More about Locke's argument against innate ideas...

When I think about Locke's argument against innate ideas, Plato's story of the slave boy in the Meno comes to mind. In the Meno, Socrates takes a slave boy through a mathematical experiment. He tells the boy that the area of a square whose sides are each 2' long is 4' squared. He then asks what the area is of a square whose sides are each 4' long. The slave boy initially doubles the area of the square, since the length of the sides was doubled. Socrates asks the boy questions until he reveals the correct answer. My question then arises: does the slave boy really have some kind of innate notion about mathematics (or, further, that he had an innate notion about the area of a square with 4' sides)?

I don't think he does. I think Socrates' questions prompt the slave boy to recall little bits of information that he has learned about numbers, addition, shape, and size. I think the questions also prompted him to use this information in such a way that he could infer the answer by way of reasoning. I'm not sure what Locke says about innate abilities as opposed to innate ideas, but it does seem as though we are born with certain innate abilities--how to think, how to breath, how to rationalize, how to compare, etc... While sometimes we may be taught how to refine and improve these abilities, we certainly do not need to be taught how to breathe before doing so...