At the close of “On The Education of Children,” Montaigne reveals the most important value he took away from his lifetime of learning: the ability to take action and make something of his life. Montaigne wrote:
The risk was not that I should do wrong but do nothing. Nobody forecast that I would turn out bad, only useless. What they foretold was idleness not wickedness.
Today, education is often framed in a similar manner – with career goals and future earnings used as benchmarks of success. But to Montaigne, the purpose of education is “not for gain” or “for external advantages.” Montaigne sees education as the way we become most fully human, “to enrich and furnish himself inwardly.”
When I first started considering this essay, my children were still quite young, not yet in school. Shortly thereafter, I worked for the Chicago Public Schools for a few years, so some of my thoughts were informed by that and then the early years of navigating the public school system in a major metropolis.
But now, my two oldest sons are about to graduate high school, and while my general beliefs about education have not changed, I see how much role the culture plays in affecting how children learn and in shaping their educational expectations. I won’t go so far as to say that parents are powerless to overcome the pressures of the culture, but I do believe that nearly every preconception you bring into learning will be crushed by peer groups and whatever the culture is demanding of children in that moment.
It’s also important to point out that Montaigne’s essay focuses on what he calls “noble families.” In fact, Montaigne was skeptical of the value of education “in mean and lowborn hands.” He believed that education should help inform “conducting a war, governing a people or gaining the friendship of a prince or a foreign nation.” He had little use for the kind of education aimed toward “constructing a dialectical argument, pleading an appeal, or prescribing a mass of pills.”
But it would be a mistake to conclude that Montaigne’s essay has value only for the governing elites of a society. To the contrary, in a democracy, decisions about foreign policy, war and peace and political economy fall to all citizens who elect their representatives and hold them accountable. Meanwhile, the societal urge to use education as a means for creating professional classes continues to grow. I think it would be fair to extrapolate Montaigne into a discussion about challenging and confronting a culture of atomized experts. Or, increasingly, a culture of atomized consumers. But that is a discussion left for another time and place.
There is a more pressing issue at hand in world today—a deep distrust of expert opinion and the managerial class at a moment when we are more reliant on them than ever before. It’s not an easy issue to navigate. How do you create a critical mass of people in a culture – whether it’s a small ruling elite or a democratic mass – capable of weighing expert opinions and making crucial decisions about the direction of a nation? Montaigne believed that you cannot create this class through specialized knowledge and by stuffing heads with facts. Rather, he believed that the best means for sculpting minds capable of critical judgments is to start off with a solid block of philosophy. He wrote:
Since it is philosophy that teaches us to live, and since there is a lesson in it for childhood as well as for the other ages, why is it not imparted to children? They teach us to live, when life is past. A hundred students have caught the syphilis before they came to Aristotle’s lesson on temperance …. Philosophy has lessons for the birth of men as well as for their decrepitude.
Montaigne believes that joy is a critical element of learning and he thinks philosophy is an important part of the mix:
I do not want the boy to be made a prisoner. I do not want him to be given up to the surly humors of a choleric schoolmaster. I do not want to spoil the mind by keeping him in torture and at hard labor, as others do, fourteen or fifteen hours a day, like a porter …. It is very wrong to portray (philosophy) as inaccessible to children, with a surly, frowning, and terrifying face. Who has masked her with this false face, pale and hideous? There is nothing more gay, more lusty, more sprightly, and I might almost say more frolicsome. She preaches nothing but merry-making and a good time. A sad and dejected look shows that she does not dwell there.
Except there’s one problem: philosophy as it exists in the 21st century is a mess. Sometime in the 20th century, philosophy divided between continental philosophy, which was heavily influenced by Martin Heidegger and then followed the post-modern path of thinkers like Michel Foucault; and analytic philosophy, which is focused on the clarity of prose, rigor of arguments, use of formal logic and math, and the natural sciences.
Analytic philosophy has become so specialized and expert oriented that it has become useless to non philosophers. So, not judging its worth on those terms at all, it is no longer a tool that Montaigne conceived of, as something that a polity could use to approach issues of expertise and make informed decisions. Adherent would say that’s exactly what these philosophies are good for, while admitting that you’d probably need a PhD to reach that destination.
