Imagine a world with no school and you had to educate yourself? How would you live without this education? Is school mandatory to attain this education? A world without school would be different, but the education can still be acquired through different means. In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the monster illustrates the importance of what Rousseau calls an education through “other things.” Through handling and encountering objects and phenomenon and nature, the monster learns all he needs to survive on his own without even having to go to school and be taught by a teacher, which Rousseau believes isn’t necessary to attain education. As you go along you will witness the monster in Frankenstein who learned the benefit of fire along with the danger of fire through his experiences. Next you will encounter how Frankenstein copied and enacted the emotions of others just by observing them. Then you will see how his experiences push him to educate himself about humans which eventually results in the monster learning to read and write on his own without attending school.
One thought on “Education Through Experiences”
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What’s good:
Your hook is very compelling.
You use a roadmap.
You have a theory and a literary text.
You are trying to put them in conversation.
Concerns:
I think your hook is good, but your transition (the rhetorical questions that follow it) actually weaken the hook by asking your reader to leave that initial compelling question and jump to these other questions that don’t really narrow us in.
My concern about your thesis is that even though you have the theory text and you’re applying that to the literary text, you don’t really say how the literary or the theory text are affected by the fact that you can put them in this relationship. What I mean is that it’s a conversation. It’s not enough just to say Frankenstein reflects Emile. You need to posit a claim about how the way Frankenstein illustrates the ideas in Emile speaks back to Emile and how we understand it. OR you have to posit how the way in which understanding some part of Emile actually complicates our understanding of how Franklin tries to illustrate Roussean ideals.