Locke's educational proposals in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (hereafter Some Thoughts) are designed for the few and not the many.Footnote ¹ This is apparent not because Locke specifically addresses the work to the education of the children of gentlemen, but because, barring the immigration of an enormous number of foreign tutors, no nation can conceivably universalize his proposal for individual tutors. Were everyone in America rich, we should still find it virtually impossible to reduce the student–teacher ratio to 1:1. Some Thoughts is written for those few with the means to secure private tutoring. As Robert Horwitz says, “it is not Locke's intention in [Some Thoughts] to deal with the education of the entire citizenry, but only with that part which he regards as indispensable for the preservation of the commonwealth and of those standards requisite for the maintenance of its political legitimacy.”Footnote ² The rest must make do with traditional schools or, in the case of the poor, with the “working schools” proposed by Locke in his report to the Board of Trade.Footnote ³ But however small the anticipated audience of Some Thoughts, within the context of his educational proposals, it is the argument of this article that Locke's concern for the common man goes far beyond a plan for basic education for the poor. Scholars differ over the question of class relations in Some Thoughts. Steven Forde and Peter Myers have argued that Locke has a broad-minded concern for the common man. Myers writes that in Some Thoughts “Locke recommends the cultivation of civility … to help preserve the peace in societies of rights-claiming individuals, and to enable independent pursuers of happiness, by avoiding offense and respecting others, better to make their way in the world.”Footnote ⁴ In contrast, critics such as Uday Singh Mehta claim that Locke promotes exclusion of and insincerity toward the lower classes by means of immersion in “social and hierarchical distinctions” and by fostering the ability “to feign humility, anger, and concern.”Footnote ⁵ The evidence favors Forde and Myers, but their arguments on this question need to be strengthened by a detailed consideration of various methods Locke uses to bridge class differences. In what follows, I will show that Locke intends that the sons of gentlemen be educated to the equally civil treatment of all men, and that the fathers of these sons be likewise re-educated. The aim is to produce a class of gentlemen much more at ease with the lower classes by virtue of being much more aware of their common circumstances in childhood, their basic equality as rational beings, and their common interest in each other both socially and economically. By altering the relationship between gentlemen and the lower classes, Locke would quietly dethrone the aristocracy as a model for the gentlemen and create instead a class of rational, civil, and independent-minded gentlemen that constitutes the social and moral example for the great bulk of the nation. This new relationship is meant to reconcile the classes on the basis of a common standard of human behavior. Locke's educational program supports his political goals in the Second Treatise and is somewhat adaptable to our own democratic age.

For the purposes of Some Thoughts, Locke divides English society into three broad classes: an aristocratic class of nobles, the gentry, and a lower class consisting largely of yeomen, farmers, tradesmen, wage laborers, and the unemployed.Footnote ⁶ H.J. Habbakuk identifies a class of “substantial squires” between the landed aristocracy and “smaller squires,” or landed gentry.Footnote ⁷ Locke appears to treat the substantial squires as part of the aristocracy.Footnote ⁸ In contrast to his contemporary John Selden, who identifies gentlemen as nobles, he specifically separates gentlemen from that class.Footnote ⁹ Locke focuses on the education of “an ordinary gentleman's son” (§216).Footnote ¹⁰

Breaking the Ice: A New Physical Regimen

Locke begins Some Thoughts with a discussion of physical health rather than an education of the mind.Footnote ¹¹ He explains his choice by hinting at his medical expertise, assuring the reader that the discussion will be brief and connecting a healthy body with happiness (§§1–3). Locke's discussion of bodily health has led some readers astray. Mehta compares Locke's suggestions for physical training to “artificially induced exercises of physical hardship and privation” and he argues that Locke subordinates such practices to parental “structures of authority.”Footnote ¹² At the same time, Mehta, like other writers, recognizes the value of bodily health to liberal education.Footnote ¹³ Mehta overstates the role of parental authority here. There is a deeper purpose in Locke's discussion of bodily training. In fact, while Locke does aim for physical hardiness and obedience, the method he suggests allows him to propose, at the very beginning of a work on the education of a gentleman's son, the common man as a physical standard for that son. Locke must break down the prejudices restraining gentlemen from treating their sons as the lower classes treat their children. He does so by temporarily elevating the lower classes and by diminishing as unmanly the gentleman's tender concern for his son.Footnote ¹⁴ In his first mention of the lower classes as a physical standard, Locke is complimentary, referring to them as “honest farmers and substantial yeomen” (§4; emphases added). He then mentions a “Scythian philosopher,” no less, as a successful example of rough treatment of the body (§5). Only in the next paragraph does he bring up “common people” in connection with such treatment of children. Locke then alternates high and low instances of rough treatment by citing the noble examples of Seneca and Horace, and “the Jews, both men and women,” of Germany and Poland (§7). His references to these two countries are meant to provoke national pride, for their rivers “are much colder than any in this our country” (§7). Could any self-respecting Englishman consider himself or his son less hardy than these Continentals? Locke also diminishes anxiety for the physical treatment of sons by playing off one prejudice against another: he locates such concerns in mothers and equates them with “cockering and tenderness,”Footnote ¹⁵ thereby inviting the gentleman reader to choose manly strength over feminine weakness (§§4, 7). He further narrows the differences in the physical treatment of gentlemen and common men by reducing protection of one's feet from cold and wetness to “custom” and presenting the results of such treatment as something worth paying for (§7).

