Some Thoughts Concerning Education

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Title Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Title page from the tenth edition of Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Author	John Locke
Country	England
Language	English
Subject(s)	Education and Philosophy
Publisher	Awnsham and John Churchill
Released	1693

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) is a treatise on education written by the English philosopher John Locke. It was the most important philosophical work on education in Britain for over a century. During the eighteenth century, Some Thoughts was translated into almost all of the major written European languages and nearly every European writer on education after Locke, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, acknowledged its influence.

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Locke outlined a new theory of mind; he contended that the child's mind was a tabula rasa or "blank slate," that is, it did not contain any innate ideas. Some Thoughts Concerning Education explains how to educate that mind using three distinct methods: the development of a healthy body; the formation of a virtuous character; and the choice of an appropriate academic curriculum.^[1]

While Locke originally wrote the letters that would eventually become Some Thoughts for an aristocratic friend, his advice had a broader appeal and his educational principles allowed women and the lower classes to aspire to the same kind of character as the aristocrats for whom Locke originally intended the work.

Contents 1 Historical context and publication 2 Summary 2.1 The body 2.2 Virtue 2.3 Curriculum 3 Class 4 Gender 5 Reception and legacy 6 Notes 7 Bibliography 8 See also 9 External links

[edit] Historical context and publication

The widespread popularity of Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education during the eighteenth century suggests that many of the views within it already pervaded European society. Rather than produce a wholly original philosophy of education, Locke, it seems, began by bringing together and popularizing several strands of seventeenth-century educational reform. English writers such as John Evelyn, John Aubrey, John Eachard, and John Milton had previously advocated "similar reforms in curriculum and teaching methods," but they did not succeed in reaching a wide audience.^[2]

As England became increasingly mercantilist and secularist, the humanist educational values of the Renaissance, which had enshrined scholasticism, came to be regarded as superfluous and irrelevant.^[3] Following in the intellectual tradition of Francis Bacon, reformers such as Locke argued against Cambridge and Oxford's decree that “all Bachelaur and Undergraduats in their Disputations should lay aside their various Authors, such that caused many dissensions and strifes in the Schools, and only follow Aristotle and those that defend him, and take their Questions from him, and that they exclude from the Schools all steril and inane Questions, disagreeing from the antient and true Philosophy [sic].”^[4] More families began to demand a practical education for their sons; by exposing them to the emerging sciences, mathematics, and the modern languages, these parents hoped to prepare their sons for the changing economy.

One of these families was the Clarkes of Chipley, Somerset. In 1684, Edward Clarke asked his friend, John Locke, for advice on raising his son and heir, Edward, Jr.; Locke responded with a series of letters that eventually served as the basis of Some Thoughts Concerning Education.^[5] But it was not until 1693, encouraged by the Clarkes and another friend, William Molyneux, that Locke actually published the treatise; Locke, "timid" when it came to public exposure, decided to publish the text anonymously.^[6] He was also a "perfectionist" and revised and expanded Some Thoughts five times before his death.^[7]

[edit] Summary

Of Locke’s major claims in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education, two played a defining role in eighteenth-century educational theory. The first is that education makes the man; as Locke writes at the opening of his treatise, "I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education."^[8] In making this claim, Locke was arguing against both the Augustinian view of man, which grounds its conception of humanity in original sin, and the Cartesian position, which holds that man innately knows basic logical propositions.^[9] In his Essay Locke posits an “empty” mind—a tabula rasa—that is “filled” by experience. Although he argued strenuously for the tabula rasa theory of mind, this did not mean that Locke did not believe in innate talents and interests. For example, Locke suggests that parents watch their children carefully in order to discover their "aptitudes;" he advises parents to nurture their children's own interests rather than force them to participate in activities which they dislike^[10]—"he, therefore, that is about children should well study their natures and aptitudes and see, by often trials, what turn they easily take and what becomes them, observe what their native stock is, how it may be improved, and what it is fit for."^[11]

Locke’s second most important contribution to eighteenth-century educational theory also stems from his theory of the self. He writes: "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences."^[12] That is, the "associations of ideas" made when young are more significant than those made when mature because they are the foundation of the self—they mark the tabula rasa. In the Essay, in which he first introduces the theory of the association of ideas, Locke warns against letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are associated with the darkness for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other."^[13]

