Education Quote by Roger Ascham

A Tudor-era eye-roll, sharpened into a sentence. Ascham’s jab lands because it isn’t really about literacy; it’s about authority. “The least learned” aren’t merely ignorant, he implies, they’re eager. They rush to publish precisely because they lack the friction that knowledge creates: self-doubt, qualification, the sense that every claim opens into five more questions. Learning, in this view, produces hesitation; ignorance produces momentum.

The line also smuggles in a class argument. In mid-16th-century England, “learned” meant more than being able to read. It meant access to Latin, rhetoric, patronage, the institutions that decided what counted as serious writing. As printing expanded and English prose began to muscle into spaces once reserved for clerics and classicists, the gatekeepers felt the ground shift. Ascham, a humanist teacher close to power, is policing the boundary between disciplined scholarship and the noisy new confidence of the uncredentialed. His “for the most part” is a strategist’s hedge: broad enough to sting, narrow enough to sound fair.

The subtext is anxious and familiar. When culture speeds up, bad writing proliferates, but so does writing that simply ignores old rules. Ascham dresses taste as ethics: the unlearned don’t just write poorly, they write irresponsibly. It’s a complaint with bite because it contains a reluctant admission: the least learned have the audacity to enter the conversation, and sometimes audacity is what the moment rewards.