Looking back at a life lived, one can see things in a different perspective. Looking at over 100 lives lived will color and fill in the picture of what a life can accomplish even more. Speaking of history and particularly Plutarch and Livy, Michel de Montaigne saw how these studies could be wasted or used, “In this association with men I mean to include, and foremost, those who live only in the memory of books. He will associate, by means of histories, with those great souls of the best ages. It is a vain study, if you will; but also, if you will, it is a study of inestimable value” (121). The study of history is vain and useless if one looks at it at merely the grammar level of understanding, memorizing facts and dates without looking deeper. The study of history can be rich and fulfilling by looking into the past to learn from and judge them in order to lead the future into what is hopefully a better place. The present is meant to be refined by learning from the past. This is at least one reading for this quote. Looking at The Essays, there does not seem to be a consistent theme throughout the work, yet one that is cycled back and touched on often is Montaigne’s philosophy of education. Interwoven within the seemingly random, yet deep, insights into everyday things that Montaigne noticed about life, he does reveal much about himself and what he sees as important to living a good life and training up those around oneself to a similar standard. To put Montaigne’s thoughts on education into a more logical manner, this paper will look at his thoughts on the importance of the beginning of education, the subjects within education, and the end goal of education.
Montaigne looked at the simplest of things from a new perspective, often revealing a layer of truth that was there all along. Taking all that he did under consideration, this comment on child upbringing is intriguing: “But in truth I understand nothing about it except this, that the greatest and most important difficulty in human knowledge seems to lie in the branch of knowledge which deals with the upbringing and education of children” (117). For being a man of great learning, he saw that the best and hardest thing to do is to teach and train children. He claims here to not understand how to educate and bring up children, but he saw the importance of this task. This he saw as a noble challenge that was absolutely worth the effort and struggle.
Just as in agriculture the operations that come before the planting, as well as the planting itself, are certain and easy; but as soon as the plant comes to life, there are various methods and great difficulties in raising it; so it is with men: little industry is needed to plant them, but it is quite a different burden we assume from the moment of their birth, a burden full of care and fear—that of training them and bringing them up. (117)
He saw children as a seed or plant, something to plan, to shape, and to grow. The planting of the seed is the easy part, it is the directing of the vine that is difficult to do. As with a vine, so with a child, the challenge with raising them is knowing what direction to push and encourage them towards. How is one to know the path that a child should take? If the wrong path is chosen or the student is not gifted with learning that type of lesson, the work that is invested into them will have little effect.
Still it is difficult to force natural propensities. Whence it happens that, because we have failed to choose their road well, we often spend a lot of time and effort for nothing, training children for things in which they cannot get a foothold. At all events, in this difficulty, my advice is to guide them always to the best and most profitable things, and to pay little heed to those trivial conjectures and prognostications which we make from the actions of their childhood. Even Plato, in his Republic, seems to me to give them too much authority (117-118).
Montaigne is considering his own life here and how his natural propensities, trivial conjectures, and actions in his childhood directed his own education. He had a training in law yet “History [was] more [his] quarry, or poetry, which [he loved] with particular affection” (116). The education that he received is not the education that he references in this section. He even talks down to his own education, “I have not had regular dealings with any solid book, except Plutarch and Seneca” (116). He works to exclude himself from having anything to say, yet he gives great wisdom at the end: “my advice is to guide them always to the best and most profitable things” (118). He does not look to the sciences to train up children. The best education “is much prouder to lend its resources to conducting a war, governing a people, or gaining the friendship of a prince or a foreign nation, than to constructing a dialectical argument, pleading an appeal, or prescribing a mass of pills” (118). It is an education that is meant to lead oneself and other that is best. Even if the subject is not needed for a particular life or occupation, education that changes a person’s life, or a correct education as Montaigne would say, would never be a waste because of what it is doing for the whole life.
