What Rousseau Got Right
A pre-crawling infant stretches for something beyond reach. You a) bring the object to the infant? b) bring the infant to the object? or c) do nothing? Dewey, Hirsch, Freire. Maybe Socrates and Mann. These are often the names associated with the greatest thinking and writing on education. Jean-Jacque Rousseau is often not included in this pantheon in spite of writing "Emile," one of the most thorough treatises on the subject of educating a human being from birth to adulthood. There are valid criticisms that I will not raise here. If you are unaware of them, I encourage you to read "Emile" and see if you can generate them! What I will suggest here is that Rousseau got at least one thing right that I fear more and more are getting wrong in modern education: we have a duty to help our charges estimate distances and become the agents of traversing them. By distance, I mean not simply physical distance as Rousseau perhaps metaphorically refers to it when he first broache...