The utopianism of John Locke's natural learning

Abstract

This article focuses on John Locke's understanding of the student as a natural learner and on the ambiguous utopia of childhood that underpins this understanding. It draws a parallel between the educational utopia of natural learning and colonization, and then investigates ethico-political implications. Locke politicizes natural learning in ways that normalize exclusions at the level of intersubjective ethical relations and naturalize colonial expansion at the level of cosmopolitan right. Thought through to its implications, this claim leads to exploring connections between Locke's educational philosophy and his multiple and ambiguous utopianisms. Thus examined, the political operations of Locke's pedagogy bring to the fore the subtle though no less important performativity of Locke-inspired, modern educational utopianism that remains so far under- or non-theorized in educational philosophy.

Keywords:

• childhood
• tabula rasa
• vacant land
• educational utopia
• natural law
• Locke

Notes

^1. Our focus in this article is Locke's main educational text. However, his other educational writings (e.g. letters) are also relevant to our arguments. Nevertheless, here we put them aside for reasons of space. For an interesting discussion of them (though from a different perspective), see Anderson (1992).

^2. As Bruce Buchan comments on it, terra nullius was a ‘convenient legal fabrication that the land was occupied but “unowned” and therefore “vacant”’ (Buchan 2005, 2).

^3. This unoccupied land was seen as open to colonial appropriation in accordance with natural law (Arneil 1992, 592).

^4. Locke's educational references to ‘Taint’ and ‘Byass’ in Temper, Curiosity to be ‘carefully cherish'd in Children’ (108) and ‘busy Inquisitiveness’ (118) operate, in tandem to his political theory of popular consent, like markers of ‘elite cueing’. Locke invokes a risk lurking in educational failures to encourage children's Inquisitiveness and ‘keep it active and busy’ (Thoughts, 118): they will become ‘dull and useless Creatures’. This invocation resonates with his lack of faith in non-elite people's sense as rational creatures: ‘can think of things no otherwise than as they find and feel them’ (Treatises, 223). Thus, the inactive child will grow up to become one of the un-cultivated masses taking life as it comes and being unable to offer their informed consent to politics. This has led commentators to detect in Locke's contractarianism a rather thin populism. For discussions of ‘elite cueing’ in Locke's Second Treatise, see Tarcov (1981), Kleinerman (2007) and Nacol (2011).

^5. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, only a few years after the publication of Locke's Thoughts.

^6. Rang (2001, 254ff) explains that Locke's metaphor of the child, portrayed as a new comer in an unknown land, was most probably drawn from a book by the Dutch author Frédéric Rivet which was written in French but published in the Netherlands. Among the other similarities (in some cases there is a literal correspondence of phrasing) between Locke's and Rivet's texts [the latter's first publication was in 1654; it was republished in 1679, preceding the one of Locke and being generally about the education that is appropriate for a prince] is the notion of curiosity and the tabula rasa (in Rivet's terms, ‘L'esprit est comme une tablette toute neuve’. It is significant, we believe, that at around the same time the three countries, Britain, France and the Netherlands, hosted, and were simultaneously the object of, heated discussions about colonialism and rights over foreign lands and unknown seas. An eminent thinker in such debates was the Dutch Hugo Grotius (for more, see Arneil 1992). These associations help us indicate the intellectual climate that informs Locke's utopianism.

^7. On the colonial distinction between the subject and the citizen, see Breen (1998).

^8. That is in addition to those utopianizations that we have already seen as the spatial utopia of the mind and the spatial utopia of land in its then current state of vacancy.

^9. In fact, ‘Locke's image of the state of nature was constructed from a range of colonial sources on Indigenous peoples, depicting a condition without settled private property and legislative authority’ (Buchan 2005, 5).

^10. This passage is also quoted by Anderson (1992, 608) but for different purposes.

^11. This also points to ambivalences in Locke's account of property but this goes beyond the confines of this article.