Tend and water it ere3 it dies. One day its fruit will reward your care. From the outset raise a wall round your child’s soul; another may sketch the plan, you alone should carry it into execution.

[4] Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. If a man were born tall and strong his size and strength would be of no good to him till he had learnt to use them; they would even harm him by preventing others from coming to his aid; left to himself he would die of want4 before he knew his needs. We lament the helplessness of infancy; we fail to perceive that the race would have perished had not man begun by being a child.

[5] We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man’s estate, is the gift of education.

[6] This education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things. The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of nature, the use we learn to make of his growth is the education of men, what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the education of things.

[7] Thus we are each taught by three masters. If their teaching conflicts, the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace with himself; if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his goal, he lives at peace with himself, he is well-educated.

[8] Now of these three factors in education nature is wholly beyond our control, things are only partly in our power; the education of men is the only one controlled by us; and even here our power is largely illusory, for who can hope to direct every word and deed of all with whom the child has to do.

[9] Viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible, since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control. Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must favor us if we are to reach it.

[10] What is this goal? As we have just shown, it is the goal of nature. Since all three modes of education must work together, the two that we can control must follow the lead of that which is beyond our control. Perhaps this word Nature has too vague a meaning. Let us try to define it.

[11] Nature, we are told, is merely habit. What does that mean? Are there not habits formed under compulsion, habits which never stifle nature? Such, for example, are the habits of plants trained horizontally. The plant keeps its artificial shape, but the sap has not changed its course, and any new growth the plant may make will be vertical. It is the same with a man’s disposition; while the conditions remain the same, habits, even the least natural of them, hold good; but change the conditions, habits vanish, nature reasserts herself. Education itself is but habit, for are there not people who forget or lose their education and others who keep it? Whence5 comes this difference? If the term nature is to be restricted to habits conformable to nature we need say no more.

[12] We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected in various ways by our environment. As soon as we become conscious of our sensations we tend to seek or shun the things that cause them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because they suit us or not, and at last because of judgments formed by means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives us. These tendencies gain strength and permanence with the growth of reason, but hindered by our habits they are more or less warped6 by our prejudices. Before this change they are what I call Nature within us.

[13] In the social order where each has his own place a man must be educated for it. If such a one leaves his own station he is fit for nothing else. His education is only useful when fate agrees with his parents’ choice; if not, education harms the scholar, if only by the prejudices it has created. In Egypt, where the son was compelled to adopt his father’s calling, education had at least a settled aim; where social grades remain fixed, but the men who form them are constantly changing, no one knows whether he is not harming his son by educating him for his own class.

[14] In the natural order men are all equal and their common calling is that of manhood, so that a well-educated man cannot fail to do well in that calling and those related to it. It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him to be a man. Life is the trade I would teach him. When he leaves me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man. All that becomes a man he will learn as quickly as another. In vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place. The real object of our study is man and his environment. To my mind those of us who can best endure the good and evil of life are the best educated; hence it follows that true education consists less in precept than in practice.

[15] We must therefore look at the general rather than the particular, and consider our scholars as man in the abstract, man exposed to all the changes and chances of mortal life. If men were born attached to the soil of our country, if one season lasted all the year round, if every man’s fortune were so firmly grasped that he could never lose it, then the established method of education would have certain advantages; the child brought up to his own calling would never leave it, he could never have to face the difficulties of any other condition. But when we consider the fleeting nature of human affairs, the restless and uneasy spirit of our times, when every generation overturns the work of its predecessor, can we conceive a more senseless plan than to educate a child as if he would never leave his room, as if he would always have his servants about him? If the wretched creature takes a single step up or down he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear pain; it is training him to feel it.

[16] People think only of preserving their child’s life; this is not enough, he must be taught to preserve his own life when he is a man, to bear the buffets of fortune7, to brave wealth and poverty, to live at need among the snows of Iceland or on the scorching rocks of Malta. In vain you guard against death; he must die; and even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they are mistaken. Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living.

Notes

1.by halves: without being thorough or exhaustive

2.chance: by chance

3.ere: before (mostly in literary works)

4.want: a lack or shortage

5.whence: from where

6.warp: twist or cause to twist out of shape

7.buffets of fortune: buffet在此的意思是“blow”，即“打击”之意，因此buffets of fortune的意思是“命运中的打击”。

Questions for Further Thinking

1.To Rousseau, nature is good and society is evil. If a child is to develop into a good person, he must be exposed to nature and isolated from society. Do you agree with Rousseau that isolating a growing child from society is the best option?

2.Today similar ideas are expressed by those who wish to control the television shows children watch, the games they play, the ideas they hear, and the people they associate with. Do you think we are too much obsessed with this vulnerable-child idea?

3.What do you think are the best that adults can do for children’s long-term wellbeing in a corrupt society?

4.By citing the example of a plant being forced to grow in a certain way, Rousseau argues that habits are ineffective and that natural education relies upon inclinations. To what extent do you agree or disagree with Rousseau’s idea on the role of habits in education?

5.Rousseau believes that “true education consists less in precept than in practice”. What do precept and practice mean here? To what extent do you agree or disagree with Rousseau?

6.Rousseau believes that “those of us who can best endure the good and evil of life are the best educated”. What do you think should be the yardstick to measure the success of education?

After-reading Assignment

Oral Work

1.According to Rousseau, there is no sense in trying to reason with a young child because the child has no capacity to reason. The young child can learn physical skills and can learn through experiencing the direct consequences of his actions, but cannot learn anything useful through the symbolic means of language. What are the current research findings about children’s capacity to reason? Do they echo Rousseau’s idea or go against it? Work on these findings and report them to your classmates.

2.In Rousseau’s work, émile, the fictitious boy, spends the first 25 years of his life in the company of his tutor in the countryside. The tutor continuously studies émile, gets to know his every motive and whim, and uses that knowledge to provide the boy with just those experiences that best impart the exact lessons that the tutor deems appropriate. What kind of life do you expect to see émile living when he gets into contact with the society? Share your thoughts with your classmates/roommates. Choose a spokesperson to organize the results of your discussion and report them to your class.

3.Rousseau contends that living in cities is bad for children and will indoctrinate them far too early to all of the vices and pretensions that are common in urban areas. Work with your classmates to find out what are those vices and pretensions Rousseau talks about and discuss the impact of China’s urbanization move on children’s education. Report your findings as well as your discussion results to the class.

Written Work

1.What qualities should a tutor or parent possess so that he/she is able to educate a child at home rather than at school? Write an essay of about 400 words to explain your views.

2.Which idea in this passage strikes you as most truthful, and which idea strikes as being a bit too strong or even biased? Write down these two ideas and list further evidence and reasoning to support or contradict them. Exchange the results of your work with your classmates and see whether you respond to the author’s ideas in similar or different ways.

3.Philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Plato, John Locke, Mo Tzu, and Confucius wrote extensively on the purpose and role of education and schooling in their respective societies. These early thinkers shared many common ideas about what it is that schools should exist to do, but each of them also had their own unique perspectives on the role of schooling within a given culture and civilization. Study these thoughts and ideas and write a short report to present your findings.

4.Einstein, the great scientist and philosopher, believes that education has two central functions: one is to educate the individual as a free individual; the other is to educate the individual as a part of society. To what extent do you agree with Einstein on the functions of education? Please write an essay of about 500 words to explain your views.