William Godwin: the first lesson is learning to ask

What should a lesson teach first? In Of Awakening the Mind, the essay opening the first part of The Enquirer, William Godwin suggests looking beyond the particular information being passed on. The text dates from 1797. It is not contemporary learning research but a philosophical position on education. We bring a practical question to our reading: what remains with a person when the explanation has finished and the teacher is no longer there to supply the next answer? [1]

Godwin writes: “Learn to think, to discriminate, to remember and to enquire”. These are four activities, not four answers to repeat. In context, he argues that early instruction should cultivate habits of intellectual activity. Discriminate here means distinguishing and assessing ideas, rather than treating groups of people unfairly. We retain the wording of the English original while explaining its historical meaning. That distinction matters because familiar words can carry different associations when we read them centuries after they were written. [1]

The essay’s argument does not remove the importance of knowledge. It also treats subjects of instruction as opportunities to exercise the mind in different directions. Godwin uses analogies of his period, including cultivated land: these are argumentative images, not biological evidence about the brain. We can follow his proposal without turning it into a scientific law. The central discovery lies in the difference between receiving content and becoming able to perform intellectual operations on that content for ourselves. [1]

Take an example invented by our editorial team. Someone shows us two leaves and gives us the names of the plants. Remembering the names is one possibility; asking which characteristics distinguish them is another. We could write down a question and look for a source that clarifies it. The example does not appear in the essay and does not demonstrate that one teaching method is better than every other. It simply translates Godwin’s question into an ordinary situation that requires no specialist knowledge. [1]

There is a limit to remember as well. Reading an emphatic sentence about independence is not enough to decide how to organise a classroom, support someone who is struggling or evaluate a course. Those decisions require context and further evidence. Here we read and discuss a philosophical proposal without using it as a shortcut to judge teachers or students. In our editorial interpretation, independent thought also begins with recognising when we do not yet have the tools needed to reach a conclusion. [1]

Today’s phrase can therefore become a small reading prompt: after an explanation, choose something to remember, a distinction to clarify and a question to investigate. This is not a diagnostic test, and it promises no school results. It is our way of trying out the invitation in the text. A page may finish with a full stop; the reader’s work can continue with a carefully formulated question mark, one specific enough to guide the next piece of inquiry. The illustration stages an imagined meeting between Godwin and Lia, rather than a documented historical episode. [1]