Parenting & Family Quote by Roger Ascham

For a 16th-century schoolroom, this is practically heresy: Ascham dares to claim that affection outperforms the rod. England’s grammar schools were notorious for routine corporal punishment, and “good learning” often meant Latin drilled into kids through fear and fatigue. By arguing that children are “sooner allured by love,” Ascham isn’t offering a soft-hearted platitude; he’s making an efficiency argument dressed as moral insight. The verb “allured” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests learning as attraction, even seduction - a pull toward mastery rather than a shove away from pain.

The subtext is political as much as pedagogical. Early modern England needed bureaucrats, clergy, and courtiers fluent in the languages of power. If beating produces compliance, it also produces resentment, avoidance, and the minimum viable performance. Ascham, a humanist and tutor to elites, has seen how curiosity and praise can turn education from a punishment into a habit. “Driven by beating” frames violence as crude propulsion: it can move a body, not form a mind.

There’s also a quiet repositioning of authority. Love here isn’t sentimental; it’s a technique of governance. The teacher’s task becomes cultivating desire - for approval, for competence, for belonging to the learned class. Ascham’s intent is reformist but pragmatic: replace terror with attachment because it works, and because the kind of learner a state wants is not merely obedient, but internally motivated.