Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Children

In Locke's treatise, children are not abstractions but the living test of every method he proposes — the boy sweating over a theme on a Latin tag he cannot understand, the pupil forced to versify who has no poetic vein, the young gentleman who should be learning to speak well on matters he actually knows. Their tension is with the schoolmasters who rack their invention for words before they have any sense, demanding bricks without straw. They matter because Locke's entire argument turns on whether education fits the child's capacity or crushes it.

Narrator

The narrator is a philosopher writing privately to Edward Clarke, whose papers were pressed into print by friends who thought them too useful to stay dormant. He admits the meanness of his own offering, distrusts his abilities, and yet throws his mite into the public receptacle because errors in education, like faults in the first concoction, carry their taint through every station of life. His tension is between modesty and conviction: he would rather someone abler rectify his mistakes than have his own opinion received.

A Child

This child stands in for every young learner whose curiosity might be fed with useful knowledge of the sensible world rather than stuffed with grammatical scraps. Locke warns that whatever you teach, you must not make anything his business but virtue, nor reprove him for anything but vice. The child matters because he embodies the treatise's central wager: that learning can be made easy and pleasant, and that the alternative is a mind disgusted before it has begun.

Your Son

Locke addresses the father through this son, urging him to insist that the boy not be set to making declamations or verses, since the design is merely to understand a Latin author, not to breed an orator or poet. The son's fate at school is the father's to negotiate, and Locke presses the point that a thousand to one the boy will never deliver a Latin speech once he leaves. He matters because he makes the argument personal: this is not abstract pedagogy but your child, your choice.

His Son

This son appears in Locke's sharpest aside: if a father wishes his boy a poet, he should consider what company and places a successful rhymer frequents, and how seldom anyone mines gold from Parnassus. The tension is between paternal ambition and worldly ruin, poetry and gaming usually going together. He matters because he crystallizes Locke's suspicion that cherishing a poetic vein is the surest way to unfit a young gentleman for every other calling.

My Young Master

My young master is the boy Locke has actually taught, the one whose good temper and love of his book he cites as evidence that his method works. The tension is between the ordinary disciplining of children and the gentler usage Locke recommends, with the child's own temper as the variable he will not claim full credit for. He matters because he turns the treatise from theory into testimony: the method has had no ordinary effects on a gentleman's son it was not designed for.