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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