Tang Xiaomin
Rousseau (28 June 1712 --- 2 July 1778) was a prominent French thinker, writer, and educator. The intellectual pioneer of the French Revolution in the 18th century, he is the author of "The Social Contract", "Emile", "Confessions", "New Arlois" and so on. Emile is an educational novel in which Rousseau takes his imaginary child Emile as the object of education, and discusses Emile's naturalistic educational ideas by telling the story of Emile's growth and educational journey from birth to the age of 20. Rousseau's educational thought was aimed at the popular rationalist educational concept at that time, and when discussing his own thoughts, Rousseau often pushed an opinion to the extreme, forming a strong impact and leaving a strong impression on the reader. Although he also added to this extreme expression, these extreme words left a strong and profound impression that the reader often only remembered these words and ignored the additions he made. For example, emile begins: "Everything that comes from the hand of the Creator is good, but when it reaches the hands of man, it all becomes bad." "Man" does not want things to be as they are, even to man, and must train man like a horse in a horse training field." But Rousseau said, "If you don't do this, things may be worse,...... A person who is born without the upbringing of others may simply be out of shape. It does not completely negate the meaning of upbringing, but the reader mostly only remembers the idea that "everything that comes from the hand of the Creator is good, and when it reaches the hands of man, it all becomes bad."
For example, Rousseau wrote in his book that the initial education should be completely negative, "I would rather let a child grow five feet tall by the age of ten than have any judgment ability." "It is even said that the child grows up to be 12 years old, and even if it is impossible to distinguish between the left hand and the right hand, it seems that it does not matter." But in another place, Rousseau adds: "You are not in a hurry to achieve any end, but you can achieve it with great certainty and very quickly." I can almost certainly say that Emile was fully learned to read and write before she was ten years old, precisely because I paid very little attention to his ability to read and write before he was fifteen. It turned out that emile, whom he had taught, had fully learned to read and write before the age of 10. This is very noteworthy, because it shows that Rousseau did not fail to pay attention to reading and writing. But many readers, including some scholars of Rousseau, tend to ignore Rousseau's formulation and one-sidedly believe that Rousseau opposed children's reading. For example, Rousseau advocated "never reading before the age of twelve", and specifically said: "Children are the child's rational sleep period, this stage can only be perceived by feeling and experience, and the physique has not developed to the stage of using reason." We don't want to create young doctors and old children, because the precocious fruit, although attractive in appearance, is not luscious. Sensory organs are tools of children's wisdom, let children learn how to feel, how to touch, see, and listen through the sensory organs, do not let him use reading and other external means to change his natural development prematurely, before the age of 12, never read, so as to help his normal development of intelligence, so as not to let prejudice and error occupy his mind. Commentators believe that this is Rousseau's educational thought, but in fact it is not. Because Rousseau fully learned to read and write before Emile was 10 years old.
From Rousseau's own experience, we can see that Rousseau himself learned to read very early on and benefited from it a lot. In the Confessions, Rousseau put it this way: "I don't know what I did before I was five or six years old, nor how I learned to read. I just remember the first books I read, and that's when it started. My mother left some novels, and after dinner I read them with my father. At first, my father just wanted to use these interesting reading materials to make people practice reading, but soon after, we took turns reading between the two countries with great interest, endlessly, often all night, and when a book was in hand, we would never stop reading it. Sometimes when the father hears the swallows of the morning, he says with embarrassment: 'Let's go to sleep; I am even more childish than you.' ’”
Rousseau read not only many novels but also history books in his childhood. These history books had a profound impact on him. The most profound influence on Rousseau was the ancient Greek Protagge's "Biography of heroes", rousseau once said: "Because of this interesting reading, and the discussion of this book between my father and me, I developed my spirit of freedom and democracy, and my proud and unashamed character... I am constantly haunted by the thoughts of the great men of Rome and Athens, as if I were in the company of them; I myself am a citizen of the Republic and the son of a patriotic and fanatical father, and I have been inspired by my father's teachings; I believe that I am Greek or Roman; I have integrated myself with the personality in the book; when I think of the stoicism and fearlessness of the fascinating great Man Jays, I suddenly have bright eyes and a majestic voice. ”
Rousseau was "full of excitement" and "endless" when he read novels as a child. This is very noteworthy. This shows that children love to read, eager to know the stories in the book, and feel great pleasure from it. It can be said that it is also the nature of children to like to read. We cannot take the nature of children too simply.
The Chinese writer Bing Xin also had a similar reading experience to Rousseau. Bing Xin began to read the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" at the age of 7, to which Bing Xin recalled: "I swallowed dates, half understood, and looked straight down. Many glyphs, because of the relationship between repetition and presentation, actually guessed the meaning of the words. The more I read it, the more I understood, the more interested I became, and I finished reading "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in one breath, and then picked up "Water Margin" and "Liaozhai Zhiyi". At that time, my father's friends knew that I would watch "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and thought that it was a fun thing for a seven-year-old child to say that "Master Dong made a big fuss about Fengyi Pavilion". Every time my father took me to the warship, they always took me to a round table and told me to talk about the Three Kingdoms. Bing Xin also read Wen Yan's "Liaozhai Zhiyi", she said: "Liaozhai Zhiyi is really a good book, each story, more than a few thousand words, less only a few hundred words. The characters in it, who are people, ghosts, and foxes, all have their own unique personalities, and each "person" stands up from the word! I sometimes laughed and sometimes cried, and my mother said that I was crazy about reading books. By the age of eleven, Bing Xin had read all of the Shuobu Series, as well as Journey to the West, Smallpox Rain, Rebirth, Children's Heroes, Shuoyue, Chronicles of the States of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, and so on. Rousseau said that when he was 6 years old, he read novels "with great interest and endlessly", and Bing xin said that when he was 7 years old, he read novels "sometimes laughing, sometimes shedding tears", and the two were strikingly similar.
The belief that Rousseau was generally opposed to children's reading is a misunderstanding of Rousseau's educational ideas. What Rousseau was opposed to was not the reading of novels, but to the rational education of children. Rousseau said: "Educating children with reason is an important principle of Locke; this principle is the most fashionable today; but it seems to me that it is so fashionable, but it is far from reliable; as far as I am concerned, I find that no one is more stupid than the children who have received much intellectual education." Of all the faculties of man, the faculty of reason can be said to be a synthesis of various other faculties, and therefore it is the most difficult to develop, and it develops late. But some people still want to use it to develop other senses! What is what Rousseau called "rational education"? Rational education is the education to cultivate rationality, including moral education and the training of logical thinking. Rousseau believed that there is an intrinsic schedule for the growth of children. "Nature wants children to be like children before they become adults. If we disrupt this order, we will produce some early ripening fruits that are neither plump nor sweet, and which will soon rot: we will produce some young doctors and old dragon bell children. Rousseau opposed "children as adults" and "educating children with reason" against allowing children to form "the ability to judge" prematurely. Reading novels is not a rational education at all, but an activity that can make children experience great pleasure. Rousseau himself began reading novels at the age of 6, which shows that children should read novels. Reading novels from childhood can cultivate a person's strong love of reading and innocent reading interest. It is often said that children are poets by their very nature. We can also say that children, by their very nature, are people who read poetry and novels. Children have a strong interest in the unknown world and a special sensitivity to written language. In reading, even more than adults can appreciate the joy of reading novels. Some educators in China today only see some of Rousseau's words in Emile, but do not pay attention to Rousseau's other writings, and even Rousseau himself forgets how he is. This misunderstanding of Rousseau's educational ideas should not continue.