Locke closes his discussion of the hardening of the body with an analysis of costiveness. By bringing up a low but natural activity common to all men, he drives home the point that beneath the customs and classes that distinguish men is a basic if base equality. Locke causes the mind of the reader to focus on this aspect of human equality by denying to him, both before (§23) and after the discussion, a man of means's resort to a “physic” in the form of “ladies’ diet drinks or apothecary's medicines” (§29; emphasis in original; see also §28).Footnote ¹⁶

The effect of his advice concerning the hardening of the body is to produce within the mind of the gentleman reader at least a partially altered view of the lower classes. We can expect that a gentleman habituated to viewing the ragged condition of lower class children as a visible manifestation of a lack of breeding will be more inclined, when he sees his own well-bred sons emerging from a similar physical upbringing, to view such conditions as a natural part of child-rearing, and not indicative of physical or mental impoverishment. Indeed, he might be inclined by his own experience to conclude that, at least insofar as their physical training is concerned, the children of the lower classes are off to a good start. This relative equality of conditions between children of lower and upper classes thus makes visible and reinforces Locke's argument “that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.”Footnote ¹⁷ Material and social poverty is more likely to be viewed as an accident of birth, not a fact of nature, and therefore as correctible by education, not to say political or economic changes. As much as Locke aims to change the thinking of fathers, these improvements in the way the lower classes are viewed are substantially more likely to be impressed upon the minds of the gentlemen's children, who experience the rough treatment firsthand, and who therefore have their own physical upbringing removed as a potential source of division between themselves and the lower classes.

Re-Educating the Father

The most obvious goal of Some Thoughts is to produce a better education for the sons of gentlemen. But the work is not, of course, addressed to these sons, or even their tutors.Footnote ¹⁸ Instead, Locke must operate indirectly by educating fathers in education, and doubly indirectly by guiding the father's choice and management of the tutor. Since much of what the child will learn will come to him under the guidance of the tutor, the father may find that there are areas in which his son acquires knowledge of which he, the father, is ignorant. But Locke also makes the father directly responsible for a substantial portion of his son's education. The father will be unfit for such a role if he passes on his own bad example to his son. Locke gives a challenging instruction to a father seeking to fulfill his role as educator: the son must never see him misbehave. “You must do nothing before him which you would not have him imitate.”Footnote ¹⁹ This might suggest to the father that he will find it necessary to engage in some role-playing or pretenses to disguise his bad behavior from his son. But Locke's deeper purpose here is more than eliciting the appearance of good behavior on the part of the father: he aims at a re-education of the father by means of a habituation to virtue. Locke emphasizes the importance of habit and its acquisition (§38). Constant, conscious repetition of good behavior will eventually do for the father what less conscious repetition does for the son: produce a habit – in the father's case, a change of habit – for the better. The education of the son accomplishes the re-education of the father.Footnote ²⁰ The model for the father is the same image of the gentleman used in the education of his son.Footnote ²¹

Locke is determined that an intractable or uncooperative father not avoid the often difficult task of correcting his own behavior. The father must not believe that he can hand over to another the role of moral exemplar for his son. Locke forestalls this temptation in the father by having him use praise and blame to instill within his son a concern for reputation:

Locke justifies this disparate treatment by noting that public praise “doubles the reward” and increases the effect of the praise, whereas “when being exposed to shame by publishing their miscarriages, they give it up for lost, that check upon them is taken off” (§62). Howsoever true this may be, keeping blame private has the added effect of ensuring that only the father will think ill of the boy for his faults. Consequently, for the father's criticism to have its desired effect, the son must think highly enough of his father to value his good opinion of him. Were the father to misbehave before the son, most particularly by being revealed to his son as a hypocrite, the son's opinion of the father would fall, and with it the purchase of the father's criticism upon the son. The father, then, is compelled to be good lest he lose the ability to chastise and correct his son.

Locke's requirement that the son be educated at home and not in a traditional boarding school places further restraints upon the father, since he cannot depend upon long periods of separation during which he, the father, can allow himself to slip back into his old, bad habits, out of sight of his son. Nor can the father depend upon a schoolmaster for corrections due his son. To be sure, Locke proposes that the tutor and not the father should administer corporal punishment, though the father must be present and the son must see him to be in command (§83).Footnote ²²

Mastering Servants

No group in Some Thoughts comes in for more criticism than servants.Footnote ²³ Again and again, Locke warns his gentleman reader to beware of their corrupting influence. With respect to the problem of servants, Nathan Tarcov correctly notes that “Locke is … concerned to preserve parental authority undivided within the family.”Footnote ²⁴ But Locke's repeated criticisms lead one to suspect that he has an additional purpose in mind. The servants live within two social worlds. They are of the lower classes, but have been taken into the gentleman's household. The servants are representatives, so to speak, of the lower classes to the upper classes, and provide Locke with an opportunity to alter the view of the lower classes held by the gentleman father and passed on to his son.

