User:Czar/drafts/Emile

Overview
The book is the fictional story of Émile, a boy, and his education from birth through adulthood. Rousseau wrote the story as a means to explicate his extended views and advice on childrearing and elementary education.

Émile is raised apart from other children by a personal tutor. The child experiences the principles of property, physics, and morals through firsthand experiment. Each experiment may appear arbitrary, but each cleverly relays a concrete lesson. The book culminates with Émile's marriage with Sophie, a female who had received a similar education.

Reception
The book was immediately denounced by the Archbishop of Paris, and Rousseau was forced into exile from France.

The 1917 Reader's Digest of Books described Emile as "unsystematic, sometimes impracticable, full of suggestion, ... [investing] the revolutionary ideas of its authors with his customary literary charm".

Legacy
Many writers described the work as the single greatest on the topic of education (G. D. H. Cole ...). The Reader’s Digest of Books called it "the most famous of pedagogic romances".

The book became the foundation for 20th century progressive education pedagogy. It was a stated influence on the ideas of Johann Bernhard Basedow, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Fröbel.