57. In the age of Locke, if we may confide in what he tells us, the domestic education of children must have been of the worst kind. “If we look,” he says, “into the common management of children we shall have reason to wonder, in the great dissoluteness of manners which the world complains of, that there are any footsteps at all left of virtue. I desire to know what vice can be named which parents and those about children do not season them with, and drop into them the seeds of, as often as they are capable to receive them.” The mode of treatment seems to have been passionate and often barbarous severity alternating with foolish indulgence. Their spirits were often broken down and their ingenuousness destroyed by the former; their habits of self-will and sensuality confirmed by the latter. This was the course used by parents; but the pedagogues of course confined themselves to their favourite scheme of instruction and reformation by punishment. Dugald Stewart has animadverted on the austerity of Locke’s rules of education.[922] And this is certainly the case in some respects. He recommends that children should be taught to expect nothing because it will give them pleasure, but only what will be useful to them; a rule fit, in its rigid meaning, to destroy the pleasure of the present moment in the only period of life that the present moment can be really enjoyed. No father himself, Locke neither knew how ill a parent can spare the love of his child, nor how ill a child can want the constant and practical sense of a parent’s love. But if he was led too far by deprecating the mischievous indulgence he had sometimes witnessed, he made some amends by his censures on the prevalent discipline of stripes. Of this he speaks with the disapprobation natural to a mind already schooled in the habits of reason and virtue.[923] “I cannot think any correction useful to a child where the shame of suffering for having done amiss does not work more upon him than the pain.” Esteem and disgrace are the rewards and punishments to which he principally looks, and surely this is a noble foundation for moral discipline. He also recommends that children should be much with their parents, and allowed all reasonable liberty. I cannot think that Stewart’s phrase “hardness of character,” which he accounts for by the early intercourse of Locke with the Puritans, is justly applicable to anything that we know of him; and many more passages in this very treatise might be adduced to prove his kindliness of disposition, than will appear to any judicious person over austere. He found in fact everything wrong; a false system of reward and punishment, a false view of the objects of education, a false selection of studies, false methods of pursuing them. Where so much was to be corrected, it was perhaps natural to be too sanguine about the effects of the remedy.
[922] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclop. Britann.
[923] If severity carried to the highest pitch does prevail, and works a cure upon the present unruly distemper, it is often bringing in the room of it a worse and more dangerous disease by breaking the mind; and then in the place of a disorderly young fellow, you have a low-spirited moped creature, who however with his unnatural sobriety he may please silly people, who commend tame inactive children, because they make no noise, nor give them any trouble; yet at least will probably prove as uncomfortable a thing to his friends, as he will be all his life an useless thing to himself and others. § 51.
58. Of the old dispute as to public and private education he says, that both sides have their inconveniencies, but incline to prefer the latter, influenced, as is evident, rather by disgust at the state of our schools than by any general principle.[924] For he insists much on the necessity of giving a boy a sufficient knowledge of what he is to expect in the world. “The longer he is kept hood-winked, the less he will see when he comes abroad into open daylight, and be the more exposed to be a prey to himself and others.” And this experience will, as is daily seen, not be supplied by a tutor’s lectures, any more than by books; nor can be given by any course save a public education. Locke urges the necessity of having a tutor well-bred, and with knowledge of the world, the ways, the humours, the follies, the cheats, the faults of the age he is fallen into, and particularly of the country he lives in, as of far more importance than his scholarship. “The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.... He that thinks not this of more moment to his son, and for which he more needs a governor, than the languages and learned sciences, forgets of how much more use it is to judge right of men and manage his affairs wisely with them, than to speak Greek and Latin, and argue in mood and figure, or to have his head filled with the abstruse speculations of natural philosophy and metaphysics; nay, than to be well versed in Greek and Roman writers, though that be much better for a gentleman, than to be a good Peripatetic or Cartesian; because these ancient authors observed and painted mankind well, and give the best light into that kind of knowledge. He that goes into the eastern parts of Asia will find able and acceptable men without any of these; but without virtue, knowledge of the world, and civility, an accomplished and valuable man can be found nowhere.”[925]
[924] § 70.
[925] § 94.
59. It is to be remembered, that the person whose education Locke undertakes to fashion is an English gentleman. Virtue, wisdom, breeding, and learning, are desirable for such an one in their order, but the last not so much as the rest.[926] It must be had, he says, but only as subservient to greater qualities. No objections have been more frequently raised against the scheme of Locke than on account of his depreciation of classical literature, and of the study of the learned languages. This is not wholly true: Latin he reckons absolutely necessary for a gentleman, though it is absurd that those should learn Latin who are designed for trade, and never look again at a Latin book.[927] If he lays not so much stress on Greek as a gentleman’s study, though he by no means would abandon it, it is because, in fact, most gentlemen, especially in his age, have done very well without it; and nothing can be deemed indispensable in the education of a child, the want of which does not leave a manifest deficiency in the man. “No man,” he observes, “can pass for a scholar who is ignorant of the Greek language. But I am not here considering of the education of a professed scholar, but of a gentleman.”[928]
[926] § 138.
[927] § 189.
[928] § 195.