ABSTRACT
John Locke’s contribution to educational thinking had great virtues. He realized that the true starting-point of education is the child and his needs. Locke's whole approach to education in the Thoughts is pragmatic enough to satisfy the modern pragmatists. In education, the empirical principle is apparent in Locke’s emphasis on finding out for oneself. Locke’s concern to stress the importance of experience in education led him to overstatement in the well-known passage which likens the child’s mind to ‘white paper or wax to be moulded’. Locke himself was of his time in taking no interest in the possibility of educational provision by the State, although in seventeenth-century England some Puritans advocated State education — an idea that was carried across the Atlantic by emigrants and put into practice in the New England Colonies.
