Montaigne picks up his points about life and education in the next essay, and it’s another where he seems a bit uncomfortable with the fact that he’s using his own example as the guide for what makes a properly educated person.

He’s forced to do this because he dislikes classical book learning education so much, but what he really wants to get at is the need to use philosophy as the core of education, not so much so young people can know what the ancient Greeks had to say about the big issues in life, but rather because getting young people a head start in behaving well is, in his view, the most important task of education.

What Montaigne says repeatedly is that educators get it backwards — they should be preparing young people to learn throughout life and instead should be giving them a template for proper living that will then allow them to take the information and knowledge they acquire throughout a lifetime, combined with their experiences, and become better people as a result.

This essay has become a place where I give an update on where the education of my own children stands. I first started opining on the subject before any of them began formal education. Now two of my kids are in college, the third begins his junior year of high school next week.

There’s a lot of reporting these days about just how badly the duty of education this generation of children has gone, some saying that this might be the first generation of American children who will be less intelligent than their parents. I don’t really but this conclusion, and I’ll use Montaignean grounds to make that argument.

The current generation of young people grew up in a technology saturated world and have been given the impossible task of adjusting to these manipulation machines from an extremely young age. If they trail previous generations in reading, writing and math, and some standardized tests indicate that they do, it simply means that we’re going to need to keep teaching this generation throughout their young adult lives.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Lifelong learning needs to be the goal now. And given that corporate America seems to have a bizarre obsession with replacing a large percentage of their workforces with silicon, it’s probably for the best that young people today aren’t directly focused into certain job types with the requisite skills attached to them. Flexibility is more in order right now than ever, because no one knows what the job market will look like five years from now.

The fact that so much of their lives has been spent getting this generation comfortable with technology and highly adaptable to it may in the end prove to be the most valuable knowledge to have at this moment. If no one is reading, then fewer people need to be writing, and if machines have taken over mathematics and coding, those skills are basically worthless as well.

If the world gets crazier in the next few years, I’m pretty comfortable with this generation figuring out a way to deal with it — that’s been what their lives have been like from the start. They also seem unusually capable of dealing with the wild ideological swings affecting our body politic, again a skill that people my generation have never acquired.

Sometimes parents want more than anything for their kids to grow up with the same interests and knowledge as them just so they can have more friends in their old age. It’s still possible to make those kinds of connections — I took a guitar class with one of my children this summer to give us both an analogue experience. But it’s another example of grown adults needing to get over their dreams and illusions — help your children excel at what they are rather than what you want them to be.

Like every parent, I have worries about my kids and how they will adjust to young adulthood. I sometimes wonder if they will ever leave the house and become independent. But, to be honest, I feel a whole lot more comfortable in them than I do the culture at large, and that’s the only yardstick that really matters … are they relatively better prepared for this crazy world and the next to come.