[edit] The body

Locke advises parents to carefully nurture their children's physical “habits” before pursuing their academic education. As many scholars have remarked, it is unsurprising that a trained physician, as Locke was, would begin Some Thoughts with a discussion of children's physical needs, yet this seemingly simple generic innovation has proven to be one of Locke’s most enduring legacies—Western child-rearing manuals are still dominated by the topics of food and sleep.^[14] To convince parents that they must attend to the health of their children above all, Locke quotes from Juvenal’s Satires—"a sound mind in a sound body." Locke firmly believed that children should be exposed to harsh conditions while young in order to inure them to, for example, cold temperatures when they were older: "Children [should] be not too warmly clad or covered, winter or summer" (Locke's emphasis), he argues, because "bodies will endure anything that from the beginning they are accustomed to."^[15] Furthermore, in order to prevent a child from catching chills and colds, Locke suggests that “his feet to be washed every day in cold water, and to have his shoes so thin that they might leak and let in water whenever he comes near it" (Locke's emphasis).^[16] Locke posited that if children were accustomed to having sodden feet, a sudden shower that wet their feet would not cause them to catch a cold. Such advice (whether followed or not) was quite popular; it appears throughout John Newbery's children's books in the middle of the eighteenth century, for example, the first best-selling children's books in England.^[17] Locke also offers specific advice on topics ranging from bed linens to diet to sleeping regimens.

[edit] Virtue

Locke dedicates the bulk of Some Thoughts Concerning Education to explaining how to instill virtue in children. He defines virtue as a combination of self-denial and rationality: "that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way."^[18] Future virtuous adults must not only be able to practice self-denial, but they must also be able to see the rational path. Locke was convinced that children could reason early in life and that parents should address them as reasoning beings. Moreover, he argues that parents should, above all, attempt to create a "habit" of thinking rationally in their children. Locke continually emphasizes habit over rule—children should internalize the habit of reasoning rather than memorize a complex set of prohibitions. This focus on rationality and habit corresponds to two of Locke’s concerns in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Throughout the Essay, Locke bemoans the irrationality of the majority and their inability, because of the authority of custom, to change or forfeit long-held beliefs.^[19] His attempt to solve this problem is to not only treat children as rational beings but also to create a disciplinary system founded on esteem and disgrace rather than on rewards and punishments. For Locke, rewards such as sweets and punishments such as beatings turn children into sensualists rather than rationalists; such sensations arouse passions rather than reason.^[20] He argues that “such a sort of slavish discipline makes a slavish temper" (Locke's emphasis).^[21]

Ultimately, Locke wants children to become adults as quickly as possible. As he argues in Some Thoughts, "the only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be entered by degrees as he can bear it, and the earlier the better."^[22] In the Second Treatise on Government (1689), he contends that it is the parents' duty to educate their children and to act for them because children are irrational when young, that is, they have not yet acquired the ability to consistently act rationally; but it is also the parents' obligation to teach their children to become rational adults so that they will not always be fettered by parental ties.^[23]

[edit] Curriculum

Locke does not dedicate much space in Some Thoughts Concerning Education to outlining a specific curriculum; he is more concerned with convincing his readers that education is about instilling virtue and what Western educators would now call critical-thinking skills. Locke maintains that parents or teachers must first teach children how to learn and to enjoy learning. As he writes, the instructor "should remember that his business is not so much to teach [the child] all that is knowable, as to raise in him a love and esteem of knowledge; and to put him in the right way of knowing and improving himself."^[24] But Locke does offer a few hints as to what he thinks a valuable curriculum might be. He deplores the long hours wasted on learning Latin and argues that children should first be taught to speak and write well in their native language.^[25] Most of Locke's recommendations are based on a similar principle of utility.^[26] So, for example, he claims that children should be taught to draw because it would be useful to them on their foreign travels (for recording the sites they visit) but poetry and music, he says, are a waste of time. Locke was also on the forefront of the scientific revolution and advocated the teaching of geography, astronomy, and anatomy.^[27] Locke's curricular recommendations reflect the break from scholastic humanism discussed above and the emergence of a new kind of education—one emphasizing not only science but also practical professional training. Locke also recommended, for example, that every (male) child learn a trade. Locke's pedagogical suggestions are the beginning of a new bourgeois ethos that would come to define Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[28]

[edit] Class

When Locke began writing the letters that would eventually become Some Thoughts on Education he was addressing an aristocrat, but the final text appeals to a much wider audience.^[29] For example, Locke writes: "I place Vertue [sic] as the first and most necessary of those Endowments, that belong to a Man or a Gentleman."^[30] As James Axtell, who has edited the most complete edition of Locke's educational writings, has written: "though he was writing for this small class, this does not preclude the possibility that many of the things he said about education, especially its main principles, were equally applicable to all children" (Axtell's emphasis).^[31] This was a contemporary view as well; Pierre Coste, in his introduction in the first French edition in 1695, wrote: "it is certain that this Work was particularly designed for the education of Gentlemen: but this does not prevent its serving also for the education of all sorts of Children, of whatever class they are."^[32]

While it is possible to apply Locke's general principles of education to all children, and contemporaries such as Coste certainly did so, Locke himself, despite statements that may imply the contrary, probably only believed that Some Thoughts applied to the wealthy and the middle-class (or as they would have been referred to at the time, the "middling sorts"). In his "Essay on the Poor Law," Locke laments that "the children of labouring people are an ordinary burden to the parish, and are usually maintained in idleness, so that their labour also is generally lost to the public till they are 12 or 14 years old."^[33] He suggests, therefore, that "working schools" be set up in each parish in England for poor children so that they will be "from infancy [three years old] inured to work."^[34] He goes on to outline the economics of these schools, arguing not only that they will be profitable for the parish but also that they will instill a good work ethic in the children.^[35]

