Some Thoughts Concerning Education

How much of what a grown person is was settled by small things done to the child? Locke answers nine parts in ten, and he begins with the body, because a mind can do little in one that fails it.

Locke opens as a physician. Children are to be out in all weathers, dressed lightly, fed plainly, put to sleep on a hard bed and given shoes thin enough to let water in, so that wet feet harm them no more than wet hands. The principle is habit: a body used early to cold and plain fare bears what would injure a coddled one. Locke then carries the principle to the mind. What a child does repeatedly becomes easy and then natural, so parents should build practices and stop loading the memory with rules that are forgotten as soon as they are given.

• health
• habit formation
• child development
• childhood
• habit
• temperance
• child-rearing

What makes a child want to do right when nobody is watching? Locke rules out both the whip and the sweet, and stakes everything on the child’s wish to be thought well of.

Virtue, for Locke, is the power to deny a desire and follow what reason shows to be best, practised from the cradle. Beating cannot teach it. The rod ties the child to bodily pleasure and pain, the very motive that has to be weakened, and produces a slavish temper that obeys only while the stick is in sight. Sweets and money do the same from the other side. What works is esteem and disgrace: the parents’ warm approval and their cold displeasure. Children are to be reasoned with as far as their age allows, and a father’s strictness should relax until the grown son is his friend.

• discipline
• motivation
• moral education
• virtue
• authority
• reason
• fear
• self-control
• character formation
• parenting

What should a child be taught, and how can it be taught without making him hate it? Locke puts book-learning last among the aims of education and turns the lesson into a game.

Locke names four things a gentleman’s son should have: virtue, wisdom, breeding and learning, in that order. Learning comes last because a scholar without character is the worse for his Latin. The method follows from the child’s temper. Whatever is imposed as a task becomes hateful, so reading should begin with letters pasted on dice, and curiosity should be answered whenever it asks. Latin is to be picked up by talking, as a mother tongue is; verse-making and long recitation by heart are dropped. He adds accounts, French and a manual trade such as gardening or carpentry, and prefers a tutor at home to the grammar school.

• curriculum
• language learning
• reading
• learning
• memory
• education
• manners
• civility