Rousseau’s critique of liberal education emerges from his broader philosophical project of reconciling individual freedom with the demands of social life. He believed that conventional liberal education, shaped by Enlightenment rationalism and social refinement, corrupts human nature by prioritizing artificial conventions over authentic development. For Rousseau, modern society imposes values of competition, vanity, and dependence, and liberal education reproduces these distortions by focusing on intellectual precocity, social polish, and externally imposed moral norms. His critique is therefore a critique of a wider cultural formation that alienates individuals from their natural dispositions. Central to Rousseau’s critique is his assertion that liberal education places an excessive emphasis on reason at the expense of natural growth. He challenges the Enlightenment belief that rationality is the supreme faculty to be cultivated as early as possible. In *Émile*, he argues that the child should not be forced into premature intellectual development because reason matures slowly and must be grounded in experience