From Stefan Zweig’s short book on the famous sixteenth-century Frenchman, a passage where Montaigne rales against schooling as the mere transmission of knowledge:
“They never cease whining into our ears,” he gripes, “as if it were being poured into a funnel, and our task is merely to parrot back everything we have been told.” Instead of allowing his own thoughts to ripen in his mind, the masters fill it with a petrified knowledge and leave it “bereft of insight and consciousness”. And he angrily contests: “What use is it to have a bellyful of meat, if one cannot digest it, if it cannot transform us, if it cannot improve us and fortify us?”
…
“As when plants suffocate for too much moisture, and lamps from too much oil, so the action of the spirit is suffocated by an overload of study and matter.” Such knowledge is a burden on the mind, not an action of the soul: “To know by heart is not to know, it is to keep what they have given you and store it in your memory.”
…
Therefore, later, the mature man will hand out a bad mark and a good lesson to those masters who only seek to inculcate rules mechanically: “our masters”, he says in his last years, should judge the aptitude of a child not by his memory but by the testimony of his life… Let the young man read and sift and verify, not just accept the authority in good faith. A rich variety of opinions must be presented to him. He will make his choice, and if he cannot, then he will remain in doubt. He who sheep-like follows another follows nothing. He discovers nothing, because he seeks nothing.
As Montaigne may have hoped, modern pedagogy has moved more toward flipped classrooms and discussion sections. After all, there is a difference between information and education. Interesting, though, is how the cheapening of readily accessible knowledge seems to have stunted educational growth. Perhaps a driven, precocious polymath may not have needed those strict guardrails of a rigid system, but inadequate groundwork and the lack of constraint also don’t seem to, well, work.
Undeniably:
Books are, I find, the best provisions a man can take with him on life’s journey.
Zweig happily points out that Montaigne, like Marcus Aurelius, was learning in public, not issuing decrees from a self-help pulpit:
It is true: Montaigne achieved little else in his life aside from posing the question: “How should I live?” But what is so magnificent, so philanthropic in his case, is that when he posed this question: “How should I live?” he did not insist on following it up with: “This is how you should live!”
…
He had never sought to counsel others on anything he did not know intimately himself. “This is not my doctrine; it is my study, and no one else’s lesson but my own.”
True self-help.