To start at the beginning of the education journey, it is good to consider what it is that education is aiming to produce. If Montaigne thought that education should advance culture and have the future generations thrive, how was this to happen?
My schoolmaster would make me a fine harangue in genere demonstrativo before he would persuade me that his school is worth that one. They wanted to take a short cut; and since it is a fact that learning, even when it is taken most directly, can only teach us about wisdom, integrity, and resolution, they wanted to put their children from the first in contact with deeds, and instruct them, not by hearsay, but by the test of action, forming and molding them in a living way, not only by precepts and words, but principally by examples and works; so that learning might be not merely a knowledge in their soul, but its character and habit; not an acquisition but a natural possession. In this connection, someone asked Agesilaus what he thought children should learn. ‘What they should do when they are men’”. (115)
Drawing from his own experience with his school masters, Montaigne looked to how his teachers tried to make him grow up. Instead of teaching him merely book knowledge, he was forced to have experience with his lessons. He developed his habits and his actions under the teachings of a master so that when he had to stand up for himself as an adult, he would already know how to behave and get the needed results.
Looking first to his own youth, Montaigne analyzed himself in order to better understand the mind of the youth. He was blessed with developing a love of learning early on in life, even if from an unusual source, “The first taste I had for books came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid” (131). Developing a love of learning is perhaps the greatest lesson that a teacher could pass onto a student. The teacher that Montaigne received his love of learning from was Ovid. His love of history, politics, and philosophy came from the likes of Plutarch, Plato, and Seneca. “For it seems to me that the first lessons in which we should steep his mind must be those that regulate his behavior and his sense, that will teach him to know himself and to die well and live well. Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us” (123). Education should start by looking at an art that is liberating. This points back to the beginning of the quote. For a man who cannot control his behavior and his senses is a man who is a slave unto his passions and lust. This is the type of education that Montaigne was looking to give to children: an education that would free the student to live life unchained from himself. It is an education that is meant to free a person’s mind to think for themselves. This is so that they can build upon what is already there. It is not meant to keep a person simply where they are at, but to free them to move beyond those who came before them.
What is the correct path though? How is one to find it? Montaigne does not give definitive answers on most of the questions that he raises, but he does at least point towards a path to start investigating. “A good education changes your judgment and conduct” (361). If one goes through a program of learning and comes out as the same person, Montaigne will judge that to not be a good education. Education is not merely a transference of knowledge, but a transference of life experience and principles. This is the type of education that transfers culture and prepares children to become adults. To look at the broader context of a quote that was used in the introduction, one can see the proof that Montaigne gives against the two types of education: one that is a transfer of knowledge and one that is a transfer of experience, Montaigne puts it this way:
In this association with men I mean to include, and foremost, those who live only in the memory of books. He will associate, by means of histories, with those great souls of the best ages. It is a vain study, if you will; but also, if you will, it is a study of inestimable value, and the only study, as Plato tells us, in which the Lacedaemonians had kept a stake for themselves. What profit will he not gain in this field by reading the Lives of our Plutarch? But let my guide remember the object of his task, and let him not impress on his pupil so much the date of the destruction of Carthage as the characters of Hannibal and Scipio, nor so much where Marcellus died as why his death there showed him unworthy of his duty. Let him be taught not so much the histories as 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. (121)
The use of the value that is in these books and lives is one that is open and available to all who can read, but it cannot stop at a study of dates, times, and events. Knowing all these things makes one appear smart to those who are around them asking questions. This would be a grammatical study of the subject though. The experiences of those who are in these books, to learn why they did what they did, and to draw conclusions and judgements off of them are the bones or skeleton one hangs their thoughts upon. He seems to be connecting philosophy, as the interior of our thoughts, to its broader context of the search for ideals and a historical education is the muscles and flesh that move culture and gives life. As the ideals of life are found out, they should be passed on to the next generation through education. Looking into the lives of those who come before us in order to learn can teach an individual a hundred new things, as Montaigne pointed out. To also study those who studied the original will also teach one a hundred different things that were not observed the first time. An explanation of this could be that passage of time, culture, and context gives a new insight and a different flavor to the knowledge of the past. This is what Montaigne was looking to encourage and produce. It is the point of the education: to learn from the past in order to look to the future. Montaigne gives a pithy summary of all this at the end of book one, chapter 26, “there is nothing like arousing appetite and affection; otherwise all you make out of them is asses loaded with books. By dint of whipping, they are given their pocketful of learning for safekeeping; but if learning is to do us any good, we must not merely lodge it within us, we must espouse it” (132).