Continental philosophy, on the other hand, is merely an umbrella term for everything else. And in the U.S., most of its adherents aren’t in philosophy departments, they are scattered into various theory driven academies on literature, sociology, gender and racial studies, fine arts and political theory. Where do culture moving terms like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion spring from? Mostly these departments and intellectuals with grounding in continental philosophies.
Again, making no judgment against the validity of these philosophies, these schools of thought are also poorly equipped to serve as intellectual grounding for democratic decision makers. The premise of these schools is that we need to deconstruct our default ways of thinking about institutions. They are critiques of culture that aim to influence and change it over time, but they do not include stable ways to think and evaluate facts. If anything, they have helped foster our facts-should-be-distrusted status quo.
For Montaigne, philosophy-based education does not mean focusing on “thorny matters of dialectics.” While he had a particular target in mind for that critique, I think you could apply it more broadly to all of the major contemporary schools of philosophy being taught today. What Montaigne has in mind is something more practical, and it has more in common with what we now call critical thinking. And, being an adherent of Pyrrhonism, Montaigne’s form of critical thinking gives great weight to doubt.
Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle’s principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicurians. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. As Dante wrote ‘Only fools have made up our minds and are certain: For doubting pleases me as much as knowing.’
Physical education is crucial to the full mind and body approach of Montaigne, and he sees a link between philosophy and physical health as well:
The soul in which philosophy dwells should by its health make even the body healthy. It should make its tranquility and gladness shine out from within; should form in its own mold the outward demeanor, and consequently arm it with graceful pride, an active and joyous bearing, and a contented good-natured countenance. The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness; her state is like that of things above the moon, ever serene.
He continues with a quote from Seneca: “We are not under a king; let each one claim his own freedom.” Montaigne then defines this freedom this way:
Let him know that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts. And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got them, but let him know how to make them his own. Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later … The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.
What Montaigne is aiming for is the creation of citizen-jurors, educated people capable of judging and integrating what we now call information and making sense of it.
Let him be taught not so much the histories as the how to judge them. That, in my opinion, is of all matters the one to which we apply our minds in the most varying degree. I have read in Livy a hundred things that another man has not read in him. Plutarch has read in him a hundred besides the ones I could read, and perhaps besides what the author had put in. For some it is a purely grammatical study; for others, the skeleton of philosophy, in which the most abstruse parts of our nature are penetrated.
Montaigne also believed strongly that children need to be educated about the world, and he began this line of thought where he often does, with Socrates:
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not “Athens,” but “The world.” He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.
He then ties this back to his thoughts about divination and beliefs in other superstitions. Knowing about other cultures lets children see that what happens in their backyard is relatively unimportant:
When the vines freeze in my village, my priest infers that the wrath of God is upon the human race, and judges that the cannibals already have the pip. Seeing our civil wars, who does not cry out that this mechanism is being turned topsy-turvy and that the judgment day has us by the throat, without reflecting that many worse things have happened, and that ten thousand parts of the world, to our one, are meanwhile having a gay time?
He then makes this beautiful connection between an appreciation for nature and art, and seeing the world from a global perspective:
Whoever considers as in a painting the great picture of our mother Nature in her full majesty; whoever reads such universal and constant variety in her face; whoever finds himself there, and not merely himself, but a whole kingdom, as a dot made with a very fine brush; that man alone estimates things according to their true proportions.
For Montaigne, starting with a foundation in philosophy is not about pushing books in front of children and making them memorize facts for a test, it’s about building a worldview so that they will be better able to emotionally regulate themselves and put personal challenges into perspective.
This is an increasingly difficult thing to do. One could retreat into ancient philosophies for this grounding, and the contemporary revival of stoicism is evidence of this, but all ancient philosophies have their weak points, especially stoicism, but also Pyrrhonism. What Montaigne desires might require greater individualism among children and a desire to dig into the truth in face of a culture that would much rather peddle easy lies.
Most important of all, Montaigne believed in fostering people so unshackled from intellectual authority that they are capable of admitting their own errors:
Let him be made to understand that to confess the flaw he discovers in his own argument, though it be still unnoticed except by himself, is an act of judgment and sincerity, which are the principal qualities he seeks; That obstinacy and contention are vulgar qualities, most often seen in the meanest souls; that to change his mind and correct himself, to give up a bad position at the height of his ardor, are rare, strong, and philosophical qualities.
Leave a Reply