Here then we have two separate counts against the Renascence education:
1st.—Knowledge is not the main thing.
2nd.—True knowledge is something very different from knowing by heart.
§ 4. It is a pity Montaigne’s utterances about education are to be found in English only in the complete translation of his essays. Seeing that a good many millions of people read English, and are most of them concerned in education, one may hope that some day the sayings of the shrewd old Frenchman may be offered them in a convenient form.
§ 5. Here are some of them: “The evil comes of the foolish way in which our [instructors] set to work; and on the plan on which we are taught no wonder if neither scholars nor masters become more able, whatever they may do in becoming more learned. In truth the trouble and expense of our fathers are directed only to furnish our heads with knowledge: not a word of judgment or virtue. Cry out to our people about a passer-by, ‘There’s a learned man!’ and about another ‘There’s a good man!’ they will be all agog after the learned man, and will not look at the good man. One might fairly raise a third cry: ‘There’s a set of numskulls!’ We are ready enough to ask ‘Does he know Greek or know Latin? Does he write verse or write prose?’ But whether he has become wiser or better should be the first question, and that is always the last. We ought to find out, not who knows most but who knows best.” (I, chap. 24, Du Pédantisme, page or two beyond Odi homines.)
§ 6. The true educators, according to Montaigne, were the Spartans, who despised literature, and cared only for character and action. At Athens they thought about words, at Sparta about things. At Athens boys learnt to speak well, at Sparta to do well: at Athens to escape from sophistical arguments, and to face all attempts to deceive them; at Sparta to escape from the allurements of pleasure, and to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, even death itself. In the one system there was constant exercise of the tongue, in the other of the soul. “So it is not strange that when Antipater demanded of the Spartans fifty children as hostages they replied they would sooner give twice as many grown men, such store did they set by their country’s training.” (Du Pédantisme, ad f.)
§ 7. It is odd to find a man of the fifteen hundreds who quotes from the old authors at every turn, and yet maintains that “we lean so much on the arm of other people that we lose our own strength.” The thing a boy should learn is not what the old authors say, but “what he himself ought to do when he becomes a man.” Wisdom, not knowledge! “We may become learned from the learning of others; wise we can never be except by our own wisdom.” (Bk. j, chap. 24).
§ 8. So entirely was Montaigne detached from the thought of the Renascence that he scoffs at his own learning, and declares that true learning has for its subject, not the past or the future, but the present. “We are truly learned from knowing the present, not from knowing the past any more than the future.” And yet “we toil only to stuff the memory and leave the conscience and the understanding void. And like birds who fly abroad to forage for grain bring it home in their beak, without tasting it themselves, to feed their young, so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there out of several authors, and hold it at their tongue’s end, only to spit it out and distribute it amongst their pupils.” (Du Pédantisme.) “We are all richer than we think, but they drill us in borrowing and begging, and lead us to make more use of other people’s goods than of our own.”[41] (Bk. iij, chap. 12, De la Physionomie, beg. of 3rd paragraph).
§ 9. So far Montaigne. What do we schoolmasters say to all this? If we would be quite candid I think we must allow that, after reading Montaigne’s essay, we put it down with the conviction that in the main he was right, and that he had proved the error and absurdity of a vast deal that goes on in the schoolroom. But from this first view we have had on reflection to make several drawbacks.