"It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn"
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Godwin’s line is a polite bomb tossed into the nursery. In an era drunk on “useful knowledge” and moral drilling, he refuses the premise that childhood can be optimized around a single keystone lesson - piety, obedience, industriousness, patriotism - that will snap the rest of a life into place. “Probable” is doing sly work here: he isn’t sermonizing, he’s undermining certainty itself, the adult addiction to imagining that one curriculum, one discipline, one doctrine will guarantee a respectable outcome.
The subtext is anti-authoritarian without sounding like it. If there is no eminently important “one thing,” then the teacher’s power to rank, force, and standardize collapses. Godwin’s radical politics - the same mind that argued against coercive government - shows up as pedagogy: children are not raw material for civic production. They’re people whose growth is contingent, plural, and hard to predict, which is exactly why grand educational schemes so often become moral policing.
Context matters: late 18th-century Britain is tightening its social order after the French Revolution, anxious about unruly ideas and unruly bodies. Education becomes a battlefield over who gets to shape the next generation. Godwin answers by reframing learning as an ecology, not a commandment. The point isn’t that nothing matters; it’s that the search for the single decisive lesson is a grown-up fantasy - a way to turn the frightening openness of a child’s future into a checklist.
The subtext is anti-authoritarian without sounding like it. If there is no eminently important “one thing,” then the teacher’s power to rank, force, and standardize collapses. Godwin’s radical politics - the same mind that argued against coercive government - shows up as pedagogy: children are not raw material for civic production. They’re people whose growth is contingent, plural, and hard to predict, which is exactly why grand educational schemes so often become moral policing.
Context matters: late 18th-century Britain is tightening its social order after the French Revolution, anxious about unruly ideas and unruly bodies. Education becomes a battlefield over who gets to shape the next generation. Godwin answers by reframing learning as an ecology, not a commandment. The point isn’t that nothing matters; it’s that the search for the single decisive lesson is a grown-up fantasy - a way to turn the frightening openness of a child’s future into a checklist.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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