[edit] Gender

Locke wrote Some Thoughts Concerning Education in response to his friend Samuel Clarke’s query on how to educate his son, therefore the text’s “principal aim,” as Locke states at the beginning, “is how a young gentleman should be brought up from his infancy.” This education “will not so perfectly suit the education of daughters; though where the difference of sex requires different treatment, it will be no hard matter to distinguish" (Locke's emphasis).^[36] This passage suggests that, for Locke, education was fundamentally the same for men and women—there were only small, obvious differences for women. This interpretation is supported by a letter he wrote to Mrs. Clarke in 1685 stating that “since therefore I acknowledge no difference of sex in your mind relating . .. to truth, virtue and obedience, I think well to have no thing altered in it from what is [writ for the son].”^[37] But Locke does recommend several minor “restrictions” relating to the treatment of the female body. The most significant is his reining in of female physical activity for the sake of physical appearance: “But since in your girls care is to be taken too of their beauty as much as health will permit, this in them must have some restriction . . . ‘tis fit their tender skins should be fenced against the busy sunbeams, especially when they are very hot and piercing.”^[38] Although Locke’s statement indicates that he places a greater value on female than male beauty, the fact that these opinions were never published allowed contemporary readers to draw their own conclusions regarding the “different treatments” required for girls and boys, if any.^[39] Moreover, compared to other educational programs, such as The Whole Duty of a Woman (1696) and Rousseau’s Emile, which was still to come, Locke’s educational theory appears to have a liberating potential for women.

[edit] Reception and legacy

Along with Rousseau's Emile (1762), Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education was one of the foundational texts on educational theory of the eighteenth century. In Britain, it was considered the standard treatment of the topic for over a century. For this reason, some critics have maintained that Some Thoughts Concerning Education vies with the Essay Concerning Human Understanding for the title of Locke's most influential work. Some of Locke's contemporaries, such as seventeenth-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, believed this as well; Leibniz argued that Some Thoughts superseded even the Essay in its impact on European society.^[40]

Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education was a runaway bestseller. During the eighteenth century alone, Some Thoughts was published in at least 53 editions: 25 English, 16 French, six Italian, three German, two Dutch, and one Swedish.^[41] It was also excerpted in novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and it formed the theoretical basis of much children's literature, particularly that of the first successful children's publisher, John Newbery. According to James Secord, an 18th-century scholar, Newbery included Locke's educational advice to legitimize the new genre of children's literature. Locke's imprimatur would ensure the genre's success.^[42] By the end of the eighteenth century, whether one agreed with Locke or not, one had to acknowledge his widespread influence. In 1772 James Whitchurch wrote in his Essay Upon Education that Locke was “an Author, to whom the Learned must ever acknowledge themselves highly indebted, and whose Name can never be mentioned without a secret Veneration, and Respect; his Assertions being the result of intense Thought, strict Enquiry, a clear and penetrating Judgment.”^[43] Writers as politically diverse as Sarah Trimmer, in her periodical The Guardian of Education (1802-6), and Maria Edgeworth, in the educational treatise she penned with her father, Practical Education (1798), both invoked Locke's ideas. Even Rousseau, while disputing Locke's central claim that parents should treat their children as rational beings, acknowledged his debt to Locke.^[44]

[edit] Notes

[edit] Bibliography

• Bantock, G. H. "'The Under-labourer' in Courtly Clothes: Locke." Studies in the History of Educational Theory: Artifice and Nature, 1350-1765. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980. ISBN 0043700926.

• Brown, Gillian. The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN 0674002989.

• Chappell, Vere, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN 0521387728.

• Ezell, Margaret J. M. "John Locke’s Images of Childhood: Early Eighteenth Century Responses to Some Thoughts Concerning Education." Eighteenth-Century Studies 17.2 (1983-4): 139-55.

• Ferguson, Frances. "Reading Morals: Locke and Rousseau on Education and Inequality." Representations 6 (1984): 66-84.

• Leites, Edmund. "Locke's Liberal Theory of Parenthood." Ethnicity, Identity, and History. Eds. Joseph B. Maier and Chaim I. Waxman. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983. ISBN 0878554610.

• Locke, John. The Educational Writings of John Locke. Ed. James L. Axtell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. ISBN 0521407366.

• Pickering, Samuel F., Jr. John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981. ISBN 087049290X.

• Yolton, John. John Locke and Education. New York: Random House, 1971. ISBN 0394310322.

[edit] See also

• Philosophy of education

[edit] External links

• Some Thoughts Concerning Education, free full text at Bartleby.com