EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

2012, Supplement, 46–56

Jean Jacques Rousseau, modern developmental

psychology, and education

Willem Koops
Department of Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The
Netherlands

All the writings of Rousseau lead to development and education. His

pedagogical thinking conquered Europe via the German group of
pedagogues called the Philantropines and via the Swiss pedagogue
Pestalozzi. The ideas also reached the homes of modern upper-middle class
citizens, particularly in the Netherlands. The second half of the eighteenth
century marked the beginning of the establishment of Primary Schools (De
Swaan, 2004) in Prussia. They were inspired by both the Philantropines and
Pestalozzi. The schools were basically modelled after Rousseauian principles.
It is therefore not surprising that Jean Piaget empirically found developmental
processes in elementary school children of the twentieth century that resemble
the developmental phases described by Rousseau in the eighteenth century. It
is clear, however, that today the Rousseau–Piaget tradition has had its time
and that we should again develop an innovative pedagogy. Rousseau still
shows the way to achieve that.

Keywords: Jean Jacques Rousseau; Enlightenment; Philantropines; History of

development and education.

The citizen of the West is a Child of the Enlightenment. Consequently,

anyone wishing to think, speak and write about children, such as this writer,
must get to grips with the Enlightenment. With the focus on children, one
cannot avoid having to get to grips with Rousseau. In this paper, a broad
outline is first presented of Rousseau the person and his work. This reveals
that ultimately only one subject is of primary importance in Rousseau’s
work, namely the upbringing of the child (and the citizen).

Correspondence should be addressed to Willem Koops, Department of Developmental

Psychology, Utrecht University, W. C. Van Unnik Building, Heidelberglaan 2, Utrecht,
NL-3584 CS, The Netherlands. E-mail: W.Koops@uu.nl

Ó 2012 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
http://www.psypress.com/edp http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2012.730996
 MODERN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND EDUCATION 47

Subsequently, the paper addresses the appreciation of Rousseau’s child-

raising ideas at the time of the Enlightenment. This appreciation, in
particular in German-speaking regions, led to the development of public
education based on the principles of child-raising as described in Rousseau’s
Émile: or, On Education (1762/1763). By way of the progressive thinking of
the Enlightenment and of German Romanticism, child development became
the focus of attention. In our own time the child of the Enlightenment has
ceased to be in evidence; this is chiefly attributable to the effects of modern
electronic media. The chapter concludes by identifying the contemporary
new opportunities for child-raising and development and by stating how
these might be encouraged by taking Rousseau’s work as an example.

THE PEDAGOGICAL INTENTIONS OF ROUSSEAU’S

WORK
Jean Jacques Rousseau was a negative thinker full of paradoxes, if not
downright contradictions. A negative: contrary to the Belief in Progress
subscribed to by his contemporaries, he believed that arts and sciences had
given civilization little of value. Quite the opposite, they were more likely to
have morally corrupted the common man. In contrast to Thomas Hobbes,
Rousseau regarded the foundation of the State as the source of corruption,
hate, envy and war; not the State but the natural state is the desired form of
civilization, without cities, those sewers of civilization. Rousseau’s pedagogy
is negative: child-raising, he writes in his famous 1762/1763 work Émile: or,
On Education, is the difficult art of ruling without a mandate and of doing
everything by doing nothing.
His work is riddled with contradictions. These are usually described as
paradoxes by most Rousseau experts in an endless series of publications on
Rousseau himself and his work. As a result of this, Rousseau’s work has
something of the quality of a chameleon: it assumes as it were the colour and
meaning bestowed by the reader. A marvellous utterance by Rousseau
himself on paradoxes is to be found in Émile. It reads as follows, ‘‘Forgive
me my paradoxes; one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you
may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices’’.1
Now take, for example, The Social Contract, in which Rousseau argues for
the equality of all citizens: all the contracting partners are equal. This insight
is itself an outstanding political virtue. The contract relies on the Volonte´
Ge´nerale [general will]. Citizens must respect the laws, which are derived
from the Volonte´ Ge´nerale that is the general will of all citizens. Citizens are
obliged to submit of their own free will to the laws of the State, which after

