If, as Augustine affirmed, we can learn from pagans because all truth is God’s truth, perhaps we can learn even more from a moderate Catholic. I am attaching a series of quotes I culled from two of Montaigne’s Essays. While I don’t endorse everything he wrote (or did), nor even all of the ideas included herein, I do think that these merit our attention as Classical Christian educators. To wit, as you read the quotes that follow, ask yourself:
- Have we settled for content memorization instead of character formation as the goal of education?
- Are we too hard or too easy on our students re: discipline and behavior?
- Should we spend so much time on ancient languages, which, as he says, “cost the Greeks and Romans nothing”?
- Have we given athletic endeavor its proper place, especially for boys?
- Should we spend more time out observing the ways of nature and society, and less in the classroom?
- Are we as teachers more interested in impressing people with our brilliance than in penetrating the souls of our students with gospel truth?
- Do we pigeonhole students into our neat normalogical categories rather than develop their individual God-given talents?
The greatest scholars are not the wisest men.
I should be inclined to say that as plants are stifled with too much moisture, and lamps with too much oil, so too much study and matter stifles the action of the mind, which, being caught and entangled in a great variety of things, may lost the ability to break loose, and be kept bent and huddled down by its burden.
The more our soul is filled, the larger it becomes.
I hate men base in deeds but wise in words. (Pacuvius)
We are eager to inquire: “Does he know Greek or Latin? Does he write in verse or prose?” But whether he has become better or wiser, which would be the main thing, that is left out. We should have asked who is better learned, not who is more learned.
We labor only to fill our memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty. Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in their beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, sour pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.
But what is worse, their students and their little ones are not nourished and fed with their learning either; it passes from hand to hand for the sole purpose of making a show of it, talking to others and telling stories about it, like chits that have no other value and use than to be counted and thrown away. They have learned to speak among others, not with themselves (Cicero). Not talking, but steering, is needed (Seneca).
We know how to say, “Cicero says thus; such are the morals of Plato; these are the very words of Aristotle.” But what do we say ourselves? What do we judge? What do we do? A parrot could well say as much.
I know a man who, when I ask him what he knows, asks me for a book in order to point it out to me, and wouldn’t dare tell me that he has an itchy backside unless he goes immediately and studies in his lexicon what is itchy and what is a backside.
We take the opinions and the knowledge of others into our keeping, and that is all. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, should go and fetch some at his neighbor’s house, and, having found a fine big fire there, should stop there and warm himself, forgetting to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not make us bigger and stronger?
We let ourselves lean so heavily on the arms of others that we annihilate our own powers.
If our soul does not go at a a better gait, if we do not have sounder judgment for all our learning, I had just as life my student had spent his time playing tennis: at least his body would be the blither. See him come back from there, after fifteen or sixteen years put in: there is nothing so unfit for us. All the advantage you recognize is that his Latin and Greek have made him more conceited and arrogant than when he left home. He should have brought back his soul full; he brings it back only swollen; he has only inflated it instead of enlarging it.
In truth, most of the time they seem to have sunk even beneath common sense. For you see the peasant and the shoemaker go their way simply and naturally talking about what they know; while these men, through wanting to exalt themselves and swagger around with this learning that is floating on the surface of their brain, are perpetually getting confused and tangled up in their own feet. Fine words escape them, but let another man apply them. They know Galen well, but the patient not at all. They have already filled your head with laws, and still have not yet grasped the crux of the case. They know theory of all things; you find someone who will put it into practice.
Most of the time they understand neither themselves nor others, and…they have a full enough memory but an entirely hollow judgment…
Now it is not enough for our education not to spoil us; it must change us for the better.
What is the use of learning, if understanding is absent? Would God that, for the good of our justice, those bodies were as well furnished with understanding and conscience as they are with learning! We learn not for life but for the schoolroom (Seneca). Now we must not attach learning to the mind, we must incorporate it; we must not sprinkle, but dye.
