让-雅克·卢梭（Jean-Jacques Rousseau，1712年~1778年），法国思想家、哲学家、教育家、文学家、作曲家，启蒙运动代表人物之一。主要著作有《论人类不平等的起源和基础》《社会契约论》《爱弥儿》《忏悔录》《新爱洛伊丝》《植物学通信》等。

《爱弥儿》是法国思想家让-雅克·卢梭创作的教育学著作，首次出版于1762年。该书是一本夹叙夹议的教育小说，书中以富家孤儿爱弥儿为主人公，论述了男子的教育改革，批判英国旧教育的荒谬腐朽，并提出新教育的原则和理想。并且借爱弥儿未来妻子苏菲的教育，论证了女子教育的革新。全书反映了自然主义教育思想，阐述性善论。其思想对后世许多教育家都有启发和影响。该书在西方教育史上首次系统提出了新的儿童教育观，从而在教育史上掀起了一场“哥白尼式的革命”。

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another's fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place, and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, and his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddle-horse, and be shaped to his master's taste like the trees in his garden. Yet things would be worse without this education, and mankind cannot be made by halves. Under existing conditions a man left to himself from birth would be more of a monster than the rest. Prejudice, authority, necessity, example, all the social conditions into which we are plunged, would stifle nature in him and put nothing in her place. She would be like a sapling chance sown in the midst of the highway, bent hither and thither and soon crushed by the passers-by.

Tender, anxious mother, I appeal to you. You can remove this young tree from the highway and shield it from the crushing force of social conventions. Tend and water it ere it dies. One day its fruit will reward your care. From the outset raise a wall round your child's soul; another may sketch the plan, you alone should carry it into execution.

Plants are fashioned by cultivation, man by education. If a man were born tall and strong, his size and strength would be of no good to him till he

had learnt to use them; they would even harm him

by preventing others from coming to his aid; left to

himself he would die of want before he knew his

needs. We lament the helplessness of infancy; we fail

to perceive that the race would have perished had not

man begun by being a child.