The School Master Author:George Long Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SOME THOUGHTS CONCERNING EDUCATION. BV JOHN LOCKE. This work, of which the following is an analysis, was published in 1690, and was written, as is staled ... more »in the Epistle Dedicatory to Edward Clarke, of Chipley, Esq., some years earlier. The Thoughts on Education are extremely discursive and irregular, the same topics being treated of in different places. The author of the following analysis has endeavoured to connect these disjointed parts, and to arrange the materials so as to give more method and unity to the whole ; but the opinions given are strictly those of Locke, and though excellent on the whole, they are not set forth as to be altogether implicitly adopted; the progress made in medical science, for instance, has shown that his recommendation of extreme hardship in the early education of the body is altogether erroneous. The original is divided into sections; but from the cause alluded to, it has been found impossible to indicate those divisions in the Analysis. Wherever the words of Locke have been used, they are placed between marks of quotation. By education Locke understands the training, not of the mind only, a limitation too apt to be given to the sense of the word, but of the body also; and accordingly the first, and perhaps not the least valuable, portion of his treatise is devoted to a consideration of the important question of physical health, as it re- lates to children. And in the first place, he strongly reprehends that over-tenderness in mothers which, in their anxiety to shield their offspring from every risk, induces them to clothe them too warmly, and otherwise to confine them at an early age, so that a certain degree of present security is obtained at the expense of a double danger from every subsequent exposure; whereas experience teaches us tha...« less