For when Latin passed out of vernacular usage, a sharp distinction was set up in society between those who knew it and those who did not The conditions for a "marginal environment" were present. Moreover, the marginal environment was one between the family (which as such used a language other than Latin) and an extra-familial world of learning (which used Latin). The fact that the marginal environment was primarily a linguistic one only heightened the initiatory aspects of the situation, for the learning of secret meanings and means of communication is a common feature of initiatory rites. It is through ability to communcate that man achieves a sense of belonging. Moreover, because of the attitude toward the classical languages peculiar to the humanist tradition, for Renaissance boys the learning of Latin represented, like the passage through puberty rites, not only something difficult but precisely a transit from ignorance to tribal wisdom, that is, to the accumulated wisdom of mankind. This wisdom was thought of as stored behind doors linguistically controlled from the inside. "In the Greeke and Latin tong," writes Ascham, “the two onlie learned tonges, which be kept not in common taulke but in private bookes, we finde alwayes wisdoms and eloquence." In any generation the wisdom of the past, which is not only the matter communicated to neophytes in puberty rites but a major item in all formal education, may be thought of as "situated" somewhere. The only point we are making here is that Renaissance man regularly located this somewhere in linguistic terms. Nor does it seem entirely irrelevant to this dialectic that corporal punishment and the stress on Latin in school have, pretty generally, been disappearing in modern times with the emergence of co-education. First, I have not sought to maintain that Renaissance educators explicitly thought of Latin study as a puberty rite. They had no definable, abstract idea of what a puberty rite is or was—and neither, for that matter, do the primitive peoples whose puberty rites we have taken as a term of comparison. Renaissance educators, like primitive peoples and like ourselves, have no rationalized explanation for everything they do. They do certain things because they feel these things should be done, finding reasons for them afterwards if at all—and, if they are observant and honest, often being surprised at the reasons which turn up on close inspection. The basic conclusion is that when Latin, in which learning was encoded, became by the time of the Renaissance a "dead" language — a language which, however widely used, was divorced from family life—initiation into the language of learning became more than ever a rite de passage. Thus, when other Renaissance courses were being labeled "methods" and "systems," Comenius finds it natural to describe his course in Latin and other languages as a "door" — lanua Linguarum. Thus, in a Western society destined to become progressively more humane in its educational procedures, the status of Latin helped maintain the relatively violent puberty rite setting, a sense of existence on a threshold, within a marginal enviroment (associated with forced seclusion from the company of women and to a certain extent from one’s own family), in an atmosphere of continuous excitement and of that aggressive competition or aemulatio which, toned down or outlawed in modern de-latinized coeducationalism, was a key principle of most Renaissance education.