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Volume 37:

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (full text) by John Locke

My sister recently started home-schooling her four children, and several of my close friends are just starting families, so lately I've done more thinking and talking about education and upbringing than is probably typical for a single 28-year-old. Naturally, my reading has played a part in this. By my count, there are at least half a dozen works in the Classics that concern themselves primarily with education. I'm being reasonably conservative in my accounting here -- not including, say, Franklin's Autobiography, which describes at some length its author's apprenticeship, but including Mill's Autobiography, which takes the specifics of its author's unusual education as its focus throughout. Of course, the Classics as a whole are a kind of treatise on education, in as much as they are an attempt to answer the question of exactly what the educated man needs to know.

The answer to that question -- what should we be teaching our children? -- is destined to remain unsettled, to be restated in each time and place, perhaps even in each human heart. For example, the opening pages of John Locke's treatise on education are largely concerned with bowel movements.

When it comes to stools, Locke believed, People that are very loose, have seldom strong thoughts, or strong bodies. Luckily, Locke had a simple solution to this problem, which was to sit your kid on the can every morning whether he had to go or not -- morning being a time when people have leisure enough ... to make so much court to Madam Cloacina -- and keep him there until he produced something. Each time Locke tried this experiment he found that in a few months they obtain’d the desired success, and brought themselves to so regular an habit, that they seldom ever fail’d of a stool after their first eating, unless it were by their own neglect.

I bring this up not because I find it funny in a puerile away (which I do), but because it suggests some interesting things about the writing on education that I've found in the Classics. In most societies before our own, formal education was not nearly so rigidly codified as it is in America today. (Nor, it should be said, was it nearly so universal.) If you were a rich man seeking to educate his son, you had far more than the choice of the finest prep schools; you could pretty much start from scratch. Of course most parents farmed the work out, just as they do today. They hired tutors from among the learned class, which is how so many of the great writers and philosophers of previous eras came to write treatises on education. These were men who were trained to begin with first principles and, when it came to education, that is exactly what they did. And so the first thing that strikes me about Locke's concerns here (okay, maybe the second thing) is that they don't belong to what we think of now as education. Locke decided what an educated man should have -- a sound mind in a sound body -- and then considered how the things was to be achieved, beginning from the very beginning.

Which brings me to the other point about Locke. His writing about education illustrates perhaps as well as his philosophical writing his theory of the human mind as tabula rasa. I suspect that one of the reasons that we are less inclined these days to start from scratch in education is that we have more modest ideas about what the possible returns might be. Biology, genetics, psychology, nutrition -- they will all come to play their parts in determining when an educated man pays court to Madam Cloacina.

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists (full text) by George Berkeley

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (full text) by David Hume

Reading Berkeley after Locke's writings on education, I was reminded how much the dialogue as a written form owes to the tutor-pupil model. Of course, this relationship is overt in Socratic dialogues. But after them, one tends to think that anyone who uses the form is imitating Plato, rather than imitating actual conversation. That the give-and-take of talking issues out might be more valuable than reading about them on the page, and that the value of that give-and-take might be reproduced and read on the page -- this is unavoidable paradox of philosophical dialogues. I'm often frustrated, when reading them, to find that Crito or Hylas isn't raising quite the objections that I would raise in his place. That he is stumbling unnecessarily over what seems like a simple enough point. But the form certainly has its advantages; when reading a monologist like Hume, one isn't always even sure what objection is being answered to.

Thus, Hume writes about Scepticism:

I need not insist upon the more trite topics, employed by the sceptics in all ages, against the evidence of sense; such as those which are derived from the imperfection and fallaciousness of our organs, on numberless occasions; the crooked appearance of an oar in water; the various aspects of objects, according to their different distances; ... with many other appearances of a like nature. These sceptical topics, indeed, are only sufficient to prove, that the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on; but that we must correct their evidence by reason.

A crooked oar in the water? In another context I would have had no idea what to make of this. But then I knew that all of these examples are precisely the ones that Berkeley had used to argue against the reality of matter. As they duke out the old materialist/idealist debate, Berkeley and Hume act out a kind of dialogue with each other. The difference being that in Hume's writing it's a bit harder to hear the other voice.


--CRB, October 11, 2007

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