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Areopagitica: And, of Education : With Autobiographical Passages from Other Prose Works (Crofts Classics)

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Anytime one looks at a work in another historical context, consideration of time and place must be given if the communicator's message is to make sense. This seventeenth century oration was delivered by John Milton to Parliament, with the central theme of the right of individuals to seek out the truth for themselves.

A Christian worldview was the framework from which Milton's peers made decisions. The age of official state religions was a contemporary issue. Milton calls for the individual conscious to be the determining factor, not an institution. He bases his argument on historical precedent, the Bible, errors made by the Roman Catholic Church, and the virtue of the members of Parliament.

When John Milton looked at the state of education in England, he foresaw a not too distant future when those who were then students would receive an inappropriate education and thus someday emerge as tragically flawed leaders. This imbalance he was determined to avoid. When he looked at the inability of writers like himself to get a manuscript published without pre-publication approval, he foresaw a day when freedom itself would be no more than a dimly remembered dream. This too he determined to avoid. In his tracts, "On Education" and "Areopagitica," he appealed both to his readers and to the leaders of Parliament to recognize the looming dangers and to take corrective measures. Sadly, in both cases, his efforts went for naught.

When Milton wrote in prose as in "On Education," he tended to write about issues that affected him personally and directly. His ability to take personal experience and to infuse that experience into a larger social context resonated with his readers even if they could not take immediate action. As a youth, Milton had the advantage of receiving a humanist education at the St. Paul's School, the curriculum of which contained not only the course content that he desired but also its proper sequence. Those years were happy ones for him. When he was old enough, he enrolled in Cambridge where the curriculum was decidedly less to his liking. Education on a middle school, high school, or university level at that time was either of the humanist sort of St. Paul's or the traditionally stifling curriculum as typified by Cambridge. The need for education and curriculum reform might have been seen as less dire for his nation had Milton not been so personally involved--mentally, spiritually, and intellectually--at all levels. Milton was a true scholar in an age of true scholars. His erudition in many areas was impressive, especially in the classics, languages, and history. Learning ought to have been a joy--as it had been at St. Paul's. But at Cambridge, the soporific style of the trivium and the quadrivium convinced him that the best and the brightest of England's young men (women were not often included in schooling nor was Milton particularly concerned with that) were being forced to learn in a sequence that would drive them away from further education. Since Milton had some experience tutoring young scholars using methods of his own, he became convinced that these methods, if applied across the board in all schools in England, would churn out a new and eager generation of soldier scholars who in true Renaissance fashion could feel equally at home in the classroom, in industry, on the battlefield, or in the laboratory. In essence, he viewed all students as younger clones of himself, who, with the right mental stimulation, would be more than eager to undertake a hugely complex and diverse series of subjects in a curriculum that would keep them busy from sunup to well past sundown. The problem with instituting such a radical change in English school curriculums was that the current system of Aristotelian thought was so thoroughly entrenched that it would take more than a few disenchanted school masters like Milton to effect any significant changes. Thus, he was a failure in his day to modify his nation's schools but today, educational theorists recognize that he was still right in his basic assumptions even if his contemporaries themselves failed to notice.

Milton's concern for literary freedom was of considerably greater import than his concern for curriculum change. In "Areopagitica," he addresses not only his dissatisfaction with the government's requiring the licensing of all manuscripts slated for publication as a prerequisite for publication, but he further suggests that censorship of ideas is a slippery slope from which many other freedoms might be imperiled. Milton, as a classic scholar of the highest ability, used the full bag of his impressive stock of rhetorical flourishes to sway a Parliament to rescind its Licensing Order of 1643 that reinstituted the hated censorship that had plagued England for decades. Since he knew that many of the Lords of Parliament shared much of his erudition, Milton felt free to unleash a wave of classical and biblical allusions that he felt sure would enable these Lords to imagine that they were the modern descendents of the judges that Isocrates faced at the Areopagus nearly two thousand years ago. Milton described the long and lamentable catalog of human failure that was censorship through the ages. He suggested that the very ones trusted to censor potentially objectionable texts must over time become as tainted as the books they were censoring. Milton reminded his Lords that if God created man with reason, then man must be trusted enough to use that reason to distinguish good from evil. Finally, he concludes by noting that since truth comes in many forms, it would be impossible for any group of well-meaning censors to recognize the difference between an obvious truth and one less obvious. Ironically, as Milton failed to do with "On Education" he similarly failed with "Areopagitica." The Lords of Parliament retained the restrictive licensing for many years. However, as with the eternal wisdom inhering in both tracts, future generations now agree that Milton was a man far ahead of his times. Thus, from a failure of his day, Milton is now seen as presciently successful.