Tag Archives | Lapsus Linguae

One of the triumphs of government schooling is that most educated English-speakers nowadays cannot read this sentence from Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education:

The age is not like to want instances of this kind, which should be made land-marks to him, that by the disgraces, diseases, beggary, and shame of hopeful young men thus brought to ruin, he may be precaution’d, and be made see, how those join in the contempt and neglect of them that are undone, who, by pretences of friendship and respect, lead them to it, and help to prey upon them whilst they were undoing: that he may see, before he buys it by a too dear experience, that those who persuade him not to follow the sober advices he has receiv’d from his governors, and the counsel of his own reason, which they call being govern’d by others, do it only that they may have the government of him themselves; and make him believe, he goes like a man of himself, by his own conduct, and for his own pleasure, when in truth he is wholly as a child led by them into those vices which best serve their purposes.