If Locke is to succeed in altering the father's view, he must first reveal to him the behavior on the part of servants that he might have long taken for granted and that must be viewed with new eyes, ones that see the effects of such behavior on the son. The education of the son becomes an important criterion for the evaluation of the servants; they must be measured by how much they contribute to or hinder the son's education, and not just by their performance qua servants. Such an alteration to a habitual way of viewing the household requires, as do all alterations of habit, constant repetition. In rhetorical terms, this repetition is made easier for Locke because servants are constantly about the household. Locke can therefore point out their corrupting influence in various settings and stages in the son's life.Footnote ²⁵

Locke's advice to the father regarding servants is threefold. He tactfully suggests that the father replace worse servants with better ones, if such are available: “But how this inconvenience from servants is to be remedied, I must leave to parents’ care and consideration. Only I think it of great importance and that they are very happy who can get discreet people about their children” (§59). However, as Locke later points out, “You will have very good luck if you never have a clownish or vicious servant, and if from them your children never get any infection” (§69). If good help is hard to find, then it must be created from the material at hand. Locke leads the father to his second suggestion: the re-education of the servants. In the event that the parents need to express disapproval toward the son, they must not be undercut by other members of the household:

It is left to the father (or perhaps both parents) to train the servants in the appropriate attitudes to display toward the son. If they cannot be trained,Footnote ²⁶ and if the father will not dismiss the “meaner servants,” then Locke's final suggestion is separation: “They are wholly, if possible, to be kept from such conversati.”Footnote ²⁷ He would instead have “the children kept as much as may be in the company of their parents and those to whose care they are committed” (§69, emphasis in original). But this is a somewhat drastic step, and Locke assures his audience that some adults can be reformed by example: “Children (nay, and men too) do most by example. We are all a sort of chameleons that still take a tincture from things near us” (§67). Examples of good behavior provide a path toward the re-education of servants.

The servants must conform to gentlemanly standards of conduct. Those who conform, or those who can be educated to conform, are considered to be in the upper strata of the lower classes.Footnote ²⁸ Those who cannot may serve as vivid examples to the father of the lower ranks of the lower classes. In educating the son, the father should take his examples wherever he can find them, and “direct [the son's] observation and bid them view this or that good or bad quality in their practice.”Footnote ²⁹ In setting the servants straight, the father learns to appreciate them in a way that matters more than cooking and cleaning: helping to raise a new generation of gentlemen. It is in his own household, among his own servants, that the father receives his initial training in making proper distinctions among the lower classes. He can then turn to making correct distinctions among the lower classes more broadly, and pass his observations on to his son.

We are thus prepared for this remarkable instruction, coming after many criticisms of servants: “[A]ccustom [young folks] to civility in their language and deportment towards their inferiors and the meaner sort of people, particularly servants” (§117). The correction of the servants by the father must be done in a civil manner, otherwise he might pass on his bad example to his son: “It is not unusual to observe the children in gentlemen's families treat the servants of the house with domineering words, names of contempt, and an imperious carriage as if they were of another race and species beneath them” (§117). In the immediately preceding section, Locke argues for the “tender” treatment of animals by children. He would have the child behave compassionately toward both people and animals. Indeed, he gives as an important reason for avoiding cruelty toward animals, the possibility that one who indulges in it will turn on people: “For the custom of tormenting and killing of beasts will, by degrees, harden their minds even towards men; and they who delight in the suffering and destruction of inferior creatures will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind” (§116). But by temporarily reminding us of our superiority to animals through his reference to “another race and species beneath them,” Locke separates servants from animals and firmly places the former in the same category occupied by gentlemen. It would serve a narrow purpose of reducing cruelty to servants were Locke merely to ask that they be treated as well as animals, but such an approach would not advance his aim of reducing the distance separating gentlemen and servants.

Locke reinforces the distinction between animals and servants by providing reasons for the kind treatment of servants that do not apply to animals. He notes that better service will result if the servants “love” and “esteem” their superiors. At the same time, “[n]o part of their [the child's] superiority will be hereby lost, but the distinction increased and their authority strengthened” (§117). Both child and servant are elevated by the kindness and civility of the child toward the servant, and Locke must be careful to reassure the father that the elevation of the servant benefits and does not threaten the child. By contrast, kindness shown toward animals carries with it no danger of subverting the child's position of superiority over animals, and Locke does not find it necessary to reassure the father on this count in the earlier discussion (§116).

Though servants are elevated above their former position, they remain social inferiors. Locke indicates that servants are not only well aware of their lower position, as we might expect, but that they identify the cause as arbitrary, as “fortune,” and not anything more rational (§117). There is a risk of conflict in consequence of this recognition, since servants may rebel against masters whose superior social circumstances they understand to be just as arbitrarily assigned. But as a result of the revised treatment of servants, an important but limited mutual bond can nonetheless form between masters and servants. This bond is based on the superior virtue of the gentleman, demonstrated tactfully and inoffensively. Though it is apparent to both the gentleman and the servant that the gentleman could only have the opportunity to develop his virtue as extensively as he has because of his fortunate circumstances, the actual development of his virtue is not strictly a matter of fortune but rather of personal effort. And so although his position is the result of fortune, his virtue is very much to his credit. The servant's appreciation of the gentleman's virtue will be strengthened by his experience with other men of privilege. In his dealings with unreformed gentlemen and the nobility, the servant will surely notice that wealth does not guarantee virtue. We can expect the Lockean gentleman to compare very favorably with others of, and above, his class in the eyes of the lower classes.

