Compare Montaignes work de 'institution des enfants in Essais livre 1 Essay

Compare Montaignes work de institution des enfants in Essais livre 1 and Jean Jacque Rousseau novel Emile ou de l fostering theories of education, with particular propagation to authority - Essay ExampleIndeed, in the introduction to Montaignes On the Education of Children, William Harris includes a graph that illustrates striking similarities in both the philosophical and literary stylings of the theorists. Both writers seek to shift the traditional assumptions of the education process away from merely treating the student as an open receptacle to whose head knowledge of facts and figures is dutifully filled. Instead, they wedge a progressive concept of education that would later be echoed in the transcendental theories of Emerson and Thoreau, and the self-exploratory theories of Maria Montessori. Rousseau and Montaigne have a go at it that the focus of education must be placed not on the rote memorization of knowledge, only if on the acknowledgement that true wisdom is gained i n the understanding of the processes of learning.Even as the underlining message of both writers concerning the need of shifting the emphasis of education away from socially constructed knowledge, towards the grasping of the intuitive processes of its attainment is the same, they disagree in the extremity of their characterizations. While Montaigne acknowledges the necessity of questioning particular elements of society, he ultimately embraces it for its essential reference in personal development. Conversely, Rousseau understands socially constructed knowledge to be inherently unsound and encourages the systematic and perhaps new questioning of its foundational concepts. In The Social Contract, another influential work, he even goes as far as chastising society because the social pact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members (Rousseau 70). Whereas for Montaige, Harrison writes, universe is too complex to reach the millennium through any single revolution, whet her it be in religion, politics, or education. Montaigne saw this vaguely, yet more clearly than did