Rousseau has given the concept of Follow Nature. The meaning of this maxim is

2025

Rousseau has given the concept of Follow Nature. The meaning of this maxim is

  1. A.

    to give full freedom to the teacher

  2. B.

    to regulate the education of a pupil according to his nature

  3. C.

    the teacher should follow his discretion

  4. D.

    knowledge should be given according to the teacher’s nature

Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's doctrine of Naturalism, summed up in the maxim ‘Follow Nature’, holds that a child grows through its own inherent, natural stages of development. The task of education, on this view, is not to impose adult conventions, discipline, or ready-made knowledge from outside, but to arrange the pace and content of instruction so that it corresponds to — and grows out of — the child's own unfolding nature.

Applied to this maxim, ‘Follow Nature’ therefore means that a pupil's education must be regulated according to the pupil's own nature: his interests, readiness, and stage of growth, rather than according to any external party's convenience.

  • Handing the teacher full and unconditional freedom concerns the TEACHER's own liberty of action, not the principle that the child's own development should set the course of instruction; Rousseau's naturalism is specifically a check on unrestrained adult authority, not an expansion of it.

  • Making the teacher's personal discretion the deciding factor keeps the operative authority with the adult educator; naturalism instead sets out to minimise exactly this kind of externally-imposed, adult-driven control over how a child is taught.

  • Anchoring the content of instruction to the teacher's own disposition assigns 'nature' to the wrong party altogether — it does not correspond to any recognised formulation of Rousseau's maxim, which is about the person being educated, not the educator.

Hence, among the given options, only regulating a pupil's education according to his own nature captures what Rousseau's ‘Follow Nature’ asserts.

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