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The article focuses on the Christian education and the moral training of the young. During the two centuries following the apostolic age Christian parents were faced with the dilemma of depriving their children of secular instruction or of sending them to pagan schools where they would be subjected to non-Christian influences. They chose the latter course. During the first three centuries, then, it was not in the school but in the home and in the little Christian communities spread throughout the Roman Empire that the Christian boy and girl received moral and religious training. The Christian parent was content to risk the dangers of pagan instruction for his children in the confidence that pagan teaching failed to touch the deeper levels of life in which the Christian faith had its roots. At school Christian boys received the education of other Roman boys, and were subjected to the brutal methods of corporal punishment then almost inseparable from the instruction of the young. The few references to the education of boys and girls in the earliest writings indicate how strongly Jewish tradition influenced the Christian attitude to children.