Some Thoughts Concerning EducationJohn Locke

Locke published Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693, drawing on letters of advice he had written for the education of a gentleman's son. The opening claim is blunt: of all the men we meet, nine parts of ten are what they are by their education. Where the Essay Concerning Human Understanding had denied innate ideas and pictured the mind as receptive to experience, the Thoughts ask how that mind should be formed. Locke treats education as the making of character. The curriculum is secondary.

He organizes the work around body, virtue, and learning, in that order of importance. Health and hardy habits come first. A child's constitution is strengthened by cold, exercise, plain diet, and freedom from softness. Virtue follows, and it occupies the bulk of the book. Locke distrusts harsh corporal punishment and empty rules. He wants habits of reason, esteem, and self-command formed early by example, practice, and the careful use of reputation rather than terror. Learning comes last. Languages, history, geography, and practical arts matter, but they serve a person already trained to govern himself. Locke prefers a private tutor to the boarding school, where vice multiplies by imitation.

The Thoughts stand in the Great Conversation as the educational corollary of empiricism. They answer Scholastic and purely bookish models of learning, and they shape later Enlightenment programs of reform, including Rousseau's Émile, which inherits Locke's stress on habit and experience while rejecting his gentlemanly aims. The work asks a permanent question: what kind of person should education produce, and by what means?