Volume 50, 2018
Philosophy of Education
Grigorios Karafyllis
Pages 109-114
Learning, Education and Human Nature in Locke
“Let us then suppose mind to be as we say white paper void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? (…)”. To this he answers that knowledge is the combined result of external and internal experience and it is not subject to the exclusivity of the senses. According to Locke’s interpretation, this process means that external objects – which exist independently of man – act on the senses, causing the initial creation of ideas-as-impressions. This action appears as a response to the stimulus and is transmitted as a movement to the brain cells, thus producing individual ideas in the mind. The mind uses these simple ideas as the material of knowledge, to produce new, complex ideas. At the beginning man through a variety of processes of distinction and composition, forms complex ideas and construct its basic functions. In this configured mental environment, learning through education can be brought to bearing is more sensitive and suggestible to logic, while later this becomes difficult, even converse.