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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 geography in 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, as were all the classical masters,7 and so informs us. He said we
need to see the difference between teaching, "where Marcellus died," which is unimportant and
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