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Locke, Education, and “Disciplinary Liberalism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2017

Hina Nazar
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Abstract

This paper contends that Locke's educational writings are more robust in their commitment to autonomy than recent assessments of Locke as a theorist of “disciplinary liberalism” suggest. While Locke's account of parental power is conflicted, it is mostly compatible with a liberal, child-responsive approach to education. Insofar as Locke develops a pedagogy sensitive to the pupil's temperament and his rights as a child, he articulates a nuanced understanding of autonomy, shown to be a product of the individual's participation in a community of rational beings. Complicating both received understandings of Lockean liberalism as atomistic and newer claims about the dark forces of socialization it unleashes, this paper gleans from Lockean education the potential of a socially embedded subject, who looks both within and without himself to cultivate a posture of considerable critical independence.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , Spring 2017 , pp. 215 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2017 

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References

1 Baltes, John, “Locke's Inverted Quarantine: Discipline, Panopticism, and the Making of the Liberal Subject,” Review of Politics 75 (2013): 189 and 191CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 In addition to Baltes, see Carrig, Joseph, “Liberal Impediments to Liberal Education: The Assent to Locke,” Review of Politics 63, no. 1 (2001): 41–76 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Durst, David C., “The Limits of Toleration in John Locke's Liberal Thought,” Res Publica 7 (2001): 39–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sumser, Robert, “John Locke and the Unbearable Lightness of Modern Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 26, no. 2 (October 1994): 1–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mehta, Uday Singh, The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 Locke, John, Some Thoughts concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Grant, Ruth W. and Tarcov, Nathan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996)Google Scholar. I will cite these separately as Thoughts and Conduct, and give page number references in parentheses. All emphases are in the original unless otherwise noted. Written in 1697, Of the Conduct of the Understanding was intended as an addition to (and the longest chapter of) a revised edition of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. On the relationship of the educational writings to the Essay, see especially Axtell's, James L. introduction to The Educational Writings of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Schouls, Peter A., Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 183–84Google Scholar. Ruth W. Grant and Benjamin R. Hertzberg also contend that it important to consider the Thoughts in relation to the Conduct, and both works in relation to the Essay. See “Locke on Education,” in A Companion to Locke, ed. Stuart, Matthew (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2016), 448–65Google Scholar.

4 Locke, John, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Henceforth cited as Essay; page number references are given in parentheses.

5 The classic works in the communitarian critique include Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Sandel, Michael J., Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Bristol, 1981)Google Scholar. For the argument about atomistic individualism, see, especially, Taylor, Charles, “Atomism,” in Powers, Possessions, and Freedom, ed. Kontos, Alkis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 39–61 Google Scholar.

6 Taylor, “Atomism”; and Sources of the Self.

7 Grant, Ruth W., “John Locke on Custom's Power and Reason's Authority,” Review of Politics 74 (2012): 607–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tarcov, Nathan, Locke's Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar. See also Grant and Tarcov's editors’ introduction to the Hackett edition of Some Thoughts concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding. All students of Locke are indebted to Tarcov's pioneering book-length study on Lockean education, Locke's Education for Liberty. However, Tarcov's focus is less the “liberty” invoked by his title than the specific gentlemanly liberal virtues Lockean education inculcates. Concerned strictly with the relationship between Some Thoughts concerning Education and the Two Treatises of Government, Tarcov does not consider how Locke's treatment of education coheres with the account of freedom he develops in the Essay; nor does he engage Locke's account of adult education in the Conduct, the most natural bridge between the Essay and the Thoughts. A more recent study that builds on Locke's Education for Liberty to further extend the dialogue between the Thoughts and the Two Treatises, and that is specifically interested in the implications of Lockean education for the art of governing others in society, is Josephson, Peter, The Great Art of Government: Locke's Use of Consent (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002)Google Scholar, chap. 7.

8 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995)Google Scholar. Direct engagement with Foucault's work is beyond the scope of this essay, which focuses instead on recent Foucault-inspired readings of Locke. I am singling out what I view as the three most powerful such readings, given by Baltes, Carrig, and Mehta. An earlier interpretation, influencing recent work, is Tully, James, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Baltes, “Locke's Inverted Quarantine,” 191.

