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.