Rousseau: Learning Through Experience

There should be a strong emphasis on learning by doing.

—U.S. Army, 1962

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

—Oscar Wilde, 1900

Rousseau (1712–1778), a French thinker of profound originality, helped move philosophy out of the abstractions of the Enlightenment into the psychological realm of modern times. It is his theories that helped spark "progressive education" in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s (via Dewey), and the constructivist movement (via Piaget) in learning in the 1990s. As Dewey writes, "Rousseau's teaching that education is a process of natural growth has influenced most theorizing about education since his time" (Schools of Tomorrow, 1915). Rousseau's most important books for his theory of learning are The Social Contract, The Confessions, and Emile, the latter being an educational tract disguised as a novel. The following comments are taken from all three of these.

Maxims from Rousseau

• We Learn by Doing. "True education consists less of precepts (lectures) than of practice."

• Learner-Centered Design. "Begin by studying your learners."

• Learning Should Be Customized. "Instruction must be individual."

• Learning Is Lifelong. "Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education."

• Learn from the Territory, Not the Map. "You think you're teaching him what the world is like; he's only learning the map."

• Sequence Learning from Simple to Complex (Mild to Strong). Example: To accustom his pupil Emile to the sound of a gun, Rousseau starts with a small charge and proceeds to ever greater charges until Emile can tolerate the large explosion given off by a real gun. This "shaping" of a response became a cardinal tenet in twentieth-century behaviorism.

• Give Nature Time. "Give nature time to work before you take upon yourself her business, lest you interfere with her dealings."

• Learning Should Be Self-Directed. "Learners should always learn for their own ends and advantages, not for the ends of an abstract curriculum."

• Ignore Tradition: Innovate! "I will not stop to prove the current education system is bad, countless others have done so before me."

• Don't Lose Sight of Powerful Theories from the Past. "Plato's Republic is the most beautiful educational treatise ever written."

• Not Facts but a Methodology for Lifelong Learning. "My object is not to furnish the mind with knowledge, but with a method of acquiring it whenever needed."

Fastpaths

1762	Jean Jacques Rousseau: Social Contract.
1762	Jean Jacques Rousseau: Emile.
1781	Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Confessions.
1945	Robert Ulich: History of Educational Thought.

See also Dewey Constructivism