1
For precise references to Rousseau’s work I simply refer here to Doorman (2012) and Wain
(2011).
48 KOOPS

all are based on their own wishes, as bundled together in the Volonte´
Ge´nerale. This Volonte´ is a rather abstract concept. It is a sort of guiding
idea but one that is difficult to put into practice. For example, Rousseau
believes that the Volonte´ Ge´nerale cannot be represented in, say, parliament
and constituent parliaments. He states quite simply that the monarch is the
expression of the Volonte´ Ge´nerale. Against this background, we need not be
surprised that Rousseau’s The Social Contract is used as justification of both
democratic forms of state and totalitarian states. For the sake of
amusement, I checked in Das Kapital by Marx, where I found a lovely
reference to Rousseau, who writes the following in his Discourse on Political
Economy, 1755, ‘‘I will allow you, says the capitalist, the honour of serving
me, on the condition that you give to me the little that remains to you for the
trouble I take to command you’’. Just as Marx could be used to set up
totalitarian systems, in which after all the will of the people, of the
proletarians, is carried out by the state power, so Rousseau’s Volonte´
Ge´nerale can also be used to justify totalitarian forms of state. The Social
Contract is actually the paradox of a totalitarian democracy.
It can be said, and many Rousseau authorities do say, that in almost all
modern—and present day—discussions about democracy, about justice,
about human rights, about international relations, about education, child-
raising and schooling, about what we now refer to as environmental issues,
about legislation, about good governance, about the sociological approach
to human relations, about individualism and egocentrism, about the tension
between the individual and the group, and so on, we always encounter the
aftermath of Rousseau.
For me, ultimately, Rousseau is of the greatest importance for his
pedagogy and developmental psychology. And I am not referring by any
means solely to Émile: or, On Education. From Rousseau’s first Discourse up
to and including The Social Contract, he describes a transition of the
individual from how he is in contemporary society (i.e., society in
Rousseau’s time) to how he could be were he to live in a society with the
right laws and institutions. And to achieve this, it is necessary to create the
ideal person by means of child-raising (see Wain, 2011). Accordingly, in
Julie, or the New Heloise, Rousseau describes the ideal family upbringing,
yet finally conceives such a deep mistrust of the French family in his own era
that he writes Émile, his concluding masterpiece, in which a fictional young
boy is taken from his family and raised to maturity (and further) by a tutor
very similar to Rousseau himself to become that ideal type of person whom,
as it were, makes possible the ideal society as described in, for example, The
Social Contract and the ideal family as in Julie.
What is special about Émile is that Rousseau himself was explicitly of the
opinion that this book should not be used as a practical guide to raising
children. This was a revolutionary book, one in which he left no doubt that
 MODERN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND EDUCATION 49

he found the French culture of his time abhorrent and that he wrote,
primarily, to demonstrate that this culture should not be replicated. Oddly
enough, this book was indeed taken as the starting point for child-raising
and, thanks to the enthusiasm of, among others, Immanuel Kant, Goethe
and Lessing, it achieved the status of a sort of pedagogical cult book and, by
way of German pedagogues (the Philantropines led by Basedow) and the
Swiss Pestalozzi, it resulted ultimately in the organization of public
education in accordance with the developmental path it describes. And so
it is not so strange that 250 years later the development psychologist Jean
Piaget encountered children with whom it could be established empirically
that, broadly speaking, they were following the development pathways of
Émile. It is true to say that the view of child development held by Jean
Jacques Rousseau became reality and has culturally been constructed within
Europe.
Should we wish to regard Rousseau as a great and important thinker
rather than a chaotic schizophrenic and a paranoid eccentric obsessed with
contradictions and paradoxes, this should be chiefly by virtue of the
enduring effect of his books on the realization of our Western culture, in
particular on the raising and development of children. I believe that
Rousseau, who knew nothing of children but who had a rich literary
fantasy, very clearly validates the famous quote by Einstein: ‘‘imagination is
more important than knowledge’’.

ENLIGHTENMENT AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT

A scholar who wants to think, speak and write about children has no choice
but to come to terms with the Enlightenment. This call takes us to the
greatest Enlightenment philosopher of all, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804),
who said: ‘‘. . . autonomous thinking is finding the ultimate test of truth in
oneself (i.e., in one’s own reason); and the fundamental principle of
continuously autonomous thinking is Enlightenment’’. Kant admired Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), whose Émile, ou de l’e´ducation from 1762 he
called ‘‘the birth certificate of pedagogy’’ (see Prins, 1963, p. 139), and which
work was later received with at least equal enthusiasm by Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe (1749–1832) as ‘‘the natural gospel of education’’, and by
Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
(1729–1781) as a ‘‘divine work’’ (see Soëtard, 1989, p. 144). It is good to note
that hardly any philosopher has been written about as much as Rousseau,
including voluminous literature on the reception of Rousseau’s thinking as
such (e.g., L’Aminot, 1992). Classical works on Rousseau include: Cassirer
(1932, 1955), Burgelin (1952), and Rang (1959). An accessible and
abundantly illustrated biography is Soëtard (1989). Many Works of
Rousseau were originally printed and published in Amsterdam; in The
50 KOOPS