The gentleman's tactful display of virtue may perhaps gain him the servant's esteem, but on its own it is not enough to gain him the servant's love. That love comes in response to the son exhibiting sympathetic recognition of the arbitrariness of their relative social positions. By that recognition, expressed through “compassionate and gentle” treatment of servants, the son acknowledges the role of fortune and so implicitly concedes that his virtue is limited to that part attained through his efforts (§117). That acknowledgement serves as a check on the son's “natural pride” and arrogance, and brings his self-understanding visibly closer to the servant's understanding of him (§117). A modestly virtuous son who is sensitive to the servant's social status is more likely to merit and receive both the servant's love and esteem as responses to the servant's belief in his master's virtue and sympathy. By contrast, the unreformed son receives “outward respect” and “submission” as responses to his power and his mere claim of virtue and goodness (§117).

In addition to exhibiting sympathetic recognition, the son is encouraged to care about the servant's opinion of him. Teaching the son to value the love and esteem of the servant helps the son to recognize the humanity and equality beneath “the shufflings of outward conditions,” since in order to value the servant's esteem the son must value the servant himself. Their relationship is so transformed that Locke can ask that the son see servants as his “brethren” (§117). We are here very far from a view of servants as mere instruments or gross inferiors. As Tarcov notes,

Locke hopes that the son will see the rationality and virtue – or at least the capacity for them – of the servant.

Among the Lower Classes

Locke cannot expect that the son will have as close a relationship with other members of the lower classes as he has with his father's servants. Nonetheless, the good treatment of servants functions as a preparation for the civility he should display to all men, including those among the lower classes who are strangers to him. Locke has an additional suggestion for the father that further narrows the differences between the son and the lower classes: “I would have him learn a trade, a manual trade” (§201; emphasis in original). Locke is well aware that the typical gentleman is averse to such low occupations, and will resist having his son learn a trade.Footnote ³¹ And so Locke presents his suggestion as a matter of physical health and a “recreation” or “diversion” from the son's normal routine.Footnote ³² Locke cites Gideon, Cincinnatus, Cato, and Cyrus as examples of “great men” who knew “how to reconcile manual labor with affairs of state, and thought it no lessening to their dignity to make the one the recreation to the other” (§205). But in fact, farming was much more than a recreation to these men. Looking to the sources he cites, we see that all undertake farming or the managing of farms as a substantial economic activity apart from any recreational benefit it might provide.Footnote ³³ Locke hopes to appeal to the reader's approval of the noble activity of farming. By describing farming as a “recreation” and “manual labor,” he seeks to establish a degree of commonality between trades and farming, thereby making the former more respectable.

As Locke's argument for a manual trade progresses, he introduces an additional reason for this activity besides recreation. He hopes that the trade “may produce what will afterwards be profitable. It has been nothing but the vanity and pride of greatness and riches that has brought unprofitable and dangerous pastimes (as they are called) into fashion and persuaded people into a belief that the learning or putting their hands to anything that was useful could not be a diversion fit for a gentleman” (§207; emphases in original). Locke hopes that his reader will consider a “profitable” trade or, more plainly, a trade as his main occupation.Footnote ³⁴ This hope appears to conflict with both his view that “[a] gentleman's more serious employment I look on to be study” (§203) and his advice that the son be directed to a life of public service (Dedication, §§94, 187). Public service involves a careful study of the law in preparation for work in any number of positions “from a justice of the peace to a minister of state” (§187).

We can reconcile this seemingly conflicting advice to pursue academic studies, the law, and a trade by considering the limitations that natural differences place on individual boys.Footnote ³⁵ We must recall that for Locke education can account for only “nine parts of ten” of human outcomes. Some men are gifted with “natural genius” with which they are “carried towards what is excellent” and “able to do wonders” (§1). Later in Some Thoughts, Locke describes a substantial natural difference between individuals: “[I]t is evident that strength of memory is owing to a happy constitution and not to any habitual improvement got by exercise.” This natural difference is no small matter, since “[m]emory is so necessary to all parts and conditions of life and so little is to be done without it” (§176). Locke also notes that differences in “native stock” can impede the effects of “industry” and “practice” (§66). These sorts of natural differences are most likely to show themselves in the most difficult intellectual pursuits. Those pursuits are therefore most appropriate for the exceptional few. For the rest, for those boys incapable of a life of serious study, idleness is the great danger (§209). They are gently directed toward a trade and moneymaking. Horwitz argues that Locke encourages gentlemen to pursue moneymaking: “The major thrust of their activities would be toward the acquisition of property, whether through the careful management of land or through trade, commerce, or such professions as law, medicine or the like. … They would be ‘men of business,’ in the broad seventeenth-century meaning of that term.”Footnote ³⁶ This analysis needs the qualification that some excellent and capable few would devote themselves to the highest intellectual activities. Those who do pursue a trade become economic actors. And like economic actors everywhere, if they are to prosper they must serve the needs of those about them, whether rich or poor. This economic service reinforces by means of financial self-interest the requirement of civility toward others.

In his discussion of civility, Locke's goal is to secure the proper treatment of all men, to keep “that respect and distance which is due to everyone's rank and quality.”Footnote ³⁷ His approach is twofold: connect the inner beliefs and outer social expressions of the individual, and impress upon the son the conventional character of good manners. The inner beliefs must rest on a “general good will and regard for all people,” whereas the outward expression is “very much governed by … fashion and custom” (§143; see §145). Locke would have gentlemen look to custom rather than their own notions of correct outward behavior, so that they may “bend to a compliance and accommodate themselves to those they have to do with.” By following such advice, the son “avoids making anyone uneasy in conversation” (§143; emphasis added). The son is not expected to treat all men identically. Locke emphasizes that he must show “a respect and value for [all people], according to their rank and condition” (§143). We can therefore expect men of low rank to be shown perhaps only minimal respect, but with all men, regardless of rank, the son must avoid “roughness,” “Contempt,” “Censoriousness,” and “Captiousness” (§143; emphasis in original). That is, at a minimum, the son must not give offense to anyone, regardless of their class. Locke understands that no matter how low a man's origins, he is just as capable of taking offense as a well-bred man. We are all equal in our capacity to feel pain.