Any other knowledge is harmful to a man who has not the knowledge of goodness.
For learning is not there to give light to the soul that has none, or to make a blind man see. Her business is not to furnish him with sight but to direct the sight he has, to regulate its steps, provided it has straight and capable feet and legs of its own.
Cripples are ill-suited to bodily exercises, and crippled souls to mental exercises; bastard and vulgar souls are unworthy of philosophy.
They wanted to take a shortcut; 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 precept and words, but principally by examples and works; so that learning might not be 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,” he replied. It is no wonder if such an education has produced such admirable results.
When Agesilaus invites Xenophon to send his children to be brought up in Sparta, it is not to learn rhetoric or dialectic there, but to learn, as he says, the finest science there is, namely, the science of obeying and commanding.
Examples teach us, both in that martial government and in all others like it, that the pursuit of knowledge makes men’s hearts soft and effeminate more than it makes them strong and warlike.
“Of the education of children” (Great Books 23:115ff.)
As for doing what I have discovered others doing, covering themselves with other men’s armor until they don’t even show their fingertips, and carrying out their plan, as is easy for the learned in common subjects, with ancient inventions pieced out here and there – for those who want to hide their borrowings and appropriate them, this is first of all injustice and cowardice, that, having nothing of their own worth bringing out, they try to present themselves under false colors; and second, it is stupid of them to content themselves with gaining deceitfully the ignorant approbation of the common herd, while discrediting themselves in the eyes of men of understanding, whose praise alone has any weight, and who turn up their nose at our borrowed incrustations. For my part, there is nothing I want less to do. I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.
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.
The manifestation of their inclinations is so slight and so obscure at that early age, the promises so uncertain and misleading, that it is hard to base any solid judgment on them. Look at Cimon, look at Themistocles and a thousand others, how they belied themselves. The young of bears and dogs show their natural inclination, but men, plunging headlong into certain habits, opinions, and laws, easily change or disguise themselves.
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.
I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man.
I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head; that both of these qualities should be required of him, but more particularly character and understanding than learning; and that he should go about his job in a novel way.
Our tutors never stop bawling into our ears, as though they were pouring water into a funnel; and our task is only to repeat what has been told us. I should like the tutor to correct this practice, and right from the start, according to the capacity of the mind he has in hand, to begin putting it through its paces, making it taste things, choose them, and discern them by itself; sometimes clearing the way for him, sometimes letting him clear his own way.
It is good that he should have his pupil trot before him, to judge the child’s pace and how much he must stoop to match his strength. For lack of this proportion we spoil everything; and to be able to hit it right and to go along in it evenly is one of the hardest tasks that I know; it is the achievement of a lofty and very strong soul to know how to come down to a childish gait and guide it. I walk more firmly and surely uphill than down.
If, as is our custom, the teachers undertake to regulate many minds of such different capacities and forms with the same lesson and a similar measure of guidance, it is not wonder if in a whole race of children they fine barely two or three who reap any proper fruit from their teaching.
Let him be asked for an account not merely of the words of his lesson, but of its sense and substance, and let him judge the profit he has made by the testimony not of his memory, but of his life.
Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust: let not Aristotle’s principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this variety of ideas be set before him; he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured. …For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his. Let him think that he knows, at least. He must imbibe their ways of thinking, not learn their precepts.
Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later.
Even so with pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. He education, work, and study aim only at forming this.
The gain from our study is to have become better and wiser by it.
To know by heart is not to know; it is to retain what we have given our memory to keep. What we know rightly we dispose of, without looking at the model, without turning our eyes toward our book.
Mixing with men is wonderfully useful, and visiting foreign countries…to bring back knowledge of the characters and ways of those nations, and to rub and polish our brains by contact with those of others.
