Education Quote by Roger Ascham

Praise, for Ascham, is not a prize at the end of learning but the tool that makes learning possible. The line works because it refuses the moralizing posture we expect from a 16th-century schoolmaster. Instead of warning about sin, sloth, or discipline, he makes an almost mechanical claim: praise is a whetstone. It does not replace the blade; it reveals and extends what is already there. Good wit exists, but it needs friction, contact, a surface that turns potential into edge.

Ascham was writing in a Tudor England obsessed with training minds for service: courtiers, clerks, diplomats, Protestant reformers. Education was less self-expression than state capacity. In that context, praise becomes quietly political. Encouraging a "will to learning" is a way to manufacture the kind of subject the era needed: eager, loyal, rhetorically skilled. The metaphor smuggles in a humane pedagogy under a culture that often leaned on fear and humiliation. He is arguing, implicitly, against the teacher as tyrant.

The subtext is also strategically flattering. By insisting that praise sharpens "a good wit", Ascham hints that ability is real and recognizable. Students are not empty vessels; they are blades worth honing. That’s a seductive promise for any learner and a subtle directive for any instructor: notice what’s sharp, name it out loud, and you will get more of it. The cynicism is mild but present: people work better when they feel seen. Ascham turns that social truth into an educational doctrine.