Considering these two theorists: John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this paper will explore the ideas of parent and child relations, with thoughts from Locke and Rousseau as well as the other readings we have had in class-- such as, Alan Richardson’s Children’s Literature and the Work of Culture - Literature, Education, and Romanticism, Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage: Chapter 9 - Parent-Child Relations, Brown’s The Metamorphic Book: Children’s Print Culture in The Eighteenth Century, as well as Hugh Cunningham’s The Invention of Childhood.
John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were both early philosophers and social contrast theorists. They both have very influential but different theories on how parents should best educate their children in the early stages. Similarly, they believed in reason and freedom as the main component to successfully raising a child; while so, their theories seem to have this main component but take different directions. Locke believed that human behavior is influenced by nurture. Meaning that humans are born, as Locke says in an Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as a “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” and we …show more content…
A formal parent-child relationship would agree with Richardson saying, “...the child inside the text was to be as manageable as the child outside of the text” (Richardson 145). Thus comparing managing a real, breathing, living, flawed child to a fictional character; whom is obviously, and easily managed because they are a figure of the imagination. This age period seemed to undermine a child’s capacity to think for themselves, “Ambiguity, puns, riddles-- the very stuff of traditional nursery rhymes, which remained largely uncensored until well into the nineteenth century-- must be avoided precisely because they subvert the notion of a stable and unitary child reader” (Richardson
John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were both early philosophers and social contrast theorists. They both have very influential but different theories on how parents should best educate their children in the early stages. Similarly, they believed in reason and freedom as the main component to successfully raising a child; while so, their theories seem to have this main component but take different directions. Locke believed that human behavior is influenced by nurture. Meaning that humans are born, as Locke says in an Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as a “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” and we …show more content…
A formal parent-child relationship would agree with Richardson saying, “...the child inside the text was to be as manageable as the child outside of the text” (Richardson 145). Thus comparing managing a real, breathing, living, flawed child to a fictional character; whom is obviously, and easily managed because they are a figure of the imagination. This age period seemed to undermine a child’s capacity to think for themselves, “Ambiguity, puns, riddles-- the very stuff of traditional nursery rhymes, which remained largely uncensored until well into the nineteenth century-- must be avoided precisely because they subvert the notion of a stable and unitary child reader” (Richardson