This is written in response to Barry Sitt’s post that can be found here.

I agree with you wholeheartedly and would like to expand on your post. Some may call the concept Rousseau implies in your first quote to be a kind of tough love, but it’s actually quite cruel. I understand Rousseau’s beliefs that a child should learn for himself, but there should be guidance provided to the child along the way. Rousseau says to never make a child say “Forgive me” for “he does not know how to do you wrong…he can do nothing morally wrong, and he deserves neither punishment nor reproof” (8). A child may not be aware of right or wrong for he has no grounds to base that on, but that is especially why he should be taught. “The first impulses of nature” may not always be right – what if it is in the child’s nature to murder (8)? It may start out relatively small; he may “seize a bird as he seizes a stone,” killing it without knowing that in a few years, he will be able to look back on that memory and see his past action as morally wrong and that it happened because at the time, no one had taught him otherwise(4).

Rousseau makes a good point – no one knows how long a child may live or if a child may ever have the opportunity to become a man at all. He says that because of that, children should be allowed to live life to the fullest, and he believes that it is only through life’s most natural, lawless state that a child’s true joy can be achieved. Rousseau asks: “How do you know that all this fine teaching…will not do him more harm than good in the future?” (5) But to that, I ask: how does Rousseau know that not teaching the child at all would do him more good than harm in the future? If a child has never experienced having to sit still, he will most likely not fare well when it becomes time to start studying as an adolescent. The transition from child to adolescent will be very short and therefore too blunt. Rousseau writes: “To train a child to be really attentive so that he may be really impressed by any truth of experience, he must spend anxious days before he discovers that truth” (16).  But what if, due to a child’s freely roaming upbringing, those anxious days result in anxious years? By the time the child is expected to be a man, he would not have learned what a man is expected to know. In reference to the original post – it would be a waste not to educate a child; “Life is about being proactive.”

Instead, there should be a good balance between playtime and education, and between tough love and affection. A child will grow up well when given the appropriate amount of time to truly enjoy his innocent fun, but lessons on proper manners and morals won’t necessarily “increase suffering in childhood” (5). When formulated correctly, playtime and education in a child can turn him into a man far quicker than one alone would. The same applies with tough love and affection – if the former is the only one witnessed in a child’s upbringing, he will be hardened, and if the latter is given out too generously, a child will be too weak-hearted. A man does not rely only on himself or material objects, but on a balance between those things and other humans. Rousseau asks: “What then is human wisdom? Where is the path of true happiness?” (5) I believe the answer stems from balance.