Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Emile tells the life story of a fictional man names Emile. In the story, Rousseau connects Emile’s development and the education he receives in his life. In his first couple books, Rousseau focuses on children. He says “they retain sounds, form, sensation, but rarely ideas, and still more rarely relations.” (Rousseau, 11).  According to Rousseau, younger children in the Age of Nature must emphasize the physical side of their education. They use their physical senses to acquire knowledge. Rousseau also believes that that a person should begin formal education in his teenage years. However the education he suggests is working with a private tutor. Rousseau believes that “a student will develop reasoning” under the guidance of a tutor. He also believes that the adolescence stage is the best time to begin studies because a man is fully developed. In the adult years of Emile’s life, Rousseau proposes that a man should focus his education on religion.

In comparison to Descartes “Book of the World” and Locke’s “experience, Rousseau takes a more planned approach in life. He maps out how education should flow in a man through his life. For example, Rousseau uses Emile’s life and separates them by books to show the steps in how education came to Emile. However, it is quite similar to Locke’s idea that no man has natural abilities and must start from scratch. Rousseau recognizes that there is no “natural man” in modern society. Locke and Rousseau share the idea that human development grow around experience. Descartes and Rousseau share that idea that studies are important. This is shown through Rousseau’s focus on formal education during adolescence years. However, Rousseau is different from both these philosophers in that he thinks aside from how a person should learn and focuses on the “when” part. “It is only after long training, after much consideration as to his own feelings and the feelings he observes in others, that he will be able to generalize his individual notions under the abstract idea of humanity” (Rousseau, 30). According to Rousseau, a man will finally adjust to a society once he has gone through his course of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood and understands how education flows through himself.