10 Ibid., 192.

11 Mehta, Anxiety of Freedom, 124; Carrig, “Liberal Impediments,” 76.

12 I take the term “disciplinary liberalism” from Baltes, “Locke's Inverted Quarantine,” 173.

13 Baltes, “Locke's Inverted Quarantine,” 191.

14 Ibid., 189.

15 As Mehta puts it, “Locke's ostensibly liberal and compassionate program is counterbalanced by the demand that the child internalize the standards—the anguishing standards—of shame, guilt, and responsibility” (Mehta, Anxiety of Freedom, 142).

16 Carrig, “Liberal Impediments,” 71.

17 Baltes, “Locke's Inverted Quarantine,” 191.

18 Margaret Ezell and Hugh Cunningham make related arguments about Locke and the eighteenth century more generally, highlighting the ambivalences that mark supposedly enlightened attitudes to education. Focusing on the imagery associated with childhood and education, Ezell notes that eighteenth-century attitudes produce no neat break from the seventeenth century, with its Augustinian view of children as “limbs of Satan.” Instead, they “act like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope: all the pieces making up the images of childhood are present from the seventeenth century, but the patterns change during the eighteenth, depending on which way one turns the focus.” In his wide-ranging study of Western views of childhood, which updates Philippe Ariès's seminal Centuries of Childhood (1962), Cunningham observes that when we turn to the eighteenth century, “both in attitudes to childhood and in behaviour towards children we are confronted at every turn by ambivalences and contradictions.” This is true also of Locke's educational writings: “Anyone who followed Locke to the letter would have been engaged in a form of child-rearing which was quite as much conservative as innovative.” See Ezell, Margaret J. M., “John Locke's Images of Childhood: Early Eighteenth Century Response to Some Thoughts concerning Education ,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17, no. 2 (1983–84): 139–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cunningham, Hugh, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Routledge, 2005), 59Google Scholar.

19 Cunningham's review of the Protestant literature on childhood sounds eerily like a summary of aspects of Locke's Thoughts. The model Protestant child, Cunningham observes, was the product of “training by parents from an early age in good habits. The analogies and metaphors which pervade [Protestant] books are not ones of natural growth, but of horticulture, of preparing good soil, of rooting out weeds, of training young shoots in the direction you want them to go; or they are of the instilling of obedience into puppies or colts. Left to themselves, children will turn out bad. Their wills must be broken… . So far as possible this training should be done rationally and calmly, but there might be occasion for inflicting corporal punishment; if so, it must not be too severe, and it must not be administered in anger” (Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 47). W. M. Spellman emphasizes Locke's indebtedness to the Puritan belief in natural depravity in John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988)Google Scholar.

20 Children, Locke argues, must be taught to “deny their appetites… by the custom of having their inclinations in subjection” (79). They must be accustomed “early to silence their desires” (79), and to learn “the art of stifling their desires as soon as they rise up in them” (78).

21 Locke revised and expanded “Of Power” for the second edition of the Essay, published in 1694, one year after Some Thoughts concerning Education. As Schouls observes, “while Locke was thinking about freedom and desire, self-determination and habit, he was at the same time preparing Some Thoughts concerning Education for the press” (Schouls, Reasoned Freedom, 183).

22 Early in the Essay, Locke underscores, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct” (46).

23 The most famous occurrence of this image is at the beginning of Book II: “Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished?” (104).

24 Vogt, Philip, John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 2; and “Seascape with Fog: Metaphor in Locke's Essay ,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 2 (1998): 1–18 Google Scholar. Regarding the image of the white paper, Vogt notes that “Locke has direct recourse to it exactly twice in the Essay and makes indirect reference to it exactly four times more” (“Seascape,” 13). Vogt underscores that in the Essay Locke nowhere mobilizes the tabula rasa metaphor. It appears instead in the “Abstract of the Essay” that Locke sent to Père le Clerc in France and that Peter King, Locke's nephew, subsequently published in England. In the “Abstract” Locke observes, “In the thoughts I have had concerning the Understanding, I have endeavoured to prove that the mind is at first rasa tabula. But that being only to remove the prejudice that lies in some men's minds, I think it best in this short view I design here of my principles, to pass by all that preliminary debate which makes the first book, since I pretend to show in what follows the original from whence, and the ways whereby, we receive all the ideas our understandings are employed about in thinking” (quoted in Vogt, John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity, 62). Vogt's interpretation of this reference to the blank slate metaphor is compelling. As he suggests, “The metaphor of the tabula rasa is not offered as a model of the human mind. Instead, it functions polemically, to undermine alternative theories, and heuristically, to illustrate how our preconceptions must be purged of erroneous doctrines like innatism… . [Locke] is not saying that the mind ever exists in an empty state. He is simply asking us to take up the problem of the origin of knowledge without the encumbrance of the discredited theory of ‘native’ or innate ideas” (Vogt, John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity, 62).

