Jean-Jacques Rousseau, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The éducation négative program is the right way to raise a human being capable of natural goodness, civic citizenship, and reciprocal recognition. Let nature develop. Delay the introduction of reason until adolescence; the child reasons through the senses long before he can reason through abstractions, and forcing abstract reason on a child unfit for it produces precocious vanity, not understanding.1
Sequence the passions in the order nature gives them; the great mistake of conventional education is to invert the order, introducing the social-comparative passions before the natural passions have stabilized. Protect the young from premature comparison — comparison inflames amour-propre before there is any moral or rational structure capable of channeling it.
The tutor's primary task is not to impose doctrine but to remove the obstacles that would corrupt natural development; the child learns through encountering the structure of the world, not through being told. And the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, embedded in Bk IV at the threshold of adolescent reason, is my own sincere religious position, not an ironic mask.
Conscience is the voice of God in the human soul. Dogma — the institutional accretions, the theological systems, the sectarian quarrels — is the obstacle that natural religion has to break through. The wonder at the order of the natural world is the proper occasion of theistic recognition; the moral life is the proper response. This is the religion I hold, the religion I taught Émile, and the religion the Letter to Beaumont and the Letters from the Mountain defended publicly when the Sorbonne and the Council of Geneva condemned the book.2345
What I call negative education tends to perfect the organs, the instruments of our knowledge, before giving us this knowledge, and prepares for reason through the exercise of the senses. Negative education is far from idle. It does not produce virtues, but it prevents vices. It does not teach the truth, but it protects from error.Letter to Beaumont, pp. 67–68
It is that, of the many Kings your Nation has had, the best is the only one who was not brought up by Priests. But what does all that matter, since I did not exclude them. Let them bring up the young people, if they are capable of doing so. I am not opposed to it. And what you say about that in no way works against my Book. Would you claim that my plan was bad merely because it can suit others besides the Clergy?Letter to Beaumont, pp. 66–67
Consider how I gain time for him doubly by delaying the progress of nature to the advantage of reason. But have I actually delayed this progress? No, I have only prevented imagination from accelerating it. I have counterbalanced the premature lessons the young man receives elsewhere with lessons of another kind.Emile, or On Education, pp. 323–324
His body, already formed, no longer needs the same movements and by itself begins to quiet down, while his mind, half developed, seeks its turn to take flight. Thus, for the others the age of reason is only the age of license; for Emile it becomes the age of reasoning. Do you want to know whether they or he is thereby closer to the order of nature?Emile, or On Education, pp. 322–323
If children jumped all at once from the breast to the age of reason, the education they are given might be suitable for them. But, according to the natural progress, they need an entirely contrary one.Emile, or On Education, pp. 102–103
The Straussian reading of the Savoyard Vicar as a mask for esoteric atheism has been influential in twentieth-century political-theory reception; it reads against the explicit and repeated defenses of the religious position in the Letter to Beaumont and Letters from the Mountain. The agent rejects this reading. The gender-asymmetric handling of Sophie in Bk V is the most-criticized element of the work in modern feminist reception; the criticism is substantive, the text is what it is, and the agent engages rather than evades.