ABSTRACT
There were many eighteenth-century thinkers who advocated training in character and believed that the moral rather than the intellectual aims of education were the most important. James Barclay, for instance, urged that teachers should only be selected for the role if they had strong characters as he considered their example to be crucial. As he said: ‘Example is allowed to be stronger than precept, and children especially are much readier to copy what they see than what they hear’ (Hutchison 1976). Barclay was a member of the movement now known as the Scottish Enlightenment and many of his ideas were strikingly modern, including his opposition to rote learning and the importance he placed on the consideration of the influence of a child’s home on his or her educational progress. Another Scot, David Fordyce, spoke of developing the child’s imagination in moral matters and wrote that ‘dull, formal lectures on several virtues and vices’ were of no use in the formation of good character. Francis Hutcheson, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1747, advocated greater study of character. He sought to ‘search accurately into the constitution of our nature to see what sort of creatures we are’ (ibid). What was needed, he argued, was an objective study of human nature, particularly a study of motives and behaviour. John Locke also believed that character formation was more important than intellectual attainment. There were those, however, who took a negative view of
human character and doubted whether it could be developed for the good. Hannah More, a leading Protestant moralist of the eighteenth century, believed that infants were ‘beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature, and evil disposition, which it should be the great end of education to rectify’ (see Jones 1952). Attempts at this type of rectification manifested themselves in schools through strict discipline, punishments and rote learning and were misapplied, particularly to the poor as a form of social control rather than character development.
