Any account of Locke's views on Education, however meagre, would be
very imperfect, if it neglected to notice the motives to obedience
and proficiency which be proposed to substitute for what was then too
often the one and only motive on which the Schoolmaster relied, fear
of the rod. Corporal chastisement should be reserved, he thought, for
the offence of wilful and obstinate disobedience. In all other cases,
appeal should be made to the pupil's natural desire of employment and
knowledge, to example acting through his propensity to imitation, to
reasoning, to the sense of shame and the love of commendation and
reputation. Many of Locke's suggestions for bringing these motives
effectually to bear are very ingenious, and the whole of this part of
the discussion is as creditable to his humanity as to his knowledge of
human nature.
There is a large literature on the theory of education, from the Book
of Proverbs and the _Republic_ of Plato downwards. It is no part of my
task even to mention the principal writers in this field. But, besides
some of the works of Comenius, the Essay of Montaigne _De l'institution
des enfants_, and the tractate of Milton already referred to, we may
almost take for granted that Locke had read the _Schoolmaster_ of
Roger Ascham. This author, who was instructor to Queen Elizabeth, is
already sufficiently independent of scholastic traditions to think
that "children are sooner allured by love, than driven by beating, to
attain good learning," and to suggest that "there is no such whetstone
to sharpen a good wit, and encourage a will to learning, as is praise."
He protests almost as strongly as Locke against the senseless mode,
then and long afterwards prevalent, of teaching grammar merely by means
of abstract rules, and proposes, as in part substitute, the method
of double translation, that is, of translating from the foreign or
dead language into English, and then back again. Of the many works on
education subsequent to Locke's, the most famous is, undoubtedly, the
_Emile_ of Rousseau. On Rousseau's theories there can be no question
that Locke, mediately or immediately, exercised considerable influence,
though the range of speculation covered in the _Emile_ far exceeds that
of the _Thoughts concerning Education_. Of the points common to the two
writers, I may specify the extension of the term "education" to the
regulations of the nursery, the substitution of an appeal to the tender
and the social affections for the harsh discipline mostly in vogue
among our ancestors, the stress laid on the importance of example and
habituation in place of the mere inculcation of rules, and, as a point
of detail, the desirableness of learning one or more manual trades. One
circumstance, however, as Mr. Morley has pointed out, distinguishes the
_Emile_ from all the works on education which preceded it. Its scope
is not confined to the children of well-to-do people, and hence its