Some Thoughts Concerning Education Review

To read Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which were excellent, applicable, insightful, and foundational pieces of political philosophy with profound impact on our modern governmental architecture and implicit social contract, I obtained a copy of Locke’s works which included numerous other pieces.  Given my interest in education, his Some Thoughts Concerning Education stood out for reading, and I finally picked it up as one of my inter-Wheel of Time reads, fully expecting it to be as insightful on the topic of education as Two Treatises were on governance.  Instead, I barely convinced myself it was worthwhile to finish skimming it.

There’s always a chance that these sorts of historical works will suffer from a certain lack of atemporality – that is, some of them don’t age well.  That’s not always a problem.  Xenophon’s treatises on the proper running of a Hellenic farmstead, or the optimal training of a cavalry mount, don’t have much relevance to the modern day…but they are interesting from historical and world-building perspectives because of their specificity.  Even if Locke’s thoughts on education weren’t relevant to modern education, I thought they would at least offer this historical interest aspect, but that proved not to be the case.  Some Thoughts Concerning Education both contains little of relevance to education in the modern age, and is to broad and/or general in its assertions to be insightful from a historical perspective.

Oh, there were occasional tidbits, like the specified recommendations for diet, and a few general suggestions which are of relevance, like the basic principle that children (and people in general) respond and adapt to the stimuli to which they are exposed and accustomed.  Most of the text, though, is at too high a level to offer intriguing specificity, and Locke’s conclusions are based more on anecdote and rationalism than any more rigorous approach to understanding education.  Perhaps it is because of my interest and engagement with education that I found this approach so lacking.  Not that I expect Locke to know the neuroscience of learning, but his other works demonstrate a much deeper understanding of human nature.  I wonder if this was one of his earlier works.

It is worth remembering that the role of the education has fundamentally changed since John Locke was writing and thinking.  A recent episode on the podcast Hidden Brain observed that while in the past a generation could reliably educate the next generation based on their own experiences, these days large scale change happens at speeds that end up with the next generation often educating the previous generation.  Now, that could be the topic of its own post, since it rests on some assumptions about the nature of change and our ability to perceive it consistently across time that may or may not be founded, but the point here is that the nature of education, and its goals, are highly situationally dependent.  Putting aside our modern knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, and other scientific disciplines which can inform educational techniques, the goals of education that we think of in response to that word today are dramatically different than those of Locke’s society.  Where modern education is thought of as a way to develop skills and to teach knowledge/information, in the past education was thought of as a way to develop a person towards a specific end.  This may be the source of some of the disconnect in perceived relevance.

I recently started reading an HG Wells novel called The Research Magnificent, in which the protagonist is set upon the search for what constitutes as noble life.  Most modern sensibilities likely regard the entire notion as faintly quaint and highly ambiguous.  Which it is, as evidenced by the lengthy novel Wells wrote on the topic, not to mention the thousands of other novels, essays, treatises, and other texts devoted to the topic over human history.  Some Thoughts Concerning Education is not about how best to teach someone to be an engineer, or to do calculus, or to hyperanalyze books beyond the reasonable bounds of meaning; it is about how to raise someone to an idea of nobility and social functioning quite apart from specific skills or societal place.  Unfortunately, it is still executed at too general a level to make it a worthwhile read.