The good or inoffensive treatment of the lower classes by gentlemen is sure to be noticed by the lower classes. If the offensive treatment of others can be traced to poor breeding, then we can expect many poorly bred men to offend each other. Their good treatment at the hands of gentlemen therefore functions as a rebuke to the more offensive members of the lower class, and makes the gentleman that much more attractive to the lower classes (§143, end). The son, for his part, does not so much feel attraction toward the lower classes as exhibit recognition of his own modest place: “We ought not to think so well of ourselves as to stand upon our own value and assume to ourselves a preference before others because of any advantage we may imagine we have over them, but modestly to take what is offered when it is our due” (§142). This recalls the earlier argument for the good treatment of servants, based intellectually on a recognition of the arbitrariness of the son's relative position (§117). But Locke here relies to some extent on self-interest as a motivation for the civil treatment of one's social inferiors. The reason he gives for feeling a “general good will and regard for all people” (§143) is that it assists in truth-telling: “[T]o teach him betimes to love and be good-natured to others is to lay early the true foundation of an honest man: all injustice generally springing from too great love of ourselves and too little of others” (§139; emphasis in original). For its part, truth-telling, and virtue in general, are founded upon a belief in God and his desire for self-esteem, the esteem of others, and happiness, since virtue is “absolutely requisite to make him valued and beloved by others, acceptable or tolerable to himself. Without that, I think, he will be happy neither in this nor the other world” (§135; see §§136, 139). His desire for happiness – and therefore his self-interest – grounds his good treatment of others.

A Model Gentleman

Locke seeks to establish his new gentleman as the model for society. As he puts it in the Dedication to Some Thoughts, “if those of [the gentleman's] rank are by their education once set right, they will quickly bring all the rest into order.” But to do so he must push aside the aristocratic model that is improperly thought to identify human excellence, a model to which gentlemen might otherwise mistakenly seek to conform.Footnote ³⁸ A dangerous aristocratic pride must be replaced by a safer civility and a desire for esteem (§117). As Tarcov argues, “one should not infer that Locke … simply defers to the examples of those socially above him. On the contrary, in discussing faults of incivility, he pointedly castigates his social superiors.”Footnote ³⁹ In turning the gentlemen away from the aristocratic model, Locke opens them up to partial imitation by the lower classes.Footnote ⁴⁰ This turning away is necessary if the gentlemen are to be imitated, for the lower classes can hardly be expected to see the gentlemen among them as ideal citizens, no matter how considerately they are treated by them, if those gentlemen in turn visibly pursue an ideal established by aristocrats.

Locke's strategy for displacing the aristocratic model must include educating the son to combine virtue with a respect for equality, neither of which is adequately present in the aristocracy.Footnote ⁴¹ The delicate task here for Locke is to reconcile basic human equality with the fact of unequal virtue. He does this by making the recognition of equality a virtue, one that redounds to the benefit of both the son and the lower classes.Footnote ⁴² As much as aristocrats and those inspired by them might like to display their sense of superiority over others, they dislike others doing the same to them. Quite the opposite: all men, Locke makes clear, are attracted to the son as a consequence of his civility.Footnote ⁴³ It is the son's desire for the esteem of others, earned through his civility, that maintains his character against the temptation to fall into aristocratic arrogance. Tarcov argues that Locke “expects [general esteem] to operate against pride and the aristocratic expectation that others should fulfill one's demands.”Footnote ⁴⁴ That esteem, in turn, is valued by the son because it is based on his recognition that all men, including the men who esteem him, are his equals.

The virtuous behavior that has its origin in the son's desire for esteem is buttressed by his training in harmonizing inner virtue and appearance. The great moral claim of the aristocracy is virtue, but Locke again and again exposes it as the mere appearance of virtue, based on convention and money.Footnote ⁴⁵ Locke avoids direct attacks upon the aristocracy. Instead, he censures behaviors and attitudes that are unmistakably aristocratic. For example, in discussing rewards for good behavior, he cautions the father against feeding the son's desire for “riches” or “finery” and the like, which would risk teaching his son “luxury, pride, or covetousness” (§52; emphases in original). A free mind, we are told, is “not haughty and insolent” (§66). The son must also avoid an “excess of ceremony” (§144; emphasis in original). In general, the great error of the aristocrats and their imitators is that they begin with a refinement of appearance and then too often fail to produce the virtue that would correspond to and harmonize with this appearance. Locke, by contrast, begins with the interior life of the child by deliberate acts of seeming physical privation. The physical world, rather than being a sign of virtue, becomes for Locke a tool with which to instill virtue. Bare, wet feet and plain food are unlovely, but they help produce mental hardiness.Footnote ⁴⁶ Locke extends this approach to his discussion of manners. In opposing affectation, Locke tells us that it is “the proper fault of education, a perverted education,” since it “endeavors to correct natural defects and has always the laudable aim of pleasing, though it always misses it; and the more it labors to put on gracefulness, the farther it is from it” (§66). True gracefulness, he tells us,

