Locke's Oversimplification of Property

Though there are clearly many flaws in the argument John Locke presents in his piece “Of Property,” the root of the idea makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, the importance of money in today’s society makes it impossible to even imagine a country in which a man’s property is determined by the amount of labor he expends to remove something from its natural state. However, I would be curious to learn what Locke would have thought about a person’s intellectual property, and the current state of the university system in this country. According to the laws of property Locke created in this piece, professors would, in effect, own their students. Teaching is certainly a form of labor, and that labor is spent on expanding students’ scope of knowledge in an attempt to free us from our natural, uneducated states. In a society that wasn’t ruled by money, a professor would also be entrusted with determining how much education a student needed so as not to “enlarge his Possessions beyond the use of his Family.” Clearly, Locke would have needed to alter these laws of property with regards to informational and educational property. However, when the existence and importance of money are taken into account, Locke’s argument unravels at the seams. Would Locke have suggested that education at a collegiate level be entirely free? Perhaps he would have imagined a system in which tuition was not paid in money, but in a symbiotic exchange of knowledge between students and professors. Either way, it is hard for me to believe that any of Locke’s laws would have done much to inspire competition, and I unequivocally believe that competition drives progress. If the concept of money had never been introduced to American society, I would probably be writing this entry on a piece of parchment with a quill, not on a computer from which I will subsequently post this entry to an invisible network for the world to see.