So, if one does not want to make a bunch of “asses loaded with books” (132), what is Montaigne’s goal for all this education? He saw education as a tool to be used: “Learning is a dangerous sword that will hamper and hurt its master, if it is in a weak hand that does not know how to use it—so that it were better not to have learned [Cicero]” (113). Knowledge and experience can be wielded and used for the betterment of man or for the harm and even enslavement of man. Caution is required for it, and it is a pursuit that all men should undertake. Montaigne saw the need for virtues to be taught alongside of the knowledge. This is why caution is needed because he saw that knowledge could perverts man into a bunch of asses. The job that the tool is meant to help man accomplish is to prepare for one’s death. “Cicero says that to philosophize is nothing else but to prepare for death. This is because study and contemplation draw our soul out of us to some extent and keep it busy outside the body; which is a sort of apprenticeship and semblance of death” (84). While philosophy is a smaller category of education, it can be taken and understood as a search for the ideals in life. A liberating education, one that is searching to free the body from the vices that bind it, is an education that is pointing this mortal life to the end and preparing for it. It is going from the current stage that is bound by pain and sorrow, making it a slave to pain and sorrow, freeing it to go beyond, and getting it ready for what comes next. Cicero and Montaigne are both looking beyond the now in order to get to what is coming. He is not overly spiritual but rather talks of death as the end. Death is a thing that is to be met well. Almost like death itself is the judge of a life well spent.
Most philosophers have either deliberately anticipated or hastened and abetted their own death. How many low-born people do we see led to death—and not a simple death, but mingled with shame and sometimes with grievous torments—bringing to it such assurance, some through stubbornness, others through natural simplicity, that we see no change from their ordinary manner: settling their domestic affairs, commending themselves to their friends, singing, preaching, and keeping up a conversation with the people; sometimes even joking and drinking to their friends, yielding in nothing to Socrates. (70)
These unlearned men and philosophers who appear smart but are really fools, go through life not knowing that it is a thing that can only be spent. “All the time you live you steal from life; living is at life’s expense” (89). This phrase is interesting because Montaigne used the word “steal” instead of a more neutral word. “Steal” has negative connotations to it that led one to believe that he meant to use it. Is he proposing that there is an entity, life, out there that holds all of life and humans have to steal what they use from it? Is it on a personal and private level that man is taking his life from himself, like a thief stealing from his own father perhaps? No matter the case, once one is born, one is spending their lives until they die. It is not a matter of “if” but a matter of “when.” How man spends the life that he has is up to him, education is the path for him to spend it in the pursuit of the best way possible.
Montaigne saw the world in an interesting way that was colored by the men who came before him that he studied. He hoped for the generations to come after him to have an easier time of making a difference than he did. This can be seen through his valuing the importance of the education of children and the way that it should be done. While he claimed to not know much about the broader context of human knowledge, often talking down about himself, he saw the vast importance of training up children. He saw the job of the educator as more than simply the telling of facts but as the sculpting of a person into what he is to come by way of experiencing the virtues and actions that make a man. This is in order to prepare them for the end of life, being able to stand at the end and say that their lives were well lived.
Works Cited
De Montaigne, Michel Eyquem. The Essays. Great Books of the Western World. Ed. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Second Edition. Vol. 23. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; Robert P. Gwinn, 1990. Print.