Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is an outline on how to educate this mind. Drawing on thoughts expressed in letters written to Mary Clarke and her husband about their son, he expresses the belief that education makes the manor, more fundamentally, that the mind is an "empty cabinet":I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.Locke also wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences". He argues that the "associations of ideas" that one makes when young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self; they are, put differently, what first mark the tabula rasa. In his Essay, in which both these concepts are introduced, Locke warns, for example, against letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are associated with the night, for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other".