Netherlands there has always been a profound and scholarly interest in

Rousseau’s (pedagogical) ideas as for example: Roland Holst (1918),
Brugmans (1951), Van der Velde (1967). Furthermore, there is a continuing
series entitled Annales de la Socie´te´ Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Geneva
(since 1905).
I have a strong conviction that no educationalist or developmental
psychologist can bear this professional title with honour without having
determined his or her own standpoint in relation to Rousseau’s Émile. Until
some 50 years ago, many colleagues would have endorsed this without a
doubt. I am afraid that now they may ironically shrug their shoulders, for
what importance has history to modern empirical researchers?
What message did Rousseau wish to convey? He claimed that pedagogy
should be child-oriented; and that there are age-related stages, to which the
approach towards the child, including the pedagogical and educational
approach, must be tailored; and that children must only be offered
knowledge when they display a need for it. Moreover, knowledge must
spring from a child’s own explorations, from hands-on experience,
preferably not from books. A child should certainly not be exposed to
wisdom from books before the age of 12! Despite much enthusiasm, from
Kant among others, Rousseau’s book should in the first place be regarded as
a revolutionary Enlightenment text, not as a pedagogical handbook. His
book stemmed from the tradition that Jonathan Israel named ‘‘radical
Enlightenment’’ (Israel, 2001, 2005).
According to Israel, the key figure of this radical Enlightenment is Baruch
de Spinoza (1632–1677), the great Dutch philosopher. The Epilogue of
Israel’s book is entitled: Rousseau, radicalism, revolution. Spinoza by way of
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) led to Rousseau and the French revolution. The
Émile was indeed radical. In the Émile the author pointed out that he did not
only rebel against French society, but also and foremost against its
reproduction (Soëtard, 1989, p. 97). Rousseau thought that children should
be taken ‘‘back to nature’’ (however, this expression did not appear in his
writings, but in those of his commentators). With ‘‘back to nature’’
Rousseau meant: as far away as possible from Parisian decadence. Children
should learn to think autonomously, without being led astray by French
culture, without following other people’s wisdom from books. This
Enlightenment idea is the radical expression of the primacy of the
autonomously thinking individual, which had great appeal to Kant. And
this is the reason that Rousseau’s Émile is a book for philosophers, not for
educationalists, fathers and mothers, as Rousseau emphasized (Bloom,
1979, p. 28). However, to no avail!
The first four books (parts) of the Émile describe the stages of a child’s
cognitive and moral development, and also how the up-bringer must respect
and be in keeping with these stages. The correspondence with the theory of
 MODERN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND EDUCATION 51

the future founder of developmental psychology, Jean Piaget (1896–1980),

in his lifetime director of ‘‘l’Institut J.-J. Rousseau’’ in Geneva, is striking.
Thanks to Piaget’s research on cognitive development, the Institute became
the most prestigious centre for pedagogical and developmental psycholo-
gical research worldwide for the largest part of the twentieth century.
Piaget’s and Rousseau’s stage theories are like two peas in a pod. It should
be realized that Piaget’s stage theory is deemed to be the result of
unprecedented large-scale and worldwide, be it mainly Western, empirical
research. Particularly, observing his own three children was a rich source of
scientific ideas to Piaget. Contrastingly, Rousseau abandoned his five
children immediately after birth; he did not like children of flesh and blood
at all. The boy Émile is a mere literary concoction. So, how can it be that
Piaget discovered in empirical research what Rousseau had made up in the
process of writing? I think there is a simple answer: European education,
particularly in public schools, was shaped according to Rousseau’s ideas,
despite Rousseau’s warnings. Below this process is described in a nutshell.

