How to Teach Children offers a vivid model for thinking freely, with a new English edition of Michel de Montaigne’s writings on education by award-winning translator Tess Lewis.
For a taste of the forthcoming volume, try the chapter on pedantry that Tess translated for the Hudson Review.
Princeton University Press (2027)
As Emerson marveled about Montaigne: “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”
Nowhere does Montaigne’s restless mind feel more vibrant than in his writings on education, where he reflects on his own unorthodox childhood (first sent by his father to live with the poor, later tutored exclusively in Latin), with frank considerations of what was best (reading) and worst (beating) about humanist pedagogy.
Montaigne’s capacious spirit encouraged students to “examine every man’s talent; a peasant, a bricklayer, a passenger: one may learn something from every one of these in their several capacities.”
According to Montaigne, teachers’ heads should be not only well-filled, but well-formed.
He insisted that a good education ought to change us — for the better.
Of Montaigne
“Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself, provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand. Here, this is not my doctrine, ’tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but my own. And if I communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that which is of use to me, may also, peradventure, be useful to another.”
— Montaigne, 1588 (Cotton translation)
“My father believed that he could not teach you anything better than how to know and employ yourself . . . The others teach wisdom; he un-teaches foolishness”
— Marie de Gournay, 1595
“Whether he originates or appropriates, Montaigne is always himself, and his essay [on education] remains the most readable and fascinating ever written on the subject.”
— Jacob Zeitlin, 1934