Roger Ascham

Roger Ascham

Roger Ascham (pronounced / 'æskəm /; * around 1515 in Kirby Wiske , North Riding of Yorkshire ; †  December 30, 1568 in London ) was an English educator.

Life

Ascham was the child of a long-established family of yeoman farmers in North Yorkshire. He received his first training in the house of a local landowner, which aroused in him a love of learning and archery . From 1530 he studied at St John's College , Cambridge , where he was so good at languages ​​(especially Greek ) that he was asked to tutor the younger students . In 1537 he received his MA and accepted a position as a lecturer in the Greek language. This pointed his way to the academic career of teaching and research.

Asham's health was bad at an early age, which led to financial problems after a long illness, and so in 1541 he had to take the position of translator with the Bishop of York . However, the trip to the north of England had awakened his old love for archery, which led to the conclusion of his treatise Toxophilus in 1545 : a text on the practical art of archery and at the same time proof that the English language was sophisticated enough to deal with such a subject to deal with. He dedicated his work to King Henry VIII and presented it to him himself. He was so taken with it that he gave Ascham a pension of £ 10.

In 1548 Ascham was initially the teacher of Prince Edward VI. and shortly after the later Queen Elizabeth I ordered. After a falling out with his royal patron, Ascham stayed as a diplomat at the court of Emperor Charles V in Augsburg between 1550 and 1553 . After Edward's death, he returned to England and was, rather surprisingly, appointed secretary to Queen Maria Tudor , who was inclined to Catholicism . The successor, Queen Elizabeth I, provided her old teacher with a benefice in York, which gave him the necessary financial independence to write his main work, The Scholemaster . The work remained unfinished when Ascham died in 1568 due to his poor health. Only his wife Margaret was able to publish it in 1570.

The Scholemaster initially seems to be a guide to teaching Latin: a plaine and perfite way of teaching children ... the Latin tong . In his Schoolmaster , however, he also designed an educational canon in English, which, in its holistic approach, seems almost modern. Ideas of this kind were previously buried in Latin and Greek texts of the Renaissance and could not be used by the general public.

In all his scientific work, Ascham turned against the prevailing scholastic teaching methods and again and again against the general moral decline at court. He advocated the education of girls, which was not a given at the time, and against corporal punishment in schools.

Roger Ascham died in London on December 30, 1568 at the age of about 53.

Works

• The schoolmaster . Folcroft, Pa .: Folcroft Libr. Ed., 1976. <Repr. d. Ed. London 1570>.
• Toxophilus. (1545), Tempe, Ariz .: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. ISBN 0-86698-286-8 .

literature

• Lawrence V. Ryan: Roger Ascham . Stanford, Calif. : Stanford Univ. Pr., 1964.
• Gerhard Weidemann: Roger Ascham as a teacher . Rostock, Univ. Diss., 1900.

Web links

• Literature by and about Roger Ascham in the catalog of the German National Library