Parenting & Family Quote by Roger Ascham

Ascham slips a small revolution into a sentence that sounds almost apologetic: "In mine opinion". In an era when classrooms and households ran on the certainty of authority and the sting of the rod, he frames a radical claim as personal judgment, a rhetorical softener that lets the idea travel where a manifesto might be rejected outright. The modesty is tactical. He knows he is arguing against a default setting of the 16th-century schoolroom: fear as a teaching technology.

The line works because it pairs moral clarity with practical instruction. "Love is fitter than fear" is not just ethical positioning; it's an argument about outcomes. "Fitter" is a cold, craftsperson's word. It implies that affection isn't sentimental indulgence but the more efficient tool for "bring[ing] up a child rightly in learning". Ascham makes education sound like cultivation, not conquest. Gentleness becomes a method, not a mood.

The subtext is also political. Tudor England is consolidating power, disciplining bodies and speech, building subjects. Ascham, a humanist and tutor to elites (including, notably, Elizabeth's circle), is proposing a different model of forming citizens: internal motivation over external coercion. He doesn't deny hierarchy; he retools it. Authority remains, but it is asked to persuade rather than terrorize.

Even the phrasing "better than beating" lands with quiet bite. He names the violence plainly, refusing to euphemize it as "correction". The sentence is a contest between two educational futures, and Ascham is betting - carefully, strategically - on the one that produces learners who don't just obey, but understand.