"To Repair the Ruins of Our First Parents": Of Education and Fallen Adam

Coiro, Ann Baynes

doi:10.2307/450719

Cited by 18 publications

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“…Modern critics have tended to use Of Education as a framework for understanding Paradise Lost , but given the current critical confusion over the fundamental purposes of the tractate's recommendations, it is certainly just as useful to use Paradise Lost to clarify our understanding of Of Education . Ann Baynes Coiro, for example, shows how Michael's instruction of Adam follows the sequence of Milton's curriculum as the angel describes the religion, agriculture, science, and politics of Earth's first civilization. Coiro frames her treatment as an explication of the epic, but her insightful reading is even more useful as an explication of the tractate because she shows, inadvertently at times, how Michael and Adam illustrate Milton's general suggestions for learning by enacting an instructional process in a model pedagogical setting.…”

Section: Envisioning Milton's Educational Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ann Baynes Coiro, for example, shows how Michael's instruction of Adam follows the sequence of Milton's curriculum as the angel describes the religion, agriculture, science, and politics of Earth's first civilization. Coiro frames her treatment as an explication of the epic, but her insightful reading is even more useful as an explication of the tractate because she shows, inadvertently at times, how Michael and Adam illustrate Milton's general suggestions for learning by enacting an instructional process in a model pedagogical setting. All of the teaching scenes in Paradise Lost demonstrate Milton's principles at work.…”

Section: Envisioning Milton's Educational Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sanctification in Milton's Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in Of Education and the Pedagogy of Paradise Lost

Schuler

2009

Milton Quarterly

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By the time John Milton published Of Education in 1644, many educational theorists had already suggested varying goals for education, 1 but few had suggested such an explicitly theological purpose. Early in the tract, Milton states "The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection" (2: 366-67). Education's central purpose is the reapprehension of the knowledge of God, which was lost through the Fall. However, after discussing second-language acquisition, Milton announces another, quite different, purpose: "I call therefore a compleate and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war" (2: 377-79).Milton's two stated purposes have generated a wide variety of explanations over the years. Some readers have argued his theological purpose is ancillary to his civil purpose, while others view the two purpose statements as fundamentally incompatible. As early as 1922, Murray Bundy described Milton's spiritual purpose as postlapsarian and his civic purpose as prelapsarian, thus making the two goals impossible to achieve at the same time (128-29). In 1944 Tyrus Hillway argued Milton's spiritual purpose was the means by which to achieve his civic purpose (377). A decade later, M. G. Mason contended that " 'to know God aright' is the spiritual call, which, in an interesting passage reminiscent of Plato, [Milton] then translated into more concrete terms. One way to Godliness was, he stated, through an education 'which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war'" (214; emphasis added). Mason believed, as would others later, that Of Education sees spiritual development as a result of intellectual development. In contrast, John F. Huntley argued in 1964 that Milton's spiritual purpose, unlike his civic goal, is not achievable through education (45). More recently, Martin Dzelzainis's brief discussion of Milton's theory of education does not even mention the first statement of purpose, but skips directly to the second, claiming that Of Education "begins with a grandiloquent statement of his ideal," one that appears almost a third of the way through the text. In another recent assessment, Gauri Viswanathan asserts a fundamental conflict between the two and privileges the civic over the spiritual purpose: "Having decided that the object of education was to make good citizens of the state, Milton put his intellectual weight behind national consolidation rather than individual salvation" (348, 351).Still other critics have seen Milton's two purpose statements as complementary. In 1928 Oliver M. Ainsworth pointed out that "some persons have been

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Section: Envisioning Milton's Educational Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Envisioning Milton's Educational Programmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sanctification in Milton's Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in Of Education and the Pedagogy of Paradise Lost

Schuler

2009

Milton Quarterly

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“Much Arguing, Much Writing, Many Opinions”

Evans¹

2008

A Concise Companion to Milton

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Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature

Cotterill

2004

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This book begins and ends with the intellectual and imaginative pleasures of narrative wandering. ‘To digress’ in early modern England carried a range of associations with authority and gender, from amplitude and escape to deviance and transgression. The book argues that writers classically trained in verbal contest used the liberty of digression to create a complex form of underground writing and self-definition in some of the richest non-dramatic texts of 17th-century England; such a pointed use of digressiveness in the period has not been recognized. Within these textual mazes writers captured the ambiguities of political occasion and patronage, while they anatomized enemies and mourned personal loss. The narrator of each text addresses a specter of speechlessness as well as loss of self through a figurative descent to an unstable underworld associated with a female or effeminate weakness. In fresh readings of Donne's Anniversaries, Marvell's Upon Appleton House, Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's The Hind and the Panther and A Discourse of Satire, and Swift's A Tale of a Tub, the book draws attention to the expansiveness of many of the period's literary forms, such as country-house poem, literary anatomy, dedicatory epistle, beast fable, and epic. Turning current sensitivity toward the silenced voice in a new direction, the book argues that rhetorical amplitude might suggest anxieties about speech and silence for early modern men forced to be competitive yet circumspect to make their voices heard.

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"To Repair the Ruins of Our First Parents": Of Education and Fallen Adam

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

Sanctification in Milton's Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in Of Education and the Pedagogy of Paradise Lost

Sanctification in Milton's Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in Of Education and the Pedagogy of Paradise Lost

“Much Arguing, Much Writing, Many Opinions”

Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature

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