ROUSSEAU AND ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

The most important source of Rousseauian education was located in
Dessau, Germany, home to the Philanthropinum, a model school, also
teacher-training school, founded by educationalist Johann Bernard Base-
dow (1724–1790). The fact that these educationalists called themselves
‘‘philanthropists’’ displayed a pedagogical enthusiasm, very much in
accordance with the Rousseauian belief in a benign human nature. They
were dedicated to ‘‘natural education’’ and aimed at ‘‘. . . developing a
child’s possibilities as freely as possible, creating a cheerful development and
learning atmosphere, stimulating autonomous thinking, and facilitating a
world orientation and practical attitude to life. Johann Friedrich Pestalozzi
(1746–1827), an educationalist who was inspired by these Philanthropines,
implemented Rousseau’s educational ideas in Switzerland. He and his wife
Anna read and commented on the Émile and preferred to call their son
Jacob by the name of Jean-Jacques.
The ideas of the Philanthropines and Pestalozzi not only influenced each
other, but also reached the homes of modern upper-middle-class citizens. A
fine example is the upbringing of Otto van Eck, which Baggerman and
Dekker (2005, 2006, 2009) have reported on. The enlightened environment,
in which Otto was raised in The Hague (The Netherlands) around 1780, had
been introduced to modern educational methods. This boy’s everyday life,
which has remained accessible through his diaries, is much like Émile’s life.
He has his own garden, in which he seeds and plants and harvests. He walks
around carrying his weeder, hammer and chisel, accompanied by a goat.
Clearly, his father, a patriot and Batavian revolutionary, had learnt a lot
52 KOOPS

from Rousseau. His son Otto had to be raised on the land, in close contact
with nature, far away from what Rousseau had called ‘‘the sewers of the
human race’’ (see Baggerman & Dekker, 2006, p. 39). The Philanthropines
adopted these principles from Rousseau and passed them on to the upper
middle class.
The second half of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of the
establishment of Primary Schools (De Swaan, 2004) in Prussia. They were
inspired by both the Philanthropines in Dessau and Pestalozzi in Switzer-
land. In The Netherlands, the initiative was mainly taken by the
Maatschappij tot Nut van ’t Algemeen [Society for the Benefit of the Public].
This organization was founded in Edam in 1784 (see Mijnhardt & Wichers,
1984) by Jan Nieuwenhuyzen (1724–1806), a Mennonite preacher in
Monnikendam. Het Nut founded many primary schools and a number of
teacher training schools, published numerous educational books and took to
translating and editing foreign pedagogical works (mainly from Dessau and
Pestalozzi’s Switzerland). Also, it established public libraries and savings
banks, and held courses for adults, providing systematic information on
vital questions and general knowledge. In 1796, Het Nut submitted a
proposal to the National Assembly to centrally organize education and to
found a general national school. It is in this spirit that the first Dutch School
Acts for primary education of 1801, 1803 and 1806 were adopted. The
Seminary for Pedagogy in Amsterdam, founded in 1918 at the instigation of
Philipp Abraham Kohnstamm (1875–1951), must be mentioned separately.
Physicist Kohnstamm became extraordinary professor of pedagogy on
account of Het Nut, and is generally considered as the father of Dutch
pedagogy.
This nutshell description of the history of education and upbringing so
far can be summarized as follows. German, Swiss and Dutch modern
pedagogy of the nineteenth century can be traced back to Rousseau and, by
way of a Rousseauian organization of the Primary School (originally a
Prussian initiative), institutionalized and in a culturally historical way
realized the ideas on child development Rousseau devised at his writing
table. So much so that in the twentieth century Piaget’s empirical research
reveals a developmental course that is very similar to the prototypical
development of Rousseau’s Émile.

END OF THE ROUSSEAU–PIAGET TRADITION?

Our contemporary picture of the child and the child-friendly development is
based on the Rousseau–Piaget tradition touched upon above. Our thoughts
on child-raising are entirely consistent with this tradition. These days,
however, fundamental doubts exist as to the longevity of the frame offered
by this tradition (see Koops, 2011, for a detailed exposition).
 MODERN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND EDUCATION 53

