Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Overview

Some Thoughts Concerning Education is about two hundred pages, published in 1693, and it began as private correspondence. Locke’s friend Edward Clarke had asked him for advice about bringing up his son, and Locke wrote him a series of letters from exile in Holland over several years. Clarke and others persuaded him to publish, and he expanded them into a book.

The origin explains the manner. There is no system, the sections are numbered and short, the tone is that of a friend giving advice about a particular boy, and Locke says explicitly in the dedication that what suits one child may not suit another and that a tutor must study the temper he is dealing with.

It also explains the limits. The book is addressed to a gentleman about his eldest son, and it is about a private education at home under a tutor. Locke has nothing to say about schools except that he distrusts them, little about daughters, and nothing about the education of the poor, on which he wrote separately and severely in a paper proposing working schools for pauper children from the age of three.

Locke was a physician by training, and the first third of the book is medical advice, which surprises readers who come for the philosophy and is central to his point about the unity of the child.

The argument

The body first. A third of the book, and it opens with a sound mind in a sound body. Locke’s prescriptions are hard and were followed: plenty of open air, exercise and sleep; plain food and not much meat; no wine or strong drink; very little physic; and a regime of hardening that includes cold water for the feet every day and shoes thin enough to let in water, on the theory that children who are never wet or cold become adults ruined by the first draught. He also wants clothes loose, and is emphatic against tight stays for girls, with a page on the damage they do.

The underlying argument is that the constitution is made, like the character, by habituation from the beginning, and that parents who spoil the body have already limited what the mind can do.

Virtue before learning. Locke sets out four aims and ranks them. Virtue, wisdom, breeding, and learning, in that order, and he says that learning is the least of them and is the one that fathers make the whole of a child’s education.

The foundation of virtue is the ability to deny yourself. A child must learn to submit an appetite to reason, and the training in that must start absurdly early, before the child can reason at all, by habituation. Locke’s rule is that children should be denied things not because the thing is harmful but because they cried for it, and granted things when they did not ask.

Esteem and disgrace, not the rod. The most influential part, and the one Locke argues hardest. Beating produces two outcomes and neither is wanted: a slavish temper, obedient while watched and worse when not, or a broken spirit, which he calls the worse of the two, since a dejected mind is useless. Rewards of sweets and money are equally bad, because they teach the child to pursue exactly the appetites the education is meant to govern.

What works is reputation. Children are sensitive to being thought well of long before they can follow an argument, and a parent who arranges that good behaviour brings esteem and bad behaviour brings coldness and disgrace has attached the child to a motive that will still be operating when the parent is not in the room.

He allows the rod once: for obstinacy, meaning open defiance of a command already given, where the contest must be won. Never for failing at a lesson.

Learning through play. Nothing should be made a task that can be made a recreation. Locke’s example is reading: a child forced to sit down to letters learns to hate books, while one who finds letters on dice and blocks and plays with them will learn without noticing. He wants the child to see learning as a privilege granted rather than a burden imposed.

He is severe on the curriculum of his day. Latin composition and verse-making are useless to a boy who will never need them, and rhetoric and logic as then taught are worse. He would keep Latin, taught by conversation rather than grammar, add French, arithmetic, geography, history, accounts, and the law of England. He would drop Greek for all but scholars.

Curiosity. One of the best sections. Children’s questions are an appetite for knowledge and should be answered directly, in terms they can follow, never mocked and never fobbed off, because a child laughed at for asking will stop asking. Locke wants their questions treated with the same respect as an adult’s.

A trade. He recommends that every gentleman learn a manual trade, preferably gardening or joinery, partly for health and partly on the argument that idleness is what ruins men of leisure and that a man with something to do with his hands has a resource.

The tutor. Locke thinks the choice of tutor is the most important decision in the whole business and that parents economise on it disgracefully. What is wanted is not a scholar but a man of breeding and good sense who knows the world, because the boy will learn manners and judgement by watching him and will forget the Latin.

How to read it

Read the opening sections on the body, then sections 40 to 110 on rewards, punishment and habituation, then the sections on curiosity, on learning through play, and on the tutor. That is the argument and it is perhaps half the book.

Read it after the Essay, or at least knowing its claim about the mind. The pedagogy follows from the epistemology: if there is nothing innate, everything depends on what is laid down and in what order.

Take the strangeness rather than skipping it. The cold feet, the leaky shoes, the recommendation that a child be made to relieve himself at the same hour daily, are not eccentric additions; they belong to the argument that everything is habit and habit is formed by repetition from the first.

Read Rousseau’s Emile afterwards. Rousseau knew this book well and wrote against it: where Locke reasons with children, Rousseau says children cannot reason and should be left to learn from the consequences of things; where Locke trains a gentleman for society, Rousseau removes the pupil from it. The disagreement is the foundation of modern educational argument.

Keep the audience in view. This is a manual for a wealthy man’s eldest son. Locke’s own proposals for the children of the poor, written for the Board of Trade two years later, recommended compulsory work from age three and are difficult to reconcile with anything in this book.

Questions it raises

• If the mind is as easily turned as water, how much of what a person becomes is anyone’s responsibility?
• Esteem and disgrace are offered as the levers. Is governing a child by shame better than governing by fear, and what does it produce in the adult?
• Locke ranks learning last. Is that right, and would a modern parent accept the ranking if it meant what he meant by it?
• Nothing that can be a recreation should be made a task. Does that survive contact with things that are genuinely difficult and genuinely necessary?
• The whole book assumes one child, one tutor, one household. What of it transfers to a classroom of thirty?
• Locke wrote this for a gentleman’s son and proposed something very different for the poor. Does that inconsistency damage the argument or only its author?