“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645himself as a schoolmaster drawing upon his own experience, probably because his
status as gentleman–scholar might be compromised by that comparatively lowly
role.^78 Yet he imagines the teacher his program requires in the familiar, heroic
terms: “this is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himselfe a teacher;
but will require sinews almost equall to those which Homer gave Ulysses” (415).
Though there are important points of connection, Of Education is not a Comenian
tract.^79 Like Hartlib and Comenius, Milton proposes the use of public funds to
establish schools “in every City throughout this land, which would tend much to
the encrease of learning and civility every where” (380–1),^80 but unlike them he
explicitly declines to work out a comprehensive articulated system of schools for all
classes and both sexes (414). Milton’s are private academies, each designed for about
150 of “our noble and gentle youth” (406) between the ages of 12 and 21; they
require at entrance literacy in English and some prior preparation, and promise a
complete education to the level of Master of Arts, replacing the university educa-
tion Milton so scorned. Milton agrees with Comenius and Hartlib that the logic
chopping, metaphysical subtleties, and rhetoric currently taught in schools and uni-
versities should be replaced by a Baconian emphasis on “useful” knowledge; that
education should proceed from “sensible things” to subjects more abstract; that the
process, while rigorous, should also be delightful; that languages should be studied,
not for the “words or lexicons” (369) but to make available the “experience and
... wisdom” of others; and that present methods of learning Latin and Greek are
prodigiously wasteful of time and ineffective. Instead of Comenius’s famous Janua,
however, Milton would begin with the grammar now used (Lily) “or any better,”^81
and proceed quickly to pronunciation and the reading of good authors. Also, he
eschews the epitomes and encyclopedias that form the core of Comenian educa-
tion, outlining instead an elaborate program of reading major texts (classical and
some modern) in all subjects, linking together literary, scientific, and philosophical
texts in a remarkable and unusual interdisciplinary program. He has no Baconian–
Comenian belief in perfect methods or systems, nor in the Comenian dream of
Pansophia – a grand cooperative compendium of all knowledge that will resolve
dissent into unity. Rather, he will soon insist in Areopagitica that truth is best ad-
vanced by a constant clash of opinions that promotes arduous intellectual struggle
and individual choice.
Milton’s core educational ideas were formed by his own education at St Paul’s
School, by his own highly disciplined five-year reading program after university,
and by his experience in working out a similar reading program in his little private
school for his nephews and a few other boys. He proclaims both a religious and
civic humanist purpose for education: “The end then of learning is to repair the
ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright... as we may the neerest
by possessing our souls of true vertue” (366–7); “I call therefore a compleate and
generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnani-
mously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war” (377–9). In his