According to culture critic and media specialist Neil Postman (1931–

2003), the Western child started to disappear in the early 1960s (Postman,
1982/1992). Following the beliefs of Ariès (Ariès, 1960, 1962; Koops, 1996,
2004, 2011), Postman observed that without education, or better without
schools, there are no children in the modern sense of the word. After all: ‘‘In
an illiterate society (like that of the Middle Ages) there was no need to
sharply distinguish between children and adults, such a society harbours few
secrets, and civilization does not need to supply education in order to
understand itself’’ (Postman, 1982/1992, p. 22). The notion of the ‘‘child’’ is
redundant if everyone shares the same information environment and lives in
the same social and intellectual world. In the wake of many media experts
and historians, Postman believed that the art of printing created a new
world of symbols, which in its turn required a new interpretation of the
notion of ‘‘adulthood’’ (Postman, 1982/1992, p. 28).
The child originated from an environment in which the information in
books was controlled by adults and was gradually supplied to children.
However, anonymization as a result of telegraphy caused a development
which would ultimately take away information from the authority of
parents and the family. After the invention of telegraphy, this development
was boosted by a continuous stream of inventions: the rotation press,
camera, telephone, gramophone, film, radio, television (Postman, 1982/
1992, p. 76), culminating in what was not described by Postman, the launch
of the internet. Mainly because these modern means of communication
primarily use image language, the typical characteristic of childlikeness,
illiteracy, loses its meaning.
Interestingly, the period discussed by Postman in relation to the
disappearance of childhood, the 1970s, also witnessed an unprecedented
large global research effort, centring on undermining Piaget’s structural
cognitive theory. In other words, the non-interconvertible developmental
stages, referred to as cognitive structures, were gradually replaced by
continuous domain-specific developmental processes. Neo-Piagetian re-
search from that time undermined the presumptions of the Rousseau–Piaget
tradition, which emphasized the inaccessibility of childlike thinking, like
never before. The fanaticism with which the origins of all kinds of childlike
rationality were explored, caused many a researcher to end up as an
‘‘infancy expert’’ (Koops, 1990, 2004). This post neo-Piagetian research,
among other things, resulted in research on the child’s Theory of Mind
experimentally demonstrating how 2- to 3-year-old children already have a
command of current lay psychology, based on a simple theory of desires and
beliefs. Meanwhile, the search for the increasingly younger origins of
generally human means of communication has not come to an end. Onishi
and Baillargeon (2005), for example, demonstrated in a fine article in Science
that 13-month-old babies basically have a command of generally human,
54 KOOPS

ordinary communication principles (‘‘beliefs’’ and ‘‘desires’’). Remarkably,

cultural historical developments—the disappearance of traditional child-
hood—go hand in hand with the experimental empirical scientific search for
(and finding of!) generally human and age-independent means of commu-
nication. To put it briefly, developmental psychology moves with the tides of
culture (Kessen, 1979).

NEW POSSIBILITIES?
It will be clear that the modern Western child, construed in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries—the Enlightened child—disappeared in the second
half of the twentieth century. Traditional upbringing was referred to as
‘‘Bringing up by keeping small’’ in a much quoted publication of Dasberg
(1975). In essence, it boiled down to setting the child apart from the adult
world—this [process] is called infantilization (see Koops, 2011; Koops &
Zuckerman, 2003)—and leading it step by step into that adult world by what
was called upbringing. This style of upbringing has become outmoded: such
that borders and border guards have become inoperative. Mainly through
electronic media, today’s children have access to the adult world from the
beginning, including the world of violence and sex, areas in which children
on the basis of the then current pedagogy were not allowed access for two
and a half centuries. Given the child’s access to the internet, it is an
improbable atavism that American parents as late as in 2006 pressed charges
against teachers persisting in marking school work with red ink (Stearns,
2009). The parents feared that the feeble self-esteem of their vulnerable
children would be damaged.
Raising children will have to be reinvented. We are assisted by a
tremendous amount of sophisticated and splendid studies on child
behaviour and on that of their up-bringers: the production of empirical
research data by developmental psychologists and educationalists is
incredible extensive. And all this research is potentially helpful. However,
I would like to point out that all this research will only prove advantageous
if we know what our objective is with regard to children, and that is what we
are in the dark about. Worse still, modern academic pedagogy is hardly
occupied with it. People who, like me, are followers of Kant’s much
maligned successor, educationalist Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841),
are convinced that pedagogy as a science cannot do without ethics on the
one hand and (developmental) psychology on the other (Herbart, 1841).
Let us return for a final time to the example set by Rousseau. His
incredibly effective book on education was a book on a new ethical person in
a Utopian society. This very context turned his book into such a success.
Like Rousseau, we could and should develop a vision of an ideal society in
the spirit of which we would like to raise our children. In doing so, I
 MODERN DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, AND EDUCATION 55

recommend restoring the Enlightenment principles of rationality and

autonomous and critical thinking; high-grade ethical principles forming
the basis of a modern ‘‘Contrat Social’’ (Rousseau, 1762); and commitment
to a democratic society in which freedom of speech and inter-human respect
are balanced.
Alas, we are not yet at the point at which we can actually offer a ‘‘new
pedagogy’’, and perhaps we never will be. But what we can do is encourage a
multidisciplinary debate concerning child-raising and, in so doing,
continually place the discussion with researchers and thinkers in the
cultural-historical context, so that child-raising is discussed and studied as a
mirror of civilization, entirely in the spirit of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

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