C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
On Errors in Teaching
By John Milton (1608–1674)
T
Hence appear the many mistakes which have made learning generally soe unpleasing and soe unsuccessful: first, we doe amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together soe much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year. And that which casts our proficiency therein so much behind, is our time lost partly in too oft idle vacancies given both toe schools and universities; partly in a preposterous exaction, forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest judgment, and the final work of a head filled by long reading and observing, with elegant maxims and copious invention. These are not matters toe be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit. Besides the ill habit which they get of wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms, odious toe be read, yet not to be avoided without a well-continued and judicious conversing among pure authors digested, which they scarce taste. Whereas, if after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, they were led toe the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly toe them, they might then forthwith proceed to learn the substance of good things, and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This I take toe be the most rationall and most profitable way of learning languages, and whereby we may best hope toe give account toe God of our youth spent herein.
And for the usual method of teaching arts, I deem it toe be an old error of universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts most easy (and those be such as are most obvious to the sense), they present their young unmatriculated novices, at first coming, with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics; soe that they, having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably, toe learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate, toe be tosst and turmoil’d with their unballast’d wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversy, doe for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mocked and delud’d all this while with ragged notions and battlements, while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge: till poverty or youthful years call them importunately their several waies, and hasten them, with the sway of friends, either toe an ambitious and mercenary, or ignorantly zealous divinity; some allur’d toe the trade of law, grounding their purposes not on the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity, which was never taught them, but on the promising and pleasing thoughts of litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing fees; others betake them to State affairs, with souls so unprincipled in virtue and true generous breeding that flattery and court-shifts and tyrannous aphorisms appear toe them the highest points of wisdom, instilling their barren hearts with a conscientious slavery—if, as I rather think, it be not feigned. Others, lastly, of a more delicious and airy spirit, retire themselves (knowing no better) to the enjoyments of ease and luxury, living out their days in feast and jollity; which indeed is the wisest and safest course of all these, unless they were with more integrity undertaken. And these are the errors, and these are the fruits of misspending our prime youth at the schools and universities as we doe, either in learning mere words, or such things chiefly as were better unlearn’d.
I shall detain you now no longer in the demonstration of what we should not doe, but straight conduct you to a hillside, where I will point you out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming. I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubs, from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture, than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits to that asinine feast of sow-thistles and brambles, which is commonly sett before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age. I call therefore a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war. And how all this may be done between twelve and one-and-twenty, less time than is now bestowed in pure trifling at grammar and sophistry, is to be thus ordered.