Emile: Or On Education
Tags: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A clear, readable, and highly engrossing translation of Rousseau's masterpiece on the education and training of the young. [b]Wikipedia:[/b] Emile, or On Education is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. On its first appearance in 1762 it was publicly burned. The work tackles fundamental political and philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society— how, in particular, the individual might retain what Rousseau saw as innate human goodness while remaining part of a corrupting collectivity. Its opening sentence: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things everything degenerates in the hands of man.”