These Italian humanist views were echoed by northern Christian humanists such as Desiderus Erasmus who wrote in his book On the Art of Learning that students should study the classics because "the whole of attainable knowledge lies therein." Each of these Renaissance humanists affirmed the key role of the classics in attaining knowledge. Despite this emphasis on the pagan classics, a Renaissance education was designed to help students acquire knowledge so that they could attain salvation. Reflecting the northern Christian humanist perspective, German school ordinances from this period instructed that a child should learn the liberal arts but tempered with the fear of God and learning virtue and discipline which will be useful in life, as well as for attaining salvation. Quite clearly, the early Renaissance humanist fascination with the classics was reflected in the educational values and goals of that time.
As the Renaissance progressed, humanist educators challenged the superficial focus on learning classical languages, rhetoric, and logic and opined that education should devote itself to enlightening men's minds and preparing them for life. Nearly 70 years after Erasmus wrote about the importance of studying the classics and the Latin language, Erasmus" ideas were challenged by Michel de Montaigne, a French essayist and politician. In Montaigne's essay "Of Presumption," he criticized the educational system because it focused on becoming learned, rather than becoming "good and wise." Instead, he believed that schools should use those texts which had the "soundest and truest values" rather than those in the best Greek and Latin. This harsh condemnation of the existing Renaissance educational system was repeated in the first half of the seventeenth century. An English schoolmaster named John Brisley and a Bohemian educational reformer named John Amos Comenius both despaired that the students at the lower levels of education could only write Latin and had little understanding of the meaning of the texts or practical uses of learning.
