John Locke Child Development Essay

Every day everyone experiences something different. Sometimes people struggle, and sometimes they flourish. The fluctuation between success and failure, agreement and disagreement, changes at home or school, and changes in the world are all experiences that change a person. This paper is not the first of its kind. In fact, a famous English philosopher, John Locke states that, “ A child is a blank slate that is formed only through experience”. Every individual is changed and formed by their experiences. Locke’s idea of tabula rasa is reflected in many works today. John Locke’s theory on the changes in people, because of experiences, are supported in the novel Frankenstein, the Holy Bible,and are seen through forced opinions. Mary Shelley,

Development begins early during childhood, in fact immediately after birth. What matters, is how the child is brought up. An example comes from the book of Proverbs, “ Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it”,( Holy, Proverbs 22:6). The experiences that a child faces, changes and shapes them into adulthood. The initial moral lessons a child learns, are typically held important to the individual for a long while and are retained with them throughout their entire life. Another example is language. “ The “mental developmental hypothesis” states that one-year-olds speak in baby talk because their immature brains can’t handle adult speech”(Hartshorne). Babies of course, are not born with the ability to speak. Every individual that learns to speak, had to learn how to first. Without the knowledge of language, that individual wouldn’t be able to speak. An experiment was designed to test this exact purpose but because of ethical reasons it has never been performed. “The Forbidden Experiment” is designed to isolate a child from any spoken, written or signed language.(McCulloch) Without learning language, the individual later in life would still not understand language linguistics. Every individual begins as a blank slate, and through development, is formed into who they are, which affects them later in