The Education of Children — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Case Against Delay

Erasmus directly confronts those who claim young children are incapable of discipline or unfit for study. He counters that the beginnings of learning depend on memory, which is especially retentive in youth. Nature herself has planted seeds of knowledge in us, making early instruction not premature but natural. He notes that certain skills—first letters, languages, fables—are acquired more quickly in childhood than later. The tone is combative, dismissing objections as “fooles wordes” and insisting that the age deemed unfit for learning is precisely the age most apt to learn.

Playful Pedagogy and the Fables of Poets

Erasmus recommends using the fables of poets, bucolic verses, and comedies to delight children while teaching them language and moral judgment. He argues that children naturally imitate others, a tendency seen even in pies and popinjays. Learning through play is central: he suggests painting or tables showing exotic animals like the rhinoceros, tragélaphus, and duocrotalus, so that a child “laugheth at the syght of thys straunge payntynge” while absorbing names and natural history. The method is concrete, visual, and joyful, avoiding all sourness in studies.

A Curriculum of Names and Nature

The text proposes teaching the names of trees, herbs, beasts, and their properties, especially those not commonly seen. Erasmus provides a mini-bestiary: the rhinoceros, enemy of the elephant; the tragélaphus, a goat-hart; the duocrotalus, a swan-like bird that brays like an ass. He advises using paintings of hunts to teach multiple categories at once. The goal is not mere vocabulary but a foundation for later learning: “by one to coniecture all.” This section reveals Erasmus’s belief that early education should be encyclopedic in scope yet accessible through sensory experience.

The Muses, the Graces, and the Ideal Teacher

Erasmus interprets the ancient myth of the Muses and Charites (Graces) as an allegory for learning: the Muses’ beauty, song, and dance, joined with the Graces, signify that study depends on mutual love and delight. He contrasts this with the “piuyshe songe” or “baudy” rhymes and “old wiues tatlynges” that children otherwise absorb. The teacher’s role is to select proper fables, histories, and sentences, matching matter to age. Autumn, he notes, is the season between summer and winter; similarly, the master must discern what is “mete for euerye age.”

Readers will find in this short declamation a concentrated argument for humane, playful education rooted in classical rhetoric and natural philosophy. Erasmus’s voice is direct, his examples vivid, and his opponent’s objections summarily dismissed. Sherry’s translation preserves the urgency of the original while adapting it to an English audience. The work rewards attention to its structural moves—refutation, recommendation, allegory—and its concrete proposals for teaching through images, stories, and the world itself.