It is not right to bring up a child in the lap of his parents. This natural love makes them too tender and lax, even the wisest of them. They are capable neither of chastising his faults nor of seeing him brought up roughly, as he should be, and hazardously. They could not endure his returning sweating and dusty from his exercise, drinking hot, drinking cold, or see him on a skittish horse, or up against a tough fencer, foil in hand, or with his first harquebus.
It is not enough to toughen his soul; we must also toughen his muscles.
When athletes imitate hilosophers in endurance, their strength is that of sinews rather than of heart.
And besides, the authority of the tutor, which should be sovereign over the pupil, is interrupted and hampered by the presence of the parents.
Let him shun these domineering and uncivil airs, and this childish ambition to try to seem more clever by being different and to gain reputation by finding fault and being original. As it is becoming only to great poets to indulge in poetic license, so it is tolerable only for great and illustrious souls to take unusual liberties. If Socrates and Aristippus have done something contrary to the rules of behavior and custom, let him not think that he has a right to do the same; for they have gained that privilege by great and divine merits (Cicero).
Put into his head an honest curiosity to inquire into all things; whatever is unusual around him he will see: a building, a fountain, a man, the field of an ancient battle, the place where Caesar or Charlemagne passed… He will inquire into the conduct, the resources, and the alliances of this prince and that. These are things very pleasant to learn and very useful to know.
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.
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.
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. They are all somewhat useful for the edification and service of our life, just as everything else is somewhat useful. But let us choose the one that is directly and professedly useful for it.
The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness…
If this pupil happens to be of such an odd disposition that he would rather listen to some idle story than to the account of a fine voyage or a wise conversation when he hears one; if, at the sound of the drum that calls the youthful ardor of his companions to arms, he turns aside to another that invites him to the tricks of the jugglers; if, by his own preference, he does not find it more pleasant and sweet to return dusty and victorious from a combat than from tennis or a ball with the prize for that exercise, I see no other remedy than for his tutor to strangle him early, if there are no witnesses, or apprentice him to a pastry cook in some good town, even though he were the son of a duke…
Since it is philosophy that teaches us to live, and since there is a lesson in it for childhood as well as for the other ages, why is it not imparted to children?
He still is yielding clay; now, now ere he congeal,
Tirelessly we must shape him on the potter’s wheel (Persius).
They teach us to live, when life is past. A hundred students have caught syphilis before they came to Aristotle’s lesson on temperance.
Our child is in much more of a hurry: he owes to education only the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life; the rest he owes to action. Let us use so short a time for the necessary teachings. The others are abuses: away with all those thorny subtleties of dialectics, by which our lives cannot be amended.
And how many men I have seen in my time made stupid by rash avidity for learning!
Even games and exercises will be a good part of his study: running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, handling horses and weapons. I want his outward behavior and social grace and his physical adaptability to be fashioned at the same time with his soul. It is not a soul that is being trained, not a body, but a man; these parts must not be separated.
For the rest, this education is to be carried on with severe gentleness, not as is customary. Instead of being invited to letters, children are shown in truth nothing but horror and cruelty. Away with violence and compulsion! There is nothing to my mind which so depraves and stupefies a wellborn nature. …Let him not be a pretty boy and a little lady, but a lusty and vigorous youth.
I have always disliked the discipline of our schools. They might have erred less harmfully by leaning toward indulgence. They are a real jail of captive youth. They make them slack, by punishing them for slackness before they show it. Go in at lesson time: you hear nothing but cries, both from tortured boys and from masters drunk with rage. What a way to arouse zest for their lesson in these tender and timid souls, to guide them to it with a horrible scowl and hands armed with rods! Wicked and pernicious system!
The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.
As in dress it is pettiness to seek attention by some peculiar and unusual fashion, so in language the search for novel phrases and little-known words comes from a childish and pedantic ambition.
There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are great and handsome ornaments, but we buy them too dear.
My late father…was told that the long time we put into learning languages which cost the ancient Greeks and Romans nothing was the only reason we could not attain their greatness in soul and knowledge.