Of Education

Of Education is a short tract John Milton published in June 1644, addressed as a letter to Samuel Hartlib, the Prussian-born reformer and correspondent who gathered English intellectuals around schemes for the improvement of learning. Hartlib had pressed Milton for his views, and Milton obliged with a few pages that sketch a program of schooling for the sons of the gentry. The moment was charged. England was in the middle of civil war, Parliament was sitting, and Milton, who had taught his nephews and the sons of friends in his own house, wrote with the conviction that a nation reforming its church and state ought to reform its schools as well. He was dissatisfied with the grammar-school routine of his day, in which boys spent years on Latin and Greek grammar without ever reaching the substance of what the languages contained.

Milton opens with a definition that governs everything after it: the end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, and to be like him, as nearly as we may. Education is thus a work of restoration, and the whole curriculum is judged by whether it serves that end. From this follows a plan that moves quickly from language to things. Boys should learn grammar briskly, then proceed to the authors themselves, taking in agriculture, mathematics, natural philosophy, geography, and the Greek and Latin writers on ethics, politics, and poetry, before turning to rhetoric, logic, and poetics. Moral instruction and Scripture are woven through the whole, and the students are to be exercised in body as well as mind, with fencing and military drill. Milton proposes a single institution, an academy that serves as both school and university and carries a boy from about twelve to twenty-one. The goal is a complete and generous education, one that fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.

The tract has endured because it joins two things often held apart: a demanding classical education and a plainly theological account of why it matters. It is also a primary witness to Puritan-era thinking about vocation, virtue, and the formation of citizens, and it sheds light on the mind that would soon write Paradise Lost. Readers will find its curriculum unrealistic as a literal blueprint, and Milton himself concedes that his plan is ambitious. Its lasting value lies in the question it presses: what is learning for?

Who should read this: teachers, homeschooling parents, and anyone shaping a school or curriculum who wants to see a seventeenth-century Christian argue that education is spiritual restoration, not merely preparation for a career. It will also reward students of Milton and of Puritan England. It is not for readers looking for a practical, modern guide to pedagogy or a detailed syllabus they can follow today.