Now, therefore, dear Sir, you can’t imagine how these difficulties perplex me, as to my knowing how to judge which is best, a home or a school education.  For hear what this excellent author justly observes on the latter, among other things, no less to the purpose:  “I am sure, he who is able to be at the charge of a tutor at home, may there give his son a more genteel carriage, more manly thoughts, and a sense of what is worthy and becoming, with a greater proficiency in learning, into the bargain, and ripen him up sooner into a man, than any school can do.  Not that I blame the schoolmaster in this,” says he, “or think it to be laid to his charge.  The difference is great between two or three pupils in the same house, and three or four score boys lodged up and down; for, let the master’s industry and skill be never so great, it is impossible he should have fifty or an hundred scholars under his eye any longer than they are in the school together.”  But then, Sir, if there be such a difficulty as Mr. Locke says, to meet with a proper tutor for the home education, which he thus prefers, what a perplexing thing is this.  But still, according to this gentleman, another difficulty attends a home education; and that is, what I hinted at before, in my second article, the necessity of keeping the youth out of the company of the meaner servants, who may set him bad examples.  For thus he says, “Here is another great inconvenience, which children receive from the ill examples which they meet with from the meaner servants.  They are wholly, if possible, to be kept from such conversation:  for the contagion of these ill precedents, both in civility and virtue, horribly infects children, as often as they come within the reach of it.  They frequently learn from unbred or debauched servants, such language, untowardly tricks and vices, as otherwise they would be ignorant of all their lives.  ’Tis a hard matter wholly to prevent this mischief,” continues he; “you will have very good luck, if you never have a clownish or vicious servant, and if from them your children never get any infection.”

Then, Sir, my third point (which I mentioned in the beginning of this letter) makes a still stronger objection, as it may happen, against a home education; to wit, the example of the parents themselves, if they be not very circumspect and discreet.

All these difficulties being put together, let me, dear Sir, humbly propose it, as a matter for your consideration and determination, whether there be not a middle way to be found out in a school education, that may remedy some of these inconveniencies?  For suppose you cannot get a tutor so qualified as Mr. Locke thinks he ought to be, for your Billy as he grows up.  Suppose there is danger from your meaner servants; or we his parents should not be able to lay ourselves under the requisite restraints, in order to form his mind by our own examples, which I hope, by God’s grace, however, will not be