Locke's Thoughts on Education

“Therefore, if we seek the roots of what is valuable in modern education philosophy, we must turn to Locke’s Thoughts on Education, even if many of its specific recommendations are now wholly out of date or irrelevant.” – Peter Gay

Must we?

I think I understand Gay’s point, that Locke’s thinking about education was revolutionary in its day, and that it provided a foundation for the way we understand the child and modern education.  I would also agree, somewhat, that because reading Locke gives us historical perspective, it is important to revisit. But I’m not sure that I agree that if we’re looking for the roots of what’s valuable in modern education philosophy, we must turn to Locke, especially if we see its irrelevancies, and those irrelevancies have implications for how we understand education in terms of class, race, culture and gender. What I mean is, if we know that Locke was really only concerned, in this piece, with the education of boys in the highest social class, and we agree that some of his specific suggestions are irrelevant, and we’re undecided in education circles about the issues he raises: curriculum, discipline, purpose schooling’s purpose, how necessary is it to revisit him with the vigor that Gay suggests? And I guess my question would stand for many thinkers we study.  (And I’m really not asking this to be flip, I’m actually trying to understand how to use this information in a meaningful way.)

I spent the weekend in San Francisco at a conference for social justice educators. (I’m not convinced that anyone really knows what they’re talking about anymore when they use the term “social justice”, myself included, but I digress.)  There were classroom teachers, youth organizers, education non-profit workers, professors, academics-in-training and administrators in attendance.  Two keynote addresses were given, one by an administrator of a social justice school in California, the other by XXX. who many hoped would be the US Secretary of Education when Barack Obama was elected president. The work that attendees were doing varied from teaching in public schools, to advising school districts on how their schools might create meaningful relationships with community organizations, to working in political campaigns, and even within these discussions among educators who’ve been in this field for decades, the thinkers that people were citing were ones that had specific class or race or gender analyses. That’s what seemed to matter most for this crowd, even in the midst of the dominant post-racial, pro-economic competitiveness discourse that happening around education now. So, for this movement, the “social-justice” (for lack of a better term) educational movement, what’s the importance of Locke?