Parenting & Family Quote by John Locke

Locke’s line flatters the child, but it’s really a slap at the grown-up ego. In a culture that treated children as unfinished adults and “learned men” as authorities, he reverses the prestige hierarchy: the child’s “unexpected questions” beat the polished “discourses” of men. The contrast is surgical. A discourse is often a performance - orderly, credentialed, self-protective. A child’s question is a stress test. It arrives from outside the script, unbothered by what’s supposed to be obvious, and that’s exactly why it’s useful.

The subtext is empiricist: knowledge doesn’t advance by reciting inherited frameworks; it advances when those frameworks meet reality and crack. Locke, the great critic of innate ideas, is telling you where the cracks appear. Children don’t yet have the social incentives to pretend understanding. They ask “why” in ways that expose the hidden assumptions adults have learned to stop noticing. The “unexpected” is doing a lot of work here - it signals not cuteness but epistemic value, the kind that comes from ignorance untrained into conformity.

Context matters: Locke helped shape modern thinking about education and the mind as a blank slate shaped by experience. This sentence sits comfortably beside his suspicion of scholastic verbosity and his preference for clarity, observation, and practical inquiry. It’s also a democratic move. Authority isn’t a property of age or status; it’s a property of attention. The child, in Locke’s telling, is not wiser - just less invested in sounding wise.