These important concepts of the Enlightenment were shown in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Both being proponents and believers of the principles reflective of the Enlightenment, they expressed their views of how humanism and reason influenced their position about the role of women and feminism, and their relationship with education. In Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the rights of women," the author utilized reason as a tool to argue her point about the history of women's suppression when it comes to achieving quality education and fair regard with men in the society. Rousseau, meanwhile, in his work entitled "Emile" (or "On Education"), asserted

Given these descriptions of the works of Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, this paper posits that the works of the authors share a similarity and difference that pertains to the issue of women's equality in attaining education and education in general. This paper argues that using both humanism and reason as foundations for their arguments, Wollstonecraft and Rousseau similarly believed that education must be achieved by all, although education in itself must not be confined to formal education, but to formative education done by the society as well. However, both differed in expressing their opinion concerning women's roles and feminism. Wollstonecraft believed that women had been suppressed and not given the privilege to acquire good formal and formative educations, while Rousseau believed that women were not hindered by society to receive education, and they can do so if they only willed themselves to achieve it.

Apart from the censorship in the educational material taught to students, Rousseau also cited the seemingly lack of imagination in the educational system. By 'imagination,' he meant that people have become heavily dependent on information and knowledge already extant in the society in all kinds of discipline. Gone is the drive to discover new things in the natural and social environment, which makes human knowledge and most importantly, intellectual development, stagnant. Learning and knowledge accumulation must be a process in which students must think "out of the box," an idea that should have been supported because this is what led to the age of Enlightenment. Without humanity's imagination and drive to learn more about the world they live in, perhaps the age of Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution Rousseau's society was benefiting from would not happen. He explicated in better terms his idea of thinking "out of the box" in the following passage from "Emile":

Wollstonecraft and Rousseau presented similar arguments when they discussed the issue of how society should develop and implement education for children and the youth. Both acknowledged the fact that formal education is important, although its state (in the 18th century) leaves more to be desired; in fact, they cited the deficiencies that formal education can have to people's learning and intellectual and moral development. They believed that formal education must include formative education, which means people must not only learn through accumulation of facts and information in schools and educational institutions, but also learn through constant interaction with other people. The youth must learn not only from within the walls of the classroom, but in the real world as well.

Rousseau expressed his strong belief in formative education in "Emile." In fact, the creation of the discourse itself was meant to critique and analyze the state of formal education as Rousseau observed it during his time. One of his critiques against formal education is that it tended to provide knowledge that is 'quite limited,'

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Approximate Word count = 2032
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)