The more complete beauty of the gentleman's consistency combines with his agreeableness and virtue to trump the merely outer beauty of the externally refined aristocrats and their imitators. Lest the point be lost, Locke also encourages gentlemen to examine aristocrats and their imitators critically by looking past the fine surface to the vice or inconsistency beneath. Locke advises the tutor to “teach [the son] skill in men and their manners, pull off the mask which their several callings and pretenses cover them with, and make his pupil discern what lies at the bottom under such appearances” (§94). Furthermore, the tutor “should accustom him to make as much as is possible a true judgment of men by those marks which serve best to show what they are and give a prospect into their inside, which often shows itself in little things, especially when they are not on parade and upon their guard” (§94). Locke drives home his point by connecting affectation with what is “counterfeit” and insincere (§66). He criticizes as a “fault in good manners [an] excess of ceremony, … [which] seems rather a design to expose than oblige, or at least looks like a contest for mastery” (§144; emphasis in original). The son must be prepared to see the outer beauty of the aristocrat and his imitators as a mask for something ugly, for vice, covering up faults within and injustices in the treatment of others.

Locke gives us a gentleman liberated from the need to imitate aristocrats, and repelled by those who do, seeing them too often exposed as insincere and arrogant. His civility is repaid by all who encounter him, thereby confirming to him the correctness of his treatment of others. The contact between the gentleman and the lower classes means that the lower classes have in this new gentleman a model for their own behavior. The Lockean gentleman is intended to be the stable core of a rational, prosperous, and harmonious society. He is industrious and prosperous, generous and benevolent, “civic-minded, well-mannered and soundly informed,”Footnote ⁴⁷ and a means of reconciliation between rich and poor.

Locke's very negative view of the aristocracy points to problems with claims that he orders human rationality according to economic class. C.B. Macpherson, for example, writes that it is Locke's belief “that the members of the labouring class do not and cannot live a fully rational life.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This is a key premise upon which Macpherson builds his theory of differential rationality.Footnote ⁴⁹Some Thoughts helps clarify Locke's understanding of human rationality. It is not their status as laborers per se that makes the laborers irrational, but rather their lack of education. At the other social extreme, it is not the case that all aristocrats are necessarily more rational than members of the lower classes, and if aristocrats are not less rational than the gentlemen, then they are certainly, in Locke's view, less rational than the re-educated gentlemen he proposes.Footnote ⁵⁰ Locke takes pains to develop the education to virtue he wants among gentlemen, an education that does not come easily to anyone, including the children of aristocrats.Footnote ⁵¹ The demanding program in Some Thoughts indicates the difficulty and fragility of rationality, or at least of a rationality sufficient to a good life. Even those few men blessed with exceptional natural abilities are subject to vice and error, and are often burdened by bad customs and, in the case of the poor, a lack of resources.Footnote ⁵² Virtue, for its part, must be practiced and acquired by habit, and not merely taught. In light of these barriers to rationality, we can hardly expect anyone to have a “fully rational life.” But if gentlemen can be made more rational, if they can reestablish customs along rational lines, then Locke hopes that their example can serve to shape the classes both above and beneath them. The fact that Locke believes that both the lower and upper classes can be brought “into order” is evidence that he does not have a static model of a class-based society in mind.

The Second Treatise and the Democratic Age

As many have observed, Locke's educational proposals support his larger political project in the Second Treatise.Footnote ⁵³ This support is apparent in his discussion of cruelty in Some Thoughts: “And truly, if the preservation of all mankind, as much as in him lies, were everyone's persuasion, as indeed it is everyone's duty and the true principle to regulate our religion, politicks, and morality by, the world would be much quieter and better natured than it is.” In the same section, he writes: “I think people should be accustomed from their cradles to be tender to all sensible creatures, and to spoil or waste nothing at all” (§116; emphasis in original). These arguments have parallels in the Second Treatise, in which he writes that since a man “is bound to preserve himself … so by the like reason when his own Preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of Mankind”; and “[a]s much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before [a thing] spoils; so much he may by his labour fix a Property in.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In addition to restating these specific points found in the Second Treatise, Some Thoughts supports the argument for consent in private and public relationships that lies at the heart of the Second Treatise. It requires an act of consent to exit the state of nature, set up a government, and then routinely replace the legislators (§§15, 95–97, 142). The power of consent requires rationality, and therefore education. But people are not equally educated. Locke's discussion of education in the Second Treatise indicates that a higher level of education results in a greater understanding of right and wrong, and therefore a greater moral accountability among the better educated. Tyranny, he writes, “is so much the worse in him … [who] is supposed from the advantages of Education, imployment and Counsellors to be more knowing in the measures of right or wrong” (§202). Conversely, then, it must necessarily be the case that lower levels of education result in a poorer understanding of right and wrong, and a lower level of moral accountability. Locke quite broadly locates the power of consent in all men in the Second Treatise (§§138, 140, 142). But could an adult be so poorly educated that he is no longer rational enough to offer his consent to political arrangements? The Second Treatise contains no discussion of whether a lower class with an impoverished education would be insufficiently rational to exercise the power of consent to which they are said by Locke to have a right. We have at most an argument that a child must remain subject to the will of adults until “Age and Education” make him rational enough to govern himself (§61). In place of a discussion of the implications of a lack of education, Locke instead repeatedly writes of the importance of the education of children (§§56, 67–69, 81). In these discussions, education is presented as a duty of the parent. But in consideration of the central importance of education to the development of the rationality of the child, what should be done, and by whom, if the parent fails – or is unable – to perform his or her duty? Locke does not write of an educational role for the government in the Second Treatise, but neither does he reject it.