25 Vogt argues that scholars who take Locke to be espousing an essentially passive empiricist epistemology forget that “Locke always couples the ‘sensation’ by which simple ideas are acquired with ‘reflection,’ or the capacity for original and independent thought” (Vogt, “Seascape,” 12).

26 Hence the irrelevance, according to Locke, of the free will debates. It is not the will but the agent that is free. As Locke puts it, “I think the Question is not proper, whether the Will be free, but whether a Man be free” (244).

27 For a related interpretation of the Essay’s account of freedom, one that foregrounds the role of probabilistic judgment, see Casson, Douglas John, Liberating Judgment: Fanatics, Skeptics, and John Locke's Politics of Probability (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 5.

28 Yolton writes, for example, of Locke's “wholly negative” attitude toward desire. See John Yolton, John Locke and Education (New York: Random House, 1971), 34. Other readings attributing an uncompromising rationalism to Locke include Mehta, Anxiety of Freedom; and Taylor, Sources of the Self.

29 Frankfurt, Harry G., “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (Jan. 1971): 5–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Korsgaard, Christine M. et al. , The Sources of Normativity, ed. O'Neill, Onora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 93.

31 Ibid., 122–23.

32 Ibid., 107.

33 Button, Mark E., Contract, Culture, and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 164Google Scholar.

34 Smith, Jad, “Custom, Association, and the Mixed Mode: Locke's Early Theory of Cultural Reproduction,” ELH 73, no. 4 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 832 and 845.

35 Grant, “Custom's Power,” 621.

36 Schouls, Reasoned Freedom; Neill, Alex, “Locke on Habituation, Autonomy, and Education,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 27, no. 2 (1989): 225–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Schouls, Reasoned Freedom, 217.

38 Ibid., 211.

39 For a detailed publication history of the Thoughts, see Axtell's introduction, Educational Writings of John Locke, 3–17.

40 While the book has a narrow class and gender focus, Locke suggests that his educational advice is generalizable. In his dedication, he enjoins readers to draw conclusions for the “training up [of] youth with regard to their several conditions” (8). Elsewhere in the Thoughts he hints that girls’ education should be broadly similar to boys’, and “where the difference of sex requires different treatment, it will be no hard matter to distinguish” (12). In a letter to Edward Clarke's wife, Mary Clarke, dated January 1, 1685, Locke writes that there is “no great difference” between the education of boys and girls, “for making a little allowance for beauty and some few other considerations of the s[ex], the manner of breeding boys and girls, especially in their younger years, I imagine should be the same” (quoted in Axtell, Educational Writings of John Locke, 5).

41 Carrig, “Liberal Impediments,” 50.

42 Ibid., 52.

43 Ibid., 48. Locke's precise argument in the Second Treatise is that fathers, even though they cannot prescribe actions to their grown sons, can expect to enjoy “a perpetual right to respect, reverence, support and compliance too, more or less, as the Father's care, cost and kindness in his Education, has been more or less” ( Locke, , Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

44 On the ways in which education is rendered responsive to the child, see also Ward, Lee, John Locke and Modern Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 5.

45 Carrig, “Liberal Impediments,” 60.

46 This insight is obscured by the disciplinarians’ contention that for Locke, “reason” signals nothing other than “a foundation of habitual thinking and acting” or “the rules of the game well-bred men observe.” See, respectively, Carrig, “Liberal Impediments,” 61; and Baltes, “Locke's Inverted Quarantine,” 190.

47 On Locke's formalism or his commitment to how (rather than what) knowledge is acquired, see Paul Schuurman, “Locke's Way of Ideas as Context for His Theory of Education in Of the Conduct of the Understanding,” History of European Ideas 27 (2001): 56.

48 Richard Yeo argues that conversation figured prominently in Locke's “life-long concern about the proper grounds of assent and belief” ( Yeo, Richard, “John Locke on Conversation with Friends and Strangers,” Parergon 26, no. 2 [2009]: 12Google Scholar).

49 Mehta, Anxiety of Freedom, 24 and 124; Baltes, “Locke's Inverted Quarantine,” 173, 178, 183, 190, 191, 192.

50 Locke's turn to discipline, Baltes argues, is due to his “fear of the natural… self” (“Locke's Inverted Quarantine,” 190).

51 Carrig, “Liberal Impediments,” 75.