Reading John Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education.

“Some thoughts” goes for nearly 200 pages, with 216 sections, so apparently… don’t get this guy started, amirite?

 Anyway, I’m always leary when I read philosophers on raising kids. I could never really get behind Rousseau’s ideas, which always came across as ignorant of, you know….. actual children. But, of course, Rousseau never had any kids, so it’s no wonder he had some ideas about raising them that might not square with reality.

Turns out Locke was never married or had any kids himself either, and the fact that he was sickly through much of his life make me think THAT’s what influenced his suggestions about giving kids more rigorous upbringing so their bodies wouldn’t be so sickly.

While I’m only 77 sections in to the work, so I can’t comment on it entirely, I’d say there are some things I find interesting, and others I’m more dismissive of.

The thing with philosophers of this caliber is- they are obviously clever men. And part of philosophy really is just …. Thinking about things. So when someone with Locke’s intellectual caliber sets himself to thinking about something like education, he can present a compelling case.

But I’ll give the first example he starts off with. As part of his recommendations for health, he suggests children should not be bundled up as protection against the cold. He thinks they can be subjected to the discomfort and slowly get used to it. He admits the moms and nannies of England would not want to hear a word of this, but that nonetheless, this sort of training to hardness would result in children able to bear up under any conditions.

Now, I have family in Italy who are near nuts when it comes to the cold. They are convinced that you can’t crank the AC up on a hot day because too much cool air will make you sick. I’m like- turn the @#$%^% AC UP! NOBODY’S gonna die from cooling 100° air down!  They don’t want to drink iced drinks on hot days because it would be considered too jarring. These are all things that I do regularly, and I don’t get sick.

I remember one rainy day where I was out playing soccer, and the discussion came up over being out in the cold. His response was- cold doesn’t make you sick, germs make you sick. This is true. But neither are people completely stupid. They learn through experience and time what works and doesn’t, so maybe, sending junior out into the cold, and him getting sick enough, turns into general wisdom about not letting kids go outside in the cold. But if Locke is right, that may have started with moms’ overprotective instinct more than anything else.

I’ll give a bit of evidence to that.

I was reading Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, or maybe it was the Origin of Species, can’t remember… and he was talking about meeting with some of the Indian tribes through the strait of Magellan in Argentina and Chile. These Indians went about nearly naked, and in many cases fully naked, in the snow. I can only presume they could do that because they were fully used to it. I’d be dead in a matter of minutes, but I’m not used to the cold at all. In fact, I remember going to Minneapolis St Paul one year in February. I got off the plane in 17°F weather and thought I was gonna die. The next day we were walking around and, to get out of the cold, I ducked into a bank. One of the tellers asked why I had come in and said it was to get out of the cold. They said, “Cold? This is nice. Last week it was 20 below.”

All these anecdotes just go to say that in some respect, Locke may be right. And in fact, to a degree (yeah, pun intended), I’m sure it’s true.

But there’s another side of the debate that is harder to argue. There are things we have learned collectively that we may not even know how we know them or if they’re true, but they’ve arisen as a sort of collective wisdom through time. Those are the kinds of things that people can be very quick to want to tear down. For them, if something can’t be rationally described as useful, then it is akin to old-wives tales and other useless nonsense like when moms would tell their sons they’d grow hair on their palms if they masturbated.

 I have to admit that I have a sort of disregard for overparenting. I feel like my generation, and GenX too, waited longer to have kids, and then got a little too smart for their own good when it came to raising kids.

I’ve spoken with so many that said I’m not going to repeat the mistakes my parents made with me. Then they get a bunch of books, and study up on which parenting model they think is best. I feel like this is a natural response in parents that waited to get married. If you wait until your 30’s to get married and start having kids, the tendency is to be more thoughtful in your approach to things.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well nothing is wrong with being thoughtful. But when we add the market in, we have a situation where lots of people feel they need to write a book (after all, what do academics do, if not write books?), explaining their particular insights. But the desire to set oneself apart it going to drive a desire to find something new to say about a subject, which is what the market is going to require in order to sell a product, and those forces have undoubtedly led to lots of helpful books filled with nonsense.

 I was married young and we had kids young. I didn’t worry about it, I had my parents as role-models and I raised my boys without overthinking things. I let them play and get messed up. I didn’t worry about a lot of things, because honestly, when I was a kid, we just got kicked out of the house to ‘go play’. Both my sons grew up as responsible, productive members of society with good heads on their shoulders. As I read Locke, I recognize I actually DID some of the things he suggests as a corrective. But I just kind of did them naturally, not as a product of overanalyzing things. I do have to accept that it won’t work for everyone. After all, I grew up in a stable healthy family. Lots of people didn’t. Maybe their examples weren’t so good.

And I’m not going to presume to give anyone advice on how to raise their kids. I’ll assume that you as an individual know your situation and your own kids better than someone like me, who can only see the outside. I’m just sharing some thoughts because that’s what this ‘too long; didn’t read’ blog is for.

Over and out.