Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke

"Men's happiness or misery is most part of their own making. He, whose mind directs not wisely, will never take the right way; and he, whose body is crazy and feeble, will never be able to advance in it."

The Old School Self Improvement Book Club champions the classics, as you know. We do this because we seek balance. We live in an age that ignores the classics when it does not actively seek to tear them down, an age that judges all the failures of the past by standards invented ten minutes ago and little imagines that the same will happen to its own failures ten minutes hence, an age that is passionately in love with the present, that is to say, passionately in love with itself.

The only fresh air to be had in such an age comes from old books. But it was not always so. There was a time when an intellectual read nothing but old books, when history was imagined as one long decline from the time of Solomon, when the works of Aristotle enjoyed near-universal dominion over the university and were thought of, more-or-less, as the only philosophy worth knowing. The Renaissance had brought the classics back into vogue and very quickly made them mandatory!

In such an atmosphere a little revolution might be just what balance requires. Some Thoughts Concerning Education is John Locke's 1693 attempt at just that, a revolution in pedagogy. Locke wants to teach more than ancient philosophy; he wants to teach natural philosophy, as the then-brand-new sciences were called. He wants the children to reason everything out and think for themselves rather than slavishly deferring to authority. He has all sorts of new ideas, some sounder than others, about physical health, the equality of the sexes, the importance of training in the practical arts, and more. Although Locke is better known today for An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government, this may have been the better-appreciated work at first. Some Thoughts was an absolute Enlightenment blockbuster that spread across Europe and North America and influenced absolutely everybody, which brings us to our club; after enough time even an anti-classic can become a classic, as this one has.

Get started early, because the title is Some Thoughts, not A Few Thoughts, and those thoughts are expressed in sometimes-thorny 17th century English without the benefit (unlike many of our works) of a modern translation. Although this one is easily found for free online, I'll be reading the Hackett edition, which contains Of the Conduct of the Understanding as a bonus (read if you like but it's not expected). If you'd like to do the same, you can buy it here (paid link):

Some Thoughts Concerning Education and of the Conduct of the Understanding

We will meet at Vino's as usual, which would, no doubt, please the wine-loving Locke, on April 21 at the usual time. See you there!