This silence in the Second Treatise is broken in the report to the Board of Trade. In that report, Locke recommends that the government supply a formal education to the children of parents too poor to pay for their own child's education. Peter Schouls has ably answered critics such as M.G. Jones, James Axtell, and James Tully, who argue that Locke's report demonstrates a lack of concern for the proper education of the poor.Footnote ⁵⁵ Schouls notes that the working schools proposed by Locke are designed to provide for the basic physical needs of poor children, while simultaneously “[t]hey are to teach school-aged children a trade and they are to make them literate and provide them with a general education.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Schouls touches on the point that Locke intends the “working schools” to be self-financing. This limitation is worth emphasizing. Locke takes pains in his report to minimize the fiscal burden on a nation and an economy that could not afford to extend either charity or free education very broadly.Footnote ⁵⁷ Schouls brings to light the substantial education that Locke has in mind in his report. He notes that “Locke refers to these children as ‘the scholars,’” they are to be taught for 11 years, and their education will encompass more than just trades. Schouls comes to these important conclusions: “Locke's proposal is meant to realize one of his main tenets, namely, that all human beings are to be guided by their own reason.” Thus, the education of these children “is to overcome … a formidable obstacle to human progress.”Footnote ⁵⁸ That obstacle is the lack of rationality of the poor, and consequently their inability to consent rationally to political arrangements. And so the rationality of the broad mass of citizens is secured by the very government to which the citizens consent, by means of the rationality produced by government-run education. This circular arrangement brings to light a potential paradox in efforts to get all men to consent to leave the state of nature and set up a government. But in the case of an existing government, it points the way to more voluntary political arrangements.

The educational proposal in his report to the Board of Trade describes Locke's direct approach to the education of the poor; Some Thoughts describes Locke's more indirect approach. The twofold education of the lower classes – direct and formal in the working schools, and indirect and informal by means of the example of gentlemen – is intended to produce in them a degree of rationality consistent with the needs of a government based on consent. Tarcov argues that “Lockean education requires the success of Lockean politics or the arrangement of society so that sober, honest industry, not violence, cheating, or insolence, is actually rewarded with fortune and prosperity.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This analysis is sound, but we might add that the reverse is also somewhat true: Locke's educational proposals strengthen his political project, and in particular his argument for the election of representatives.Footnote ⁶⁰ While it is focused on developing the virtues of the gentry and often proceeds by appealing to their self-interest, Some Thoughts should be seen as component of a larger Lockean project to secure the just treatment of all men.

We might wonder, though, whether the reverse of Tarcov's observation is entirely true, that is, whether Lockean politics requires the success of Lockean education. The importance of Some Thoughts to Locke's political project hinges in part on whether it is necessary to his political project or merely useful to it. Locke's educational proposals are meant to produce a degree of rationality required by the politics of the Second Treatise, and so they are certainly useful to his politics.Footnote ⁶¹ However, Locke gives no indication that such rationality requires his specific educational proposals. A defense of the claim that a Lockean education is essential to Lockean politics therefore necessitates showing that no other possible educational program could produce the rationality Locke seeks. Quite apart from the extraordinary difficulty of showing this, the claim of essentialness in effect would presuppose a degree of confidence in Locke's education project not shared by Locke himself. In the Dedication, Locke humbly calls on “someone abler and fitter” than himself to “rectify the mistakes that I have made” in Some Thoughts. We might be inclined to see this as false modesty, but in the conclusion, Locke provides details on the limits of his work: “I would not have it thought that I look on it as a just treatise on this subject. There are a thousand other things that may need consideration. … Each man's mind has some peculiarity … and there are possibly scarce two children who can be conducted by exactly the same method” (§216). And so we must be content with seeing Locke's educational proposals as useful but not essential to his political proposals.

Essential or not, Lockean education must profoundly affect the political order presupposed in Some Thoughts. A likely consequence of improving the rationality of the lower classes is a relocation of most votes and therefore most political power to the great mass of people newly capable of running both their own lives and the lives of others. Such an extension of the franchise, though, must have the effect of calling into question the rightness and necessity of locating any disproportionate political power in either an aristocracy or a landed gentry. Locke does not explicitly call for the abolition of the class system, and indeed in the Second Treatise, he writes that those at a lower rank may have to “pay an Observance” to more excellent men, albeit in a manner that is compatible with human equality. Locke attempts to combine a respect for various sorts of inequality, including inequality of social class, “with the Equality, which all Men are in, in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion one over another” (§54; emphasis in original). This combination might well make sense in the case of social and material inequalities, but it is untenable in the case of political inequalities. The political equality of rational men must doom the political privileges of the upper classes. The reformed gentry can only be the core of their society until the lower classes are ready to supplant their political role.

