In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the scholars of the Renaissance turned from theological education to human letters. A revival of interest in the literature of antiquity became a sort of passion. Those who sought through the study of Greek and Latin poets, essayists, and philosophers to revive the spirit of the lost pagan civilization were called Humanists. They had a philosophy of education very different from that of scholasticism which was at that time on the decline. There was the promise that education might again become liberal, in the sense I use the term. Wherever the “New Learning” was carried it had a liberalizing influence. It roused the hostility of “obscurantists” and created a jolly row in many institutions of learning. It awakened pagan ideas throughout Italy, even in high ecclesiastical circles. It was bringing “refinement” to France. It was receiving something of a triumph in Northern Europe under the leadership of Erasmus, when the Reformation again turned general interest to theology. What the result of this humanistic movement in education might have been had it gone on unchecked no one can say. No one now believes it could have been what its leaders expected. They tried to produce an imitation in their own times of the manners and ways of men who had lived centuries earlier in a wholly different environment. Such an attempt of course is futile. But it is conceivable that as larger and larger numbers of people achieved freedom in the modern world a liberal education might have done in our day what the Greeks sought to do in theirs--lay the foundations of freedom in a well-considered basis of philosophy. In that event the whole of modern education might have been vitalized by a cultural tradition which could take into account the conditions under which modern men live and work without degenerating into narrow utilitarianism and mere mechanical efficiency. What chiefly survived from the Renaissance--at least in Protestant countries--is the traditional education, in which the ancient classics are taught as tedious drill in language with the aim of improving the student’s literary style, also of disciplining his soul by compelling him to do something disagreeable, and finally so that he may be able to repeat a few Latin or Greek phrases, remember the names of a few ancient writers and perhaps if he has been very diligent, retain a sufficient number of vague memory traces to enjoy a book like Professor Erskine’s “Private Life of Helen of Troy.”