How to educate your children
Montaigne's Selected Essays: On educating children, and That it is madness to judge the true and the false
We’re already into Week 3 of our Summer of Montaigne, with the read-along of his Selected Essays. The schedule can be found here:
July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness
July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die
Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities
Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence
Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life
Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience
Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch
Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers · Book III-2 On Repenting
Sept 15: Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse · Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches
Sept 22: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience
Sept 29: Live Zoom Q&A Finale
All of these read-along posts are free. I will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work here on Substack, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:
On Educating Children
Around this time last year, my daughter (who had just turned four), became naturally obsessed with reading. A few months prior, my wife took it upon herself to begin teaching Eden how to read, following a simple phonics-based system, mostly because she showed signs of wanting to read. She saw us do it all the time and we would read to her from the moment she was born, so she naturally assumed that reading on your own must be worthwhile.
She began by mimicking us, pretending to read books, and by the time she learned how to sound out words, she wanted to read everything. Traffic signs, milk cartons, simple books, harder books. If she got bored or frustrated either at home or at pre-school, she would grab a book, cozy up on a couch, and begin reading. It was an innate love of learning that we simply gave aid to.
This past week, we read Montaigne’s On Educating Children, which besides being one of my favorite of his essays, mirrors exactly what I’ve witnessed as a new parent. Writing to his friend Madame Diane de Foix, Montaigne goes into detail both about his views regarding how children ought to be educated, as well as giving us a peek into his own childhood.
“Teachers” he begins one of his many complaints, “are for ever bawling into our ears as though pouring knowledge down through a gunnel: our task is merely to repeat what we have been told.” In this part of the essay, he critiques what will eventually come to be known as the bucket theory of the mind, and he lays the groundwork for some of the more radical pedagogical systems that would come centuries later.
The philosopher of science and epistemology (theory of knowledge) Karl Popper, who coined the term bucket theory of the mind, noted that words are always interpreted, and not transferred from one person to another. To understand what is being said or taught to you is to make guesses in a creative, problem-solving way. Montaigne noticed this same dilemma:
“…as soon as the mind in his charge allows it, he should make it show its fettle by appreciating and selecting things – and by distinguishing between them; the tutor should sometimes prepare the way for the boy, sometimes let him do it all on his own. I do not want the tutor to be the only one to choose topics or to do all the talking: when the boy’s turn comes let the tutor listen to his pupil talking.”
Erudition, for Montaigne, is showing that you have grasped the ideas by showing it in different parts of your life—not merely repeating from memory. In this way, he cautions against teaching a child things by way of authority. You shouldn’t set out to only teach the ways of Aristotle, or the lessons of the Stoics. Let children be exposed to all of it and make up their own minds.
“Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram.”
What we should all be seeking in the quest for knowledge, our “profit” he calls it, is “to become better and wiser.”
He advocates for a physical fitness regime to toughen the body, not just the soul. He recommends traveling to foreign countries to have the child exposed to different languages and cultures—but not the way the aristocracy would do it. For Montaigne, real travel involved meeting and intermingling with the locals, not simply going to museums and bringing back facts, but having your character expanded from the experience. He even warns against being too bookish.
Mostly, Montaigne wants us to raise children who are smart and strong enough to admit when they are wrong. To learn to embody virtue, temperance, and good judgement. Only then should we be worried about the normal subjects taught in school: in his time this was the study of Logic, Physics, Geometry, and Rhetoric.
For Montaigne, teaching a child how to live (and how to die) is to teach them Philosophy. Again, in an almost prophetic piece of writing, he anticipates how out-of-touch and analytical philosophy can become when it is trapped inside the ivory tower.
“Oddly, things have now reached such a state that even among men of intelligence philosophy means something fantastical and vain, without value or usefulness, both in opinion and practice.”
Philosophers, or at least those teaching and studying the field, come across as arrogant and gloomy, and totally inaccessible both to the masses and to children. He sees this as a grave mistake and misunderstanding about what philosophy ought to be. Quoting Herakleon of Megara who responds to someone who, upon seeing him and his friends laughing, assumes they must not be having an intellectual conversation, he writes:
“Furrowed brows are for grammarians…philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad.”
Montaigne sees it as part of the downfall of society that philosophy was no longer being taught to children. Keep in mind he was writing in the 16th century. Imagine what he would think of today’s education.
“Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?”
When Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, he didn’t bother with teaching logic or math, instead he first focused on teaching young Alexander about “valour, prowess, greatness of soul and temperance, as well as that self-assurance which fears nothing.”
I mentioned that Montaigne anticipated a radical form of pedagogy earlier. If you didn’t click into the link, I was referring to the Taking Children Seriously movement, which at its core advocates against all forms of coercion with children. Montaigne would agree, writing that education should be conducted with a “severe gentleness.” He saw the cruelty of teachers in classrooms in his time and was horrified. True learning, he wrote, comes from an innate search for knowledge that is lodged inside each and every child. But learning “must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.”
The Limits of Skepticism
Montaigne was an avid reader and admirer of the Pyrrhonians who followed Pyrrhonism, a school of philosophical skepticism originating in Ancient Greece. They rejected dogma and advocated for the suspension of judgment (epoché) of all beliefs. They reasoned that this approach to life leads to ataraxia, or a state of undisturbedness and tranquility.
We usually take skepticism to mean we doubt everything and prize empiricism—whatever we can observe. Think Richard Dawkins and the New Atheist movement in the early 2000s. In Montaigne’s second essay we read, That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities, he surprised me with his condemnation of those who are too quick to throw out any claims which might seem fantastical.
“…if I heard tell of ghosts walking or of prophecies, enchantments, sorcery, or some other tale which I could not get my teeth into – I used to feel sorry for the wretched folk who were taken in by such madness. Now I find that I was at least as much to be pitied as they were.”
Montaigne realized that at its core, being skeptical of everything, even if it seems to contradict what we know about the ways of the world, is a form of arrogance. Be moderate in everything, including moderation. Don’t believe too rashly but also try not to disbelieve too easily.
Some really nice insights.
He really was a thinker ahead of his time. His comments seem to have an especially clear constructivist perspective, which I find fascinating for that time.