Questions have been raised about whether Some Thoughts is applicable today.Footnote ⁶² But the rise of democracy and the absence of a class of landed gentry in our day have not made obsolete Locke's educational proposals. Democracy has not eliminated economic differences, and so there is a continuing need for reconciliation between the classes. An opinion poll conducted by the New York Times in 2005 revealed (or confirmed) that solid majorities of Americans believe that there is “a lot” or “some” tension between rich and poor, and that “the rich have too much power.”Footnote ⁶³ Recent data suggest that differences between rich and poor are being exacerbated by a reported “growing concentration of income at the top.” Indeed, “[t]he total 2005 income of the three million individual Americans at the top was roughly equal to that of the bottom 166 million Americans.”Footnote ⁶⁴ These class divisions continue to be reflected in political divisions. Gelman et al. claim that “[m]any observers have been misled by the seemingly contradictory pattern of richer states supporting Democrats but richer voters supporting Republicans.” The perception that the rich who live in richer states such as California and Connecticut are now mostly voting for Democrats is, they argue, false. Their statistical analysis shows that “richer voters support Republicans within states as well as overall.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In short, class-based mistrust, income inequalities, and the political divisions through which they are reflected constitute ongoing political challenges for American society that call for some means of reconciliation between the classes.

Democracy's need for the ends of Lockean education is somewhat matched by a compatibility with the means to that education. In his day, Locke chose the gentry as the vehicle for his educational ideas in part because they combined the requisite wealth with an ambition to rescue their sons from “the early corruption of youth,” and therefore they were willing and able to take instruction from him.Footnote ⁶⁶ He could then take advantage of this willingness to propose an education that goes beyond the elimination of corruption to teach important virtues and help reconcile the classes. In our day, the most obvious candidates for the application of Lockean educational principles are the wealthy. Only about 1.7 percent of upper class American children are currently being home schooled, but that figure is growing.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet home schooling extends well beyond upper class parents. Of all home schooled children, more than three quarters are middle or lower class.Footnote ⁶⁸ This opens up the possibility of applying Lockean education to middle class home schooled children, who could be taught civility toward the lower classes, insofar as they might exhibit arrogance toward or disdain for those who are manifestly poorer than themselves. As things stand now, though, most home schooled children are far from receiving a Lockean education. Recent data indicate that many parents home school their children out of a concern for their safety, to inculcate religious beliefs, or to provide them with better academic instruction.Footnote ⁶⁹ These are laudable aims, but they do not address the deep concerns about character and class reconciliation on which Locke focuses.Footnote ⁷⁰ On the other hand, such goals today roughly parallel the desire of the gentry in Locke's day to deal with corruption. When parents today choose to home school their children to isolate them from broader social problems, they move them closer to the conditions necessary for a fully Lockean education. It remains for such parents to discover and apply the lessons of Some Thoughts.

For those who do not home school their children, Locke's plan for the poor in his day is very much applicable. Over the last few centuries, massive productivity increases have created a large middle class that can readily afford universal public education. These public schools are similar to the working schools proposed by Locke for the poor. In both cases, the government looks to the education of children whose parents are unable or unwilling to educate their own children. But unlike Locke's working schools, our public schools are – or were – intended to do more than teach academic and work skills; they were designed in part to help integrate American society.Footnote ⁷¹ However, this “melting pot” function has been eroded in recent years, partially as a result of multiculturalist efforts that heighten and valorize group identities, political struggles over the secularization of public schools, and the continuing presence of significant class segregation in American education.Footnote ⁷² On this last point, Richard Kahlenberg notes that “[i]n … 25 percent of [public] schools, the majority of students are from low-income households … .”Footnote ⁷³ At the other end of the income scale, nearly one quarter of upper class students are either home schooled or in private schools.Footnote ⁷⁴ Some directions for reform of public education are indicated in the reasons given by parents for home schooling their children. We might especially consider changes that would revitalize a sense of parental responsibility.Footnote ⁷⁵ Kahlenberg notes that “[p]arental involvement in schools varies dramatically.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Such changes could conceivably be prompted by visible success in the home schooling movement. The dedication of parents who home school might be held up as an example of parental responsibility to those parents who are inattentive to and uninvolved in the public schooling their children receive. And were they successfully educated to Lockean standards, home schooled children of all classes could be models for partial emulation by public schools and their students.

The more compelling the example of home schooled children, the more easily we could address a serious difficulty likely to arise in applying Lockean educational proposals to the present day: elevating the many individuals who exhibit decent but unremarkable middle class virtues, so as to spur them to a greater rationality and excellence. In this respect, the middle class today may be a victim of its own success. For all its problems, public education works to secure a degree of rationality at least minimally sufficient to our most basic political and economic purposes of, respectively, democratic elections and economic growth. For all the complaints about the circumstances of the middle class – as often as not by members of the middle class – it may be that the very decency and basic rationality of so many middle class citizens dampens a desire for the difficult task that remains of emulating the most virtuous men and women among us. In the absence of some felt necessity, we can expect resistance among many parents of public school children to the very difficult task of educating their children to virtue. Locke is not unaware of such impediments, telling us “that the chief, if not only spur to humane Industry and Action is uneasiness.”Footnote ⁷⁷ And so the task of applying Locke's educational program to our current circumstances hinges on, first, its adoption by parents who home school their children, and second, a growth in other parents of an ambition to see their children rise in virtue. Even if the upper class successfully reforms itself and we improve class relations, we have the great challenge of prompting a general “uneasiness,” if we are to see the widest inculcation of Lockean virtue.