Indeed he argued that the only acceptable class-size was one, and he was such a critic of contemporary schooling that he argued it would be better for the child to be educated at home. Locke was an Enlightenment champion of individual liberty, not a theorist of standardised mass schooling. His Thoughts Concerning Education stress again and again the importance of both parents and tutors cultivating the child’s curiosity and encouraging children in asking questions so that they gradually become the masters of their own learning and achieve the overriding goal of becoming adults who can think for themselves and take an active part in the political life of the new republic. Locke, without any contradiction, believed firmly both in the original emptiness of the child’s mind and in the value of active learning. The alternative would be a Platonic classroom, devoid of textbooks, relying entirely on a discussion in which the children clarify the ideas that they find within themselves, with the teacher playing the role of the good Platonic midwife assisting in the process of cognitive birthing.īut perhaps the thing that provokes so much opposition is not the idea of emptiness itself but the passivity of the learner that is supposed to follow from it. All teachers who employ textbooks (either paper or digital) in the classroom assume in practice that the students pouring into the classroom have a certain intellectual emptiness which needs to be filled in one way or another. Now, despite the online vilification of Locke’s idea the vast majority of teachers are, in their teaching practice at least, faithful acolytes of Locke. And the tabula rasa and the blank sheet of paper are the empty vessel (a term which neither Aristotle nor John Locke actually used). The human mind in its original condition is a tabula rasa or a blank sheet of paper – the blank tablet described by Aristotle. No, the human mind is not something upon which indubitable ideas are writ by the Divine Hand. Locke was an ardent anti-dogmatist, and the view that there were innate ideas was, as he saw it, pure dogmatism. has no innate ideas, was then defended at greatest length by John Locke in his Essay on Human Understanding. As Henry More in An Antidote Against Atheism put it in 1655, the question was “whether the soul of man is a tabula rasa – a book in which nothing is writ – or whether she have some innate notions and ideas.” The notion that the human mind is empty, i.e. The idea then disappeared for almost two millennia before surfacing again in the early modern period in the context of a debate about innate ideas. 4), who argued that the human intellect must be something like a blank writing tablet able to receive the imprint of the ideas that come to be written on it. The idea of the human mind as originally an empty vessel or a blank slate has a long history dating back at least to Aristotle (see De Anima, bk. What we want to do here is not just set the record straight about the child as an empty vessel, but we also want to suggest that the time has come to take the truly radical step – the truly progressive step – the truly thoughtful step of embracing the idea of emptiness.įirst the record. Instead, the idea is ripped out of context, passed on in a game of digital Chinese whispers, and vilified in a manner that speaks not of radicalism but of thoughtlessness. Tweets leave no room for footnotes, and hardly anyone feels obliged to go back and look at who proposed the idea of the empty vessel and why on earth they might have thought that it made sense. There is no place for such ideas of emptiness in 21st century pedagogy.Įducation-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. If people who pride themselves on their progressive approach to education can agree on one thing, it is that the child is not an empty vessel. Looking at education-related tweets it would seem that the most vilified idea in education at the moment is the idea that the child is an empty vessel. The child as an empty vessel: a defence of emptiness in education
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