The Scholemaster

A conversation at Windsor in 1563 about whether boys should be beaten for false Latin turns into Ascham's book on education. He argues that fear teaches nothing, that a beaten child learns to hate the subject and not to master it, and that the way to Latin is double translation — out of Latin into English and, after an interval, back again — with the master correcting gently and by comparison. The second book is on imitation: what to read, in what order, and how to use the best authors rather than the merely available ones. He digresses, memorably, on Italy and on what an English gentleman brings home from it.

Roger Ascham had been tutor to the Princess Elizabeth and Latin secretary to Mary and then to the Queen. He left The Scholemaster unfinished at his death in 1568, and his widow published it in 1570. It is among the first substantial works of English prose written deliberately in English rather than Latin.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.