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Rousseau on Experience and Learning
January 11, 2012
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He fled from the rain and sat down under the waterspout.
-Saudi Arabian Proverb
In his article, "The Many Modes of Experience and Learning:  The Grandmasters of ECE," in the January/February 2012 issue of Exchange, David Elkind summarizes the contributions of John Amos Comenius, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Heinrich Pestalozzi, Frederick Froebel, Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, and Erik Erikson to our understanding of the interplay between experience and learning.  For example, here are his observations on the contributions of Rousseau:

  • Added a new dimension to Locke’s conception of sense experience — two types of experience: natural experience (the child’s encounters with plants, animals, sun, moon, earth, water, etc.) and group (socially created experiences like manners and morals).  Both were acquired through the senses, but had different outcomes.

  • Believed that natural experience came from self-initiated experience with the real world and perpetuated the goodness of the child with which he or she was born.

  • Maintained that social experience was essentially man-made and, from Rousseau’s perspective, corrupting.

  • Recognized that language was a social construct and instrumental in natural, as well as social, learning: all natural experience passes through a social filter.

  • Emphasized that sequence is important: children should experience the natural world before being exposed to the potentially corrupting experience of the social world.





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