Of Education

The influences at work in the tractate are an interesting blend of Renaissance humanism with its emphasis on the via activa, tempered by the more contemplative medieval concern with personal redemption.

Both Vives and Comenius rejected the dialectical approach in education in favour of empirical observation and “the study of things rather than words, nature rather than books” (Lewalski 204).

Milton dismissed the medieval curriculum which produced such scholars as the "scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry" (Lewalski 208), and sought to liberate it from the scholastic yoke from which he believed it desperately needed rescuing.

The trivium laid the groundwork for the quadrivium, which turned its attention to the theoretical in the world of number, including the study of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

Progress, in his view, is delayed by unnecessarily “forcing the empty wits of children to compose theme, verses, and orations” (53); instead, he proposes that after some foundational grammatical instruction, students should “be won early to the love of virtue” by having “some easy and delightful book of education” from among the ancient classics read to them (56).

He derides the medieval practice of “present[ing] their young unmatriculated novices, at first coming, with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics” after having only recently left "those grammatic flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction" (54).

Milton's proposed curriculum, encompassing as it does grammar, arithmetic, geometry, religion, agriculture, geography, astronomy, physics, trigonometry, ethics, economics, languages, politics, the law, theology, church history as well as the “organic arts” of poetry, rhetoric and logic, is encyclopaedic in scope.

Milton's desire to marry scholarly pursuits to commitments of a professional and public nature is, as Ainsworth implies, an over-riding characteristic of Renaissance humanism (Witt 34).