Editing Education reform (section)

====Child-study====
[[Image:Rousseau.jpg|right|thumb|190px|Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]
[[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]], father of the Child Study Movement, centered the child as an object of study.

In ''[[Emile: Or, On Education]]'', Rousseau's principal work on education lays out an [[educational program]] for a hypothetical newborn's education through adulthood.

Rousseau provided a dual critique of the educational vision outlined in Plato's Republic and that of his society in contemporary Europe. He regarded the educational methods contributing to the child's development; he held that a person could either be a man or a [[citizen]]. While Plato's plan could have brought the latter at the expense of the former, contemporary education failed at both tasks. He advocated a radical withdrawal of the child from society and an educational process that utilized the child's natural potential and curiosity, teaching the child by confronting them with simulated real-life obstacles and conditioning the child through experience rather intellectual instruction.

Rousseau ideas were rarely implemented directly, but influenced later thinkers, particularly [[Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi]] and [[Friedrich Fröbel|Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel]], the inventor of the [[kindergarten]].