Natural Virtue versus Book Learning: Rousseau and the great Enlightenment battle over education

Abstract

Although Rousseau was certainly the towering figure in educational theory in the later Enlightenment, his educational theories proved more serviceable to the Counter-Enlightenment. The moral order on which society depends rests in his view on a natural sentiment which education should cultivate in the child and allow to develop uncorrupted by society. From this emerged a view of education, strongly espoused during the French Revolution by Robespierre and Saint Just, which believed it more important for children to remain ordinary and “natural” than to learn things. This view clashed directly with the ideas of Radical Enlightenment thinkers (Diderot, d'Holbach, Helvétius and Condorcet), and carried further during the Revolution, before Robespierre's rise, that the republic needs compulsory universal education that instils into children (and parents) the elements of a secular morality based on equality and the principles of the Rights of Man. The resulting clash of educational policies reflected the wider ideological conflict within French revolutionary republicanism in the 1790s.