Emile as case study
The book is called Emile after the hypothetical case study that Rousseau depicts. His hypothetical question is how to correctly raise a child to become perfectly ethical without being corrupted by the world. He admits that this might be technically impossible, but by perfecting the craft of education from that point of view, he feels it will lead to important philosophical discoveries. He wants to take education from the real practice of his day into a more focused, goal-oriented future with Emile as an example.
Chaos and decomposing
The book takes entropy as a given. If no action is taken, a thing will naturally corrupt from bad to worse. This is a portrait of the philosophical concept known as chaos, and therefore, the reader can understand Rousseau's book as an attempt at order. The implications of the book extend far past Education alone, because by studying a child's acquiring of true beliefs about reality, the book approximates Ontology (the study of reality).
Education and knowledge
The book takes education as a flexible term and revises its meaning through thoughtful analysis and essays. If education merely means taking a list of facts and shoving them into a child's brain by force, then education will fail to make ethical people. Instead, an educator must explain to the child the true value of knowledge, which makes the education a proper philosopher. This book's treatment of knowledge and education will likely remind a philosophical reader of Plato's Republic and the Philosopher-King.
Mastery
One complex aspect of this problem (ethical education) is to teach the child the value of hard work and improvement. This means teaching them about their own potential. Instead of merely exposing the child to masters of a craft, Rousseau explains that to a certain extent, apprenticeship in a tactical craft is necessary in helping a child elaborate their sense of capacity, improvement, and intelligence. By becoming masterful at some skill, a child learns about their own body, its various skills, and the nearly infinite capacity of one's untapped potential.
Religion and truth
Now the book has addressed external reality through classroom education, and it has addressed internal reality through the ethical pursuit of mastery, but there still remains one obvious category that has yet to be educated. During the time of Emile's adolescence, Rousseau exposes the youth to the church, to the various theories of God and religion that exist. By seeking to understand the intricacies of tradition, Rousseau hopes to teach Emile something new about religion. He wants to teach Emile that the religion is typically passed down through education unlike Emile's own, and therefore if Emile wants to attain enlightenment, he must re-educate himself about God and the universe using organized religion as a starting point and touchstone, but with true beliefs all his own.
