Education Quote by Roger Ascham

Praise is doing double duty here: it is both a moral gesture and a piece of learning technology. Ascham, a Tudor humanist who tutored Princess Elizabeth and wrote The Scholemaster, isn’t romanticizing compliments; he’s prescribing them as infrastructure. In a culture where schooling often meant coercion, drills, and the occasional threat, he argues for something more strategic: the teacher’s approval as the quickest way to make intelligence want to keep going.

The metaphor is telling. A “whetstone” doesn’t create a blade; it sharpens what’s already there. Ascham’s subtext is a quiet rebuke to instructors who treat students as dull material to be hammered into shape. A “good wit” exists, latent and promising, but it needs the right friction. Praise supplies that friction without breaking the spirit. It also redefines discipline: the classroom runs best not on fear, but on status and desire. “Let the master praise him” is less about kindness than about calibrated power, the teacher granting recognition as a reward that students will chase.

There’s also an early-modern politics to the line. Ascham writes in an era obsessed with forming governable subjects: eloquent, obedient, self-directed. Praise becomes a tool for manufacturing internal motivation, turning external authority into a student’s own “will to learning.” It’s pedagogy as persuasion, not punishment - and a reminder that the softest forces can be the most efficient.