The main aim of education for Locke is character-building, since he conceived virtue as “the first and most necessary of those endowments that belong to a man or a gentleman.” Next to virtue, wisdom is the most necessary quality for a man. Wisdom means “a man’s managing his business ably and with foresight in this world.” And since “this is the product of a good natural temper, application of mind, and experience together,” we cannot teach it to children. “To accustom a child to have true notions of things, and not to be satisfied till he has them; to raise his mind to great and worthy thoughts, and to keep him at a distance from falsehood and cunning, which has always a broad mixture of falsehood in it, is the fittest preparation of a child for wisdom” (7: pp. 119-120). The rest is “to be learned from time, experience and observation, and an acquaintance with men.” Let him inform his mind by engaging in conversation with “men of parts and breeding,” as soon as he is capable of benefitting by it, and send him to travel when he reaches mature adolescence. The third important quality is good breeding. “The happiness that all men so steadily pursue consisting in pleasure--he that knows how to make those he converses with easy, without debasing himself to low and servile flattery, has found the true art of living in the world, and being both welcomed and valued everywhere” (7: p. 124). The aim of good breeding is to avoid a sheepish bashfulness on the one hand, and a misbecoming negligence and disrespect on the other; to cultivate a modest but assured, courteous yet not mean attitude of mind and outward demeanor accompanying it, this is “a great skill which good sense, reason, and good company can only reach.” Here, again, rules and exhortation avail little, unless good examples are shown. “Be as busy as you like with discourses of _Civility_ to your son, such as is his company, such will be his manners” (7: p. 125). But young children should not be too much interfered with as to the outward manners; carelessness and clumsiness are natural to them, and age will cure them, if you only “teach them humility and to be good-natured,” and always choose for them good company. Dancing should be taught as soon as they are capable of learning it, for “nothing appears to me to give children so much becoming confidence and behavior, and so to raise them to the conversation of those above their age, as _Dancing_” (7: p. 42). To give a “freedom and ease to all the motions of the body” is the main thing in dancing. “One that teaches not this is worse than none at all: natural unfashionableness being much better than apish affected postures; and I think it much more passable to put off the hat and make a leg like an honest country gentleman than like an ill-fashioned dancing master. For as for the jigging part and the figures of dances, I count that little or nothing further than as it tends to perfect graceful carriage” (7: p. 174).