"Love childhood, indulge its games, its pleasures, its delightful instincts....Why pave the way for future regret for yourselves by robbing them of the short span which nature has allotted them. As soon as they are aware of the joy of life, let them rejoice in it, so that whenever God calls them they may not die without having tasted the joy of life."
Even so Rousseau "fails to see the real purpose of them [the senses] as they are integrated with the emotions, will and intellect--the emotions (via the senses) moved by wonder; the will, naturally attracted to the good; and, the mind inclined intuitively to the truth."
"Rousseau's Naturalism...is unnatural in that it rejects the natural human faculties of the will and intellect...example...'Let the child do nothing on anybody's word. Nothing is good for him unless he feels it to be so.'"
Upon first reading this I thought of the public school indoctrination of values clarification.
The other thing that stood out to me is Taylors bit on Verhoeven:
"Verhoeven's study of the separation of wonder from philosophy reveals the devastating effects on education....what passes for general education today is actually a barrier to knowledge in the absence of the poetic element of wonder.
'General education is...a substitute for knowledge among people for whom that knowledge is too dangerous and too demanding...It creates and preserves mediocrity. It does not demand that contact with things, the piercing of man's self righteous subjectivity which is precisely the beginning of knowledge....At best it displays mountain peaks, but saves one the trouble of climbing them..........The great temptation of education is to insist that one should memorize the results of science instead of flinging open its sources"
In reading this section I wrote in the margin, "This [mindset] comes about out of selfishness and the false idea of scarcity."
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