Instead of resolving this contradiction by providing a tidy pedagogical formula, however, Emile asks to be read ironically, such that it reveals the ideal driving much thinking about education, in the Enlightenment and in post-Enlightenment modernity, to be unattainable, and even a danger. Emile poses as a treatise laying out a scheme for a new form of “natural” education designed both to shield children from this corruption and to prepare them for their inevitable entry into the social realm where it prevails. In Emile, Rousseau argues that the spread of “civilization” has not made human society more perfect but has instead corrupted it. Rousseau’s work Emile: or On Education (1762) is concerned, like all of his major writings and like those of many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, with an inquiry into the notion of “progress” and the “perfectibility” of humankind. It is regarded by some as the first philosophy of education in Western culture to have a serious claim to completeness, as well as being one of the first Bildungsroman novels.The Geneva-born philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) has had a significant influence on thinking about childhood and education from the later eighteenth century until the present. Emile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but it does contain some specific advice on raising children. He employs the novelistic device of Emile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Rousseau seeks to describe a system of education that would enable the natural man he identifies in The Social Contract (1762) to survive corrupt society.

During the French Revolution, Emile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education. Due to a section of the book entitled 'Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar', Emile was banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned in 1762, the year of its first publication. Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered it to be the 'best and most important' of all his writings. Book Synopsis 'Emile, or On Education' or 'Émile, or Treatise on Education' is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man.

Emile by jean jacques rousseau