27.Montaigne's Curriculum: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Montaigne's
Curriculum
Between the fall of Rome in the late fifth century and the decline of
monarchy in the eighteenth,
secular schooling in any form was hardly a ripple on the societies of
Europe. There was talk of it at
certain times and places, but it
was courtly talk, never very serious. What simple schooling we find was
modestly undertaken by religious orders which
usually had no greater ambition than
providing a stream of assistants to the ecclesiastical bureaucracy, and perhaps molding the
values of whatever future leaders proved
susceptible; the few exceptions shouldn't be looked upon as the spark
for our own
schools. School was only a tiny blip on the radar until the last half of
the eighteenth century.
If you and I are to
have a productive partnership in this book you need to clear your mind of false history, the type that clogs
the typical school chronicle written for teacher training institutes where each fact may be verifiable but
the conclusions drawn from them
are not. Turn to typical school history and you will learn about the
alleged anticipation of our own
schools by Comenius, of the reformed Latin Grammar School founded by Dean Colet at St. Paul's in London in 1510,
of the "solitaries of Port Royal," whoever those lonely men may have been; each instance
is real, the direction they lead in is false. What formal school experimentation the West provided touched only
a tiny fraction of the population,
and rarely those who became social leaders, let alone pioneers of the
future.
You can disinter
proclamations about schooling from Alfred's kingdom or Charlemagne's, but you can't find a
scrap of hard evidence that the thing was ever seriously essayed. What talk of schooling occurs is the
exclusive property of
philosophers, secret societies, and a host of cranks, quacks, and
schemers. What you never find
anywhere is any popular clamor for a place to dump children called School. Yet while schooling is conspicuous by
its absence, there's no shortage of intelligent commentary about education — a commodity not to be conflated
with the lesser term until late in
history.
Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius
II, in his tract The Education of Children (1451), prescribes the reading and study of classical authors,
geometry, and arithmetic "for
training the mind and assuring rapidity of conceptions." He
included history and geographyin his
recommended curriculum, adding that "there is nothing in the world more beautiful than enlightened
intelligence." The sixteenth century is filled with theories of education from men like Erasmus,
Rabelais, and Montaigne. French schoolman
Gabriel Compayre, in his History of Pedagogy (1885), holds all three in
the highest regard:
Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne. ..before pretending to
surpass them, even at this day, we
should rather attempt to overtake them, and to equal them in their pedagogical precepts.
Like most educated
men and women, Erasmus was his own teacher. He assigned politeness an important place in
education:
The tender mind of
the child should. ..love and learn the liberal arts. ..be taught tact in
the conduct of the social life.
..from the earliest be accustomed to good behavior based on moral principles.
Montaigne, who
actually attended school at Guienne from the age of six until he was thirteen, bequeathed an image of late
sixteenth-century schooling amazingly modern in its particulars:
Tis the true house of correction of
imprisoned youth. ..do but come when they are about their lesson and you shall hear nothing but the outcries of
boys under execution, with the
thundering noise of their Pedagogues, drunk with fury, to make up the
consort. A pretty way this to
tempt these tender and timorous souls to love their book, with a furious countenance and a rod in hand.
What Montaigne
requires of a student seeking education is the development of sound judgment: "If the judgment be not
better settled, I would rather have him spend his time at tennis."
Montaigne was preoccupied with the training of judgment. He
would have history learned so that
facts have contexts and historical judgment a bearing on contemporary affairs; he was intrigued by the
possibilities of emulation 1 , as were all the classical masters, and so informs us. He said we
need to see the difference between teaching, "where Marcellus died," which is unimportant and
teaching "why it was unworthy of his
duty that he died there," which has great significance. For
Montaigne, learning to judge well
and speak well is where education resides:
Whatever presents
itself to our eyes serves as a sufficient book. The knavery of a page, the blunder of a servant, a table
witticism. ..conversation with men is wonderfully helpful, so is a visit to foreign lands.. .to
whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them upon those of others.
And in Gargantua the
physician Rabelais set out a pedagogy quite in harmony with the experience-based curriculum of John
Locke.
When I started teaching, I was able to
transfer principles of Montaigne to my classroom without any difficulty. They proved as useful to me in 1962
as they must have been to
Montaigne in 1562, wisdom eternally sane, always cost-free. In contrast,
the bloated lists of
"aims," "motivations," and "methods" the New York
City Board of Education supplied
me with were worse than useless; many were dead wrong
One important bit of
evidence that the informal attitude toward schooling was beginning to break up in seventeenth-century New
England is found in the Massachusetts School Law of 1647, legislation attempting to establish a system of
schools by government order and
providing means to enforce that order. Talk like this had been around for
centuries, but this was a
significant enactment, coming from a theocratic Utopia on the frontier of the known universe.
Yet for all the effort of New England
Puritan leadership to make its citizenry uniform through schooling and pulpit, one of history's grand ironies
is that orderly Anglican Virginia
and the heirs of Puritan Massachusetts were the prime makers of a
revolution which successfully
overthrew the regulated uniformity of Britain. And in neither the startling Declaration of Independence,
which set out the motives for this revolution, nor in the even more startling Bill of Rights in which ordinary
people claimed their reward for
courageous service, is either the word School or the word Education even
mentioned. At
the nation's founding, nobody thought School a cause worth going to war for,
nobody thought it a right worth
claiming.
7. Emulation or the imitation of notable
models as an effective spring of learning; thus was the most ancient and effec-
tive motivation to learn- to
become like someone admirable — put to death deliberately by institutional
pedagogy.
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