EdSight

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born on 28 February 1533 at the Château de Montaigne in the Périgord region of Aquitaine, France, the son of Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne, a prosperous merchant who had inherited the family estate and elevated himself to the minor nobility, and Antoinette de Louppes, of Spanish-Jewish descent. His early education was arranged with exceptional care by his father, who had absorbed the humanistic values of the Renaissance during his service in the Italian campaigns of Francis I and was determined to give his son a formation that combined freedom with rigour. From birth until approximately age three, Montaigne was placed among the peasants of a nearby hamlet, to accustom him to simplicity, austerity, and closeness to the unprivileged people of the Ancien Régime. On returning to the castle, he was entrusted to a German tutor ignorant of French but thoroughly versed in Latin, and all inhabitants of the household were instructed to speak only Latin in the child's presence: the result was that Montaigne learned Latin as his first language of literacy, “without art, without books, without grammar, without rules, without whips and without tears.” His father instructed the tutor to cultivate a “moral atmosphere” that would bring his son “to love knowledge and duty by his own choice, without forcing his will.” At the age of six, Montaigne was enrolled at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, then among the best schools in France, where he completed the standard humanistic curriculum between about 1539 and 1546 — an experience he later judged largely negative, despite the quality of the institution, because the methods he encountered there exemplified precisely the pedantic, authoritarian, and memory-based teaching he would spend his life criticising. He studied law, served in the Bordeaux Parlement, became mayor of Bordeaux (1581–85), and withdrew to his tower library at the age of thirty-eight to write the Essays — the work in which his educational philosophy is most fully elaborated, principally in Chapter I.25 (“On Schoolmaster's Learning”) and Chapter I.26 (“On Educating Children”). He travelled extensively in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy between 1580 and 1581, recording his observations in a Journal de Voyage. He died on 13 September 1592 at the Château de Montaigne.

Montaigne's most fundamental educational contribution is his systematic critique of what he calls “pedantry” — the authoritarian, verbalistic, and mnemonic model of humanistic education dominant in his time, which he condemned in Chapter I.25 under the heading “On Schoolmaster's Learning.” He argues that the educational practices of his day fill the memory with the words and arguments of classical authors while leaving “the sense of right and wrong empty”: students learn to quote Plato and Cicero but are unable to speak on their own, to express what they are thinking, or to act well in the world. The goal of education, for Montaigne, is not to produce a “well-filled” but a “well-formed” mind — a mind capable of independent judgment, critical reflection, and moral action, rather than one stocked with accumulated erudition it cannot use. This distinction — between the accumulation of knowledge and the formation of the capacity to judge — is the organising principle of his educational philosophy and remains among the most influential ideas in the history of Western pedagogy.

Montaigne's conception of how education ought to proceed from books and learning is set out principally in Chapter I.26. Books — including the classics of philosophy, history, and poetry that formed the core of humanistic education — have genuine value, but only if they are used in the right way: not as repositories of authority to be passively absorbed, but as interlocutors with whom the reader engages critically, comparing what he reads with his own beliefs, questioning its value for his life, and ultimately making the ideas his own through a process of digestion and assimilation. “If it is by his own reasoning that he adopts the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, they are no longer theirs: they are his.” The aim of reading history is less to memorise facts and dates than to “judge what happened”; the aim of studying philosophy is not to master definitions but to learn how to live. This model of critical, reflexive reading — which Montaigne describes in terms that anticipate contemporary discussions of metacognition and reflexivity — produces what he calls “commerce with books”: a transformative engagement that refines the moral self rather than merely furnishing the intellect.

Montaigne grounds his account of how children learn in a theory of human nature centred on what he calls the “natural desire” to explore and understand — an emotional and cognitive energy, or curiosity, that the educator must arouse and sustain rather than extinguish. Against sad passions — fear, anxiety, and boredom — that produce slavish and cowardly minds, he proposes an educational regime built on pleasure and desire as primary motivational forces: “the value of pleasure” takes precedence over all other educational considerations. This begins with the physical curiosity of the body — games, sports, wrestling, dancing, hunting — and is cultivated through travel and exposure to the diversity of human customs and places, which Montaigne recommends from early childhood as an instrument for enlarging the pupil's perspective beyond his egocentric and ethnocentric viewpoint. The insistence that learning must be pleasurable and must engage the child's own desire — rather than proceeding by compulsion, imitation, or fear — anticipates Rousseau's child-centred pedagogy and remains among Montaigne's most modern and influential intuitions.

Montaigne explicitly counters the word-centred (logocentric) model of humanistic education with what he calls the “test of things and actions” — an active pedagogy in which students are put in contact with practical situations, ethical dilemmas, and real-world cases in order to exercise and strengthen their judgment, rather than receiving ready-made conclusions from a teacher's lecture or a classical text. The ideal pedagogical relationship is a Socratic maieutics: the tutor discusses and dialogues with the pupil not to teach a lesson but to elicit the pupil's own thinking by questioning and testing, adjusting his approach to the specific character and form of the individual child's mind. Montaigne is emphatic that bodily and physical experience is as important as intellectual: fighting, riding, wielding weapons, and camping alongside the activities of the mind. Education, on this account, teaches humans to live among humans — not to become specialists in this or that field. The pragmatist and experientialist strand of this pedagogy was recognised by John Dewey, who named Montaigne among the “educational reformers… vehemently denouncing all learning which is acquired on hearsay,” and by the twentieth-century Philosophy for Children movement, whose founders placed Montaigne among the advocates of a “reflective education starting from childhood.”

The ultimate goal of education, in Montaigne's philosophy, is moral: to transform individual behaviours “for the best,” to produce human beings who know themselves, who are free from intellectual and moral tutelages of any kind, and who embody the values that preserve the human condition — tolerance toward diversity, loyalty, sympathy against cruelty, and respect for nature. Writing amid the violent religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that shook France in the second half of the sixteenth century, Montaigne saw in the devastation of his time the failure of humanistic education to produce moral beings: an education that had made people “learned” rather than “good and wise,” that had taught them to “decline the Latin word for virtue” but not “to love virtue.” Self-knowledge — the awareness of one's own thoughts, wills, and emotions, and the growing recognition that “every man bears the whole Form of the human condition” — is the foundation on which genuine moral development rests, and it culminates in intellectual and moral autonomy: the capacity to think for oneself, free from the tutelages of masters, doctrines, and inherited prejudices.

Montaigne's influence on subsequent educational philosophy is both vast and often unacknowledged, operating through the thinkers who took up his ideas more than through direct citation. John Locke drew on Montaigne's lesson in abandoning the deductive method, respecting the nature of the child, and teaching through things and experience. Rousseau's child-centred pedagogy in Émile (1762) develops Montaigne's insight that educating means following and fostering the natural development of the pupil's faculties. Ralph Waldo Emerson found in Montaigne the model for an American scholar educated through nature, books, and active life rather than through the inherited pedantry of European culture. Dewey integrated him into the current of American progressive education. Matthew Lipmann's Philosophy for Children movement realised Montaigne's explicit wish to open childhood to philosophical practice. The unfinished business in his legacy lies in the tension between his egalitarian rhetoric — which speaks of “every human being” as a bearer of the human condition — and the pedagogical elitism of his actual programme, which was explicitly designed for the young nobleman, not for the children of the Populace. The extension of his vision of self-forming, autonomous, pleasure-driven, critically engaged education to all children — rather than to the fortunate few whose families could provide a tutor and a tower library — remains the task that his philosophy demands but that his historical moment did not allow him to undertake.

• de Montaigne, M. (1580–1588/2003). The complete essays (M. A. Screech, Trans.). Penguin Classics.