THE HUMANIST CURRICULUM

Thomas Hobbes was born in Wiltshire on 5 April 1588 and received his early education at a series of local schools. According to John Aubrey, his first biographer, he began by attending the church school in his native village of Westport at the age of four, where he learned to read, write and ‘number four figures’. He completed this ‘petty’ training by the time he was eight after which he was sent to an establishment run by the minister in Malmesbury, the adjoining town. From there he shortly moved back to a private school in Westport where the master, Aubrey tells us, was a gifted young teacher called Robert Larimer, ‘newly come from the University’. Hobbes remained under Latimer's tutelage until the age of fourteen, working his way through the six years of study normally required for the completion of the Elizabethan grammar school curriculum. By that time, Aubrey adds, Hobbes had ‘so well profited in his learning’ that he was judged to be ready for the university, and duly ‘went away a good schoole-scholar to Magdalen-hall, in Oxford’ at the beginning of 1603, a few months short of his fifteenth birthday.

By the time Hobbes embarked on his secondary schooling in the mid-1590s, there had come to be widespread agreement among the pedagogical theorists of Tudor England about the proper aims of a grammar school education and the best means of attaining them.