Montaigne: Selected Essays

Montaigne’s education in the arts and sciences has been wide but shallow, “nor is there any art whose most elementary features even I could delineate” (39). A child knows more than he does, “since [Montaigne] cannot even pretend to examine him on his first lesson” (39).

He does lay claim to some expertise: “History is more my meat, or poetry, which I love with a special affection” (40). Knowing his limits, especially when compared to the Classical writers, “I let my inventions, feeble and trivial as they are, run free just as I have created them, without plastering over and mending the defects in them that this comparison has shown me” (40).

A countess asks Montaigne to advise her on how to educate her children. Montaigne suggests she find for a tutor someone with “character and understanding more than learning” (44). Instead of teaching by rote, “the tutor should begin to put the pupil into the ring, letting him get the taste of things, choose and discriminate among them by himself: at times opening the way for him, at others letting him open it” (44).

The pupil must learn not merely the words of the lesson, but “their meaning and substance, and he should judge the profit he gets not by the testimony of his memory, but that of his life” (45), so that he can make use of the knowledge in different ways.