Seeing Renaissance Latin teaching in the psychological framework of the puberty rite helps us to explain much in the later trajectory of Latin teaching. In the nineteenth century, when Latin was on its way out as the core subject of the curriculum, educators produced the theory that Latin u strengthened” or a toughened” the mind. This theory, which is still met with today, has been labeled new,26 and it was new in the sense that earlier educators had not explicitly advanced it. But the complex in which Latin was normally taught had associated the language in a special way with some sort of toughening. Were not nineteenthcentury educators, and are not the few twentieth-century educators who repeat their words today, merely giving voice to a vague feeling which has its roots in the psychological setting of the Renaissance Latin school — the feeling that the teaching of Latin, independently of the communication of the ability to read the language (the immediate aim of Renaissance Latin teaching), had somehow to do with toughening the youngster for the extra-familial world in which he would have to live? Translated, this means the feeling that a boys education was basically a puberty rite, a process preparing him for adult life by communicating to him the heritage of a past in a setting which toughened him and thus guaranteed his guarding the heritage for the future. Latin had indubitable connections with the past, and it was hard, indeed all the harder as motivation waned when real use for the language began to wane. This association of Latin with a toughening marginal environment of a puberty rite type was sufficient to keep Latin in its place as the basic discipline forming the prep school character, with its twin emphases on Latin and physical hardihood (modulated eventually into good sportsmanship).