Locke had served as a tutor in an English nobleman's family, had worked out his educational theories in practice and thought them through as mind processes, and had become thoroughly convinced that it was the process of learning that was important, rather than the thing learned. Education to him was a process of disciplining the body, fixing good habits, training the youth in moral situations, and training the mind through work with studies selected because of their disciplinary value. This conception of education he sets forth well in the following paragraph, taken from his Thoughts:
The great Work of the Governor is to fashion the Carriage and form the Mind; to settle in his Pupils good Habits and the Principles of Virtue and Wisdom; to give him by little and little a View of Mankind, and work him into a Love and Imitation of what is excellent and praiseworthy; and in the Prosecution of it, to give him Vigor, Activity, and Industry. The Studies which he sets him upon, are but as it were the Exercise of his Faculties, and Employment of his Time, to keep him from Sauntering and Idleness, to teach him Application, and accustom him to take Pains, and to give him some little Taste of what his own Industry must perfect (§94).
In his Thoughts Locke first sets forth at length the necessity for disciplining the body by means of diet, exercise, and the hardening process. "A sound mind in a sound body" he conceives to be "a short but full description of a happy state in this world," and a fundamental basis for morality and learning. The formation of good habits and manners through proper training, and the proper adjustment of punishments and rewards next occupies his attention, and he then explains his theory as to making all punishments the natural consequences of acts. Similarly the mind, as the body, must be disciplined to virtue by training the child to deny, subordinate desires, and apply reason to acts. The formation of good habits and the disciplining of the desires Locke regards as the foundations of virtue. On this point he says:
As the Strength of the Body lies chiefly in being able to endure
Hardship, so also does that of the Mind. And the great Principle and
Foundation of all Virtue and Worth is plac'd in this:—That a Man is
able to deny himself his own Desires, cross his own
Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason directs as best, tho' the
Appetite lean the other Way (§ 33).
Similarly, in intellectual education, good thinking and the employment of reason is the aim, and these, too, must be attained through the proper discipline of the mind. Good intellectual education does not consist merely in studying and learning, he contends, as was the common practice in the grammar schools of his time, but must be achieved by a proper drilling of the powers of the mind through the use of selected studies. The purpose of education, he holds, is above all else to make man a reasoning creature. Nothing, in his judgment, trains to reason closely so well as the study of mathematics, though Locke would have his boy "look into all sorts of knowledge," and train his understanding with a wide variety of exercises. In the education given in the grammar schools of his time he found much that seemed to him wasteful of time and thoroughly bad in principle, and he used much space to point out defects and describe better methods of teaching and management, giving in some detail reasons therefor. His ideas as to needed reforms in the teaching of Latin (R. 227) are illustrative.
LOCKE ON ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. For the beginnings of education, and for elementary education in general, Locke sticks close to the prevailing religious conception of his time. As for the education of the common people, he writes:
The knowledge of the Bible and the business of his own calling is
enough for the ordinary man; a Gentleman ought to go further.
Continuing regarding the beginnings of education and the studies and textbooks of his day, he says:
The Lord's Prayer, the Creeds, and the Ten Commandments, 't is necessary he should learn perfectly by heart…. What other Books there are in English of the Kind of those above-mentioned (besides the Primer) fit to engage the Liking of Children, and tempt them to read, I do not know;… and nothing that I know has been considered of this Kind out of the ordinary Road of the Horn Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible (§ 157).
Locke does, however, give some very sensible suggestions as to the reading of the Bible (R. 228), the imparting of religious ideas to children, and the desirability of transforming instruction so as to make it pleasant and agreeable, with plenty of natural playful activity. [3] On this point he writes: