Like all eighteenth-century education reformers, Turnbull owed a considerable debt to John Locke. He appropriated wholesale many of Locke’s ideas on early instruction and the cultivation of good habits, specifically, on the dangers of parental indulgence, on the importance of self-denial, on the use of praise and blame, and on the best means of disciplining children. Turnbull also embraced the Lockean description of the ideal English gentleman. The child should learn to be natural in company rather than affected, industrious rather than lazy, and courageous rather than pusillanimous. Turnbull also followed Locke closely in his prescriptions for the teaching of English and foreign languages as well as British history and law. Despite these obvious borrowings, Turnbull’s Observations cannot be regarded as merely a restatement and elaboration of Locke’s educational writings. Locke proved too antiestablishment and anticlassical in his pedagogy and apparently too antinormative in his epistemology for Turnbull’s more balanced view of human nature and education.
An instance of Turnbull’s balanced approach to education reform can be seen in his handling of the most controversial educational issue of the century and the one with which he began his Observations. Every elite family in Britain had to decide whether to send its sons to school, usually one of the “public” boarding schools such as Eton or Westminster, or to educate them privately in the home by hiring a domestic tutor. Though Locke had made a strong case against corrupting the young gentleman’s morals by sending him to a school, the accomplished schoolmasters of Britain were not without their own powerful arguments. Foremost they rehearsed the advantages of public education set forth by the great Roman schoolmaster Quintilian.6 His Institutio Oratoria offered a systematic account of the rigorous oratorical training undertaken by the Roman youth and aimed ultimately at producing a Cicero. Renaissance education had largely been modeled on the Institutio Oratoria, and Quintilian’s authority had by no means diminished in the eyes of eighteenth-century British schoolmasters. According to Quintilian, a boy’s morals could be preserved in a public school provided that upstanding and watchful instructors were in charge. Moreover, a child’s morals were as often corrupted in the home as in the school. Parents spoiled their children, and slaves introduced them to all sorts of vice. Even more important, a school offered youth a public setting that stimulated their minds through “emulation,” that is, the spirited rivalry of many boys competing to be the best. The advantages of emulation for producing a great orator and a public man were obvious. British schoolmasters adopted Quintilian’s arguments wholesale; they had only to adjust “slaves” to “servants.” Turnbull, however, saw the merits of both sides and hoped to effect a compromise. In his Socratic dialogue devoted to the issue, he concluded that smaller schools could preserve morality and also offer emulation, “rivalship,” and “bustling.”
As important as the educational setting, the curriculum was something that must be addressed by every education reformer. Turnbull devoted considerable attention to the subjects that should be taught, and even more to how they should be taught. Again he reached a compromise between Locke and the classicists. In doing so, he made some unique contributions to his age’s understanding of what today is called “the canon,” those arts and sciences that should be studied by all liberally educated individuals. Turnbull agreed that British youth should study their own history and language. At the same time he allowed for more training in the classical languages and classical history than did Locke.
For support of this more classical curriculum, Turnbull drew on the Frenchman Charles Rollin as well as Quintilian. After Locke, Charles Rollin was probably the most authoritative writer on education in eighteenth-century Europe.7 Whereas Locke’s experience in education derived from his office as private secretary and tutor in the house of Shaftesbury and later his observations of Damaris Mascham educating her children, Rollin was a schoolmaster through and through. While rector of the University of Paris, he turned his lectures into two of the most voluminous and popular works of the century, The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres and The Ancient History. In the former work Rollin explained his methods of teaching the classics, methods that drew liberally from Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Xenophon, Plutarch, Plato, and, above all, Quintilian, authors who also make frequent appearances in Turnbull’s Observations. Rollin explained how youth should be steered away from false images of “glory” presented by the culture and instead turned toward true glory and a correct taste as found in the great works of history and literature. In short, Rollin paved the way for Turnbull by showing how the proper teaching of a canon of great works in school could achieve the same ends that Locke advocated in his system of private instruction. As much as a tribute to Locke, the Observations can be read as a defense of teaching the classics for moral purposes.
Turnbull’s curriculum comprehended far more than the classics. Turnbull also embraced subjects that Locke either criticized or largely ignored, such as poetry, painting, and the natural sciences. Although today we take for granted scientific and aesthetic subjects in a liberal-arts curriculum, it must be realized that the rigorous linguistic basis of the classical curriculum left little room for “modern” subjects. Turnbull was one of the first educational theorists to open up liberal education to the study of the natural world as it had been explained by Newton. He stood virtually alone in his enthusiasm for art.8 Unlike educators today, however, Turnbull did not compartmentalize or departmentalize such different “branches” of learning. As the metaphor of the tree implies, all forms of learning had a common origin and were connected. Invoking Plato and other ancient philosophers, Turnbull pronounced all knowledge as having “one common scope” whose purpose is to harmonize the human mind and affections. The lessons drawn from nature were the same as those to be found in the human, or “moral,” world because a benevolent creator has set into motion laws of nature, both human and material. It is therefore the duty of human beings to live according to the designs of “God’s moral providence” as revealed to us in history and through the “analogies” of the physical world. The one true purpose of philosophy, therefore, is to make men better. For Turnbull moral philosophers were, strictly speaking, philosophers who moralized.
Moral philosophers had an ally in human nature itself according to Lf0478_ Following Shaftesbury, Turnbull rejected the ideas of a “certain set of philosophers” who regarded human nature as “originally deformed.” These unnamed philosophers were no doubt Hobbes and Mandeville, but also by implication Saint Augustine and the theologians inspired by him, especially the orthodox Calvinists in the Church of Scotland. To explain evil deeds in the world, Turnbull had recourse to Locke’s association of ideas. Individuals would become vicious when they were exposed to false associations in childhood and formed habits accordingly. Yet he seemed as troubled as Shaftesbury by the underlying idea that morality is only the result of custom, habit, or education, as one reading of Locke would have it. Instead, Turnbull posited that human beings are equipped with a “natural furniture” of the mind that urges them to advance in knowledge and virtue. By natural furniture Turnbull referred to reason, the imagination, the moral sense, the passions or affections, and other capacities common to every individual. The benevolent “author of Nature” endowed human beings with these capacities so they could “exercise a very large power” by doing good in the world. Given proper instruction, people would normally imitate their benevolent creator and thereby attain real and lasting happiness. Turnbull’s optimistic view of human nature allowed him to enlist for moral purposes certain parts of the mind that seventeenth-century philosophers had distrusted, such as the imagination. Of course, the “fancy” had to be regulated, but it could not be restrained completely. Rather, the imagination opened up to the spectator the beauties of nature and of poetic and artistic excellence. Like Shaftesbury, Turnbull held that the aesthetic and moral senses were closely allied. Pleasures of the imagination, as Addison had shown, could thus be used to harmonize the soul.9
By “liberal education,” then, Turnbull meant the employment of the various branches of learning to show youth how to gain mastery over their “affections.” The ability to regulate the passions and imagination granted youth a true “inward liberty” and strength. Teachers and moralists should therefore