"We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them"
About this Quote
Rousseau’s line is a rebuke to education as content delivery and a warning about the seductions of premature expertise. “Should not teach” sounds provocatively anti-intellectual until you notice the pivot: he isn’t rejecting science, he’s rejecting the schoolish impulse to turn science into recitation, status, and obedience. The real aim is appetite. If a child learns the vocabulary of astronomy but not the thrill of wondering why the moon changes shape, Rousseau thinks you’ve trained a clerk, not a mind.
The subtext is political as much as pedagogical. In Rousseau’s century, “the sciences” were increasingly tied to elite prestige and state power: academies, measurements, classifications, the bureaucratic confidence that the world can be managed if only it’s named correctly. Rousseau is suspicious of that confidence. He wants knowledge to grow from lived encounters with the world, not from authority. “Taste” is doing heavy lifting here: it’s sensory, personal, and hard to fake. You can cram facts; you can’t cram curiosity.
Context matters: in Emile, Rousseau’s ideal education delays abstract instruction and moralizes against vanity. Science, taught too early, risks becoming another badge - cleverness as social currency - which corrupts the child into performing intelligence rather than exercising it. His alternative is almost proto-STEM in the best sense: experiments, puzzles, self-directed problem-solving, the slow discovery that laws describe experience instead of replacing it.
It’s also a sly critique of modern education’s metrics. Rousseau anticipates the trap where students learn to pass exams about science while quietly deciding it’s not for them. He’s arguing for seduction over coercion: make them want to know, and the rest becomes inevitable.
The subtext is political as much as pedagogical. In Rousseau’s century, “the sciences” were increasingly tied to elite prestige and state power: academies, measurements, classifications, the bureaucratic confidence that the world can be managed if only it’s named correctly. Rousseau is suspicious of that confidence. He wants knowledge to grow from lived encounters with the world, not from authority. “Taste” is doing heavy lifting here: it’s sensory, personal, and hard to fake. You can cram facts; you can’t cram curiosity.
Context matters: in Emile, Rousseau’s ideal education delays abstract instruction and moralizes against vanity. Science, taught too early, risks becoming another badge - cleverness as social currency - which corrupts the child into performing intelligence rather than exercising it. His alternative is almost proto-STEM in the best sense: experiments, puzzles, self-directed problem-solving, the slow discovery that laws describe experience instead of replacing it.
It’s also a sly critique of modern education’s metrics. Rousseau anticipates the trap where students learn to pass exams about science while quietly deciding it’s not for them. He’s arguing for seduction over coercion: make them want to know, and the rest becomes inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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