One of the prominent tendencies of the New Teaching is to revert to, and elaborate, that Direct Method in the teaching of Languages which was characteristic of the “New Learning” in the days of Erasmus and his fellow pioneers. This we shall see foreshadowed in Dante. It is a part of a tendency to make education “paido-centric”; to lay its emphasis on, and find its focus in, the child rather than in the instructor; to make it less of an imposition of the dominant teacher upon a submissive and receptive pupil. The New Teaching requires that “the relative activities of teacher and pupil” should be “reversed.” It recognises that pupils need to be “trained in initiative,” and “made increasingly responsible for their own education”; that the inertia of many pupils has to be met not by force or browbeating, but “by taking steps to reach indirectly the goal of stimulating their individual activity.”[184] The watchword therefore of the modern teaching is _Liberty_. And this principle of Liberty—the recognition that all education is, at bottom, self-education; and that the teacher’s business is to liberate (or make possible the liberation of) the inherent evolutionary forces latent in the pupil—finds its climax in the doctrine of Dante’s compatriot and sincere admirer, Madame Montessori. She is also, in a sense, the most modern of the Modernists; for in her method is carried, probably to its highest point, the application of psycho-physical science to education. She represents in some ways—and especially on the individualistic side—the extreme advance of the modern movement; and it is with her system that we shall institute later on a somewhat detailed comparison of the educational principles underlying Dante’s _Purgatorio_. Dante’s name is not popularly associated with those of the World’s Greatest Educators—with Aristotle and Quintilian, with Alcuin and Alfred, with Colet and Erasmus, with Pestalozzi and Froebel and Montessori. He is not claimed as the conscious originator of new didactic method. He has not left us any systematic treatise on Education. Yet many have found in him a mighty Teacher, “who being dead yet speaketh”; and to such it will bring no surprise to find great educational principles embodied in his work. We may compare and contrast his opportunities with those of his great contemporary, Robert Grosseteste, who as “First Chancellor,” if we may call him so, of the University of Oxford, may rank in a sense as a professional Teacher. Such a comparison would surely demonstrate that the permanent influence of the illustrious Bishop of Lincoln upon subsequent generations bears no comparison with that of the Florentine Poet.