McClintock's Essay


< Back to table of contents

Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction

Robbie McClintock

Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000

   
 

Introduction
¶ 3 "Preserve measure, observe the limit, and follow nature." This line from Lucian was one of fifty-seven favored phrases that Montaigne inscribed upon his study wall. [ 1 ] All offer terse advice, one man to another, on the discipline of life: resist illusion, aspire to humility, beware vanity, judge cautiously, love mankind but be not its dupe. A series of sayings from sources both familiar and obscure: they are a key to our past, a sign of its character, frailty, and future.
 
¶ 4 Fifty-seven sayings upon the wall, upon the study wall. A skeptical, ironical egoist, Montaigne was but one vital vector in the myriad of human lives. Still, he stands out as a significant person, advantaged to be sure, but accomplished as well; and both his advantages and his accomplishments were what they became because he sustained himself in a life of continuous self-education. The sobering sentences that surrounded Montaigne as he worked helped direct and sustain his formation of self; they reinforced a regimen of self-culture, speaking to him sagely as he cut his quill, shelved a book, stoked his stove, or gazed in silent introspection. Such sayings were the stuff of pedagogical philosophy, classically conceived. Such sayings set forth the ends and means of study, of meditation, inquiry, and self-formation.
 
¶ 5 Study, inward driven study, was no mere private matter for Montaigne: it is a theme that pervades his essays. For him, education was a continuous heightening of consciousness, an unceasing sharpening of judgment. When he spoke "Of Training," it was not a training administered by some external teacher, but a self-imposed bringing of one's mental powers to their full potential, as an athlete in training brings his physical powers to a peak. He admired Canius Julius, an unfortunate Roman noble wrongly condemned by Caligula. Canius spent his last moments bringing his attention to the full alert so that as the ax cut he could perceive the nature of dying. To celebrate this example, Montaigne quoted Lucan: "That mastery of mind he had in death." [ 2 ] 
 
¶ 6 Like a number of the ancients, especially the stoical Seneca, Montaigne cautioned against reliance on teachers in the course of education. Passive knowing was less important than the work of finding out, and authoritative instruction simply put the youthful mind to rest. Teaching and learning might impart knowledge, whereas study led to understanding, whereby things known were made one's own and became a part of one's judgment, and "education, labor, and study aim only at forming that." Yes, Montaigne went to school, to the College de Guienne, the best in France, at a precocious six. "At thirteen . . . I had completed my course (as they call it), and, in truth, without any benefit that I can now take into account." Like many students of today and yore, Montaigne shirked his assignments, instead reading avidly Virgil, Terence, Plautus, and other authors that struck his, not his teachers', fancy. When mature, Montaigne remembered the wisdom of one instructor, "who knew enough to connive cleverly at this escapade of mine. . . . Pretending to see nothing, he whetted my appetite, allowing me to devour these books only on the sly and holding me gently at my job on the regular studies." [ 3 ] Whether in or out of school, education for Montaigne was a process of self-set study, not of learning the lessons that others prescribed.
 
¶ 7
 		 Montaigne, moreover, was not alone in preferring a theory of study to a theory of teaching. In his taste for improving mottoes, he was of his time and of his tradition. Erasmus is a case in point. Not a few of Montaigne's fifty-seven sentences had appeared among the 4,251 that Erasmus collected and elucidated in his vast work, the Adages, a crescent compendium that he meant to "be neither unprofitable nor unpleasing" for those who would study the ways and the wisdom of the ancients. [ 4 ] 
 
¶ 8
 		 Erasmus wrote for men studying. The bulk and the best of his work he designed to provide others in all manner of situations with matter worthy of study. "He whose single aim it is, not to exhibit himself, but to do some good to others, is not concerned so much with the splendour of the matters in which he is engaged, as with their utility; and I shall not refuse any task . . . , if I see that it will conduce to the promotion of honest study." [ 5 ]
 
¶ 9
 		 With this sentiment, Erasmus turned himself into the great printer-pedagogue, the first tycoon of the text. His was a life well-timed; he had the fortune, the genius, to first put a heritage into print, magnificently facilitating the studies of others. Usually ensconced in one or another printing house, where the best libraries were then to be found, Erasmus proved himself the exemplary editor of all time. Little of his work was original, yet his spirit was strong all the same, for it turned the seeds of others into fruit: he transformed the oral medieval tradition, the newly dynamic classical literature, and even the consecrated works of the Church; he adapted all for publication, each as befit the type, revising, translating, reorganizing, elucidating, collating, emending, correcting, perfecting — in sum, preparing the texts for profitable study by a growing reading public. 
 
¶ 10
 		 To begin, de Copia was a straightforward text on how to study, not only the teacher's lessons, but more essentially the rhetorical riches to be found in the school of life. [ 6 ] Then, second, Erasmus labored unceasingly as an editor of both pagan and Christian classics. As a result, in theology he won fame, not for doctrines duly devised and taught, but for his scholarly editions of the New Testament and the Church fathers, which enlivened history by much facilitating the independent studies of others. [ 7 ] Likewise, Erasmus' reputation as a learned humanist primarily rested, not on his own work, but on his editorial industry, for he put into print writings by Ausonius, Cicero, Quintus Curtius, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Persius, Plautus, Pliny, Seneca, Suetonius, Publius Syrus, and Terence; Aesop, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Euripides, Galen, Isocrates, Josephus, Libanius, Lucian, Plutarch, Ptolemy, and Xenophon. [ 8 ] To be sure, many of these works found their way into the classroom of the school, but their prime justification was to provide more readers with more literature worthy of personal study. 
 
¶ 11
 		 In writing, too, Erasmus showed clearly his commitment to study and self-formation. His first fame came from the Enchiridion, or The Handbook of the Christian Knight, which he wrote — with rather medieval moralizing about the war of virtues and vices — to help wayward courtiers win their self-possession. This dagger, as it could be called, he fashioned for a man who "was no one's enemy so much as his own, a man of dissolute life, but in other respects an agreeable companion"; the writer hoped that on some morning after the reader would resolve to "achieve a character acceptable of Christ," and that in the pursuit of this resolve the writer's precepts might prove of use. [ 9 ] The Praise of Folly and The Education of a Christian Prince had similar aims but different methods. In the former, Erasmus used satire and negative models, not to point the way to a character acceptable to Christ, but to explode the manifold self-deceptions by which men smugly shirk the endless difficulties of mastering humble excellence. [ 10 ] In the latter, Erasmus built on the Platonic convention, putting before everyman a regimen of political self-formation through the literary artifice of describing an ideal education that might give rise to a perfect prince. [ 11 ]
 
¶ 12
 		 Erasmus shows how an educator who dedicates his labor to the man studying can find variety and vitality within his unitary purpose. The active spirit can learn something from everything. The Erasmian ideal is not that of dead pedantry; it is antithetical to learning by rote. He who would get the most from study must be willing to give unceasing effort, a protean effort that is ever adapted to the matter at hand, savoring a joke with mirth, applying a precept with wisdom, proving a truth with learning. Thus, Erasmus' labor of leisure, the Colloquies, had an extraordinary duality of intent — simultaneously to provide adults with recreational reading and schoolboys with grammatical exercises. With the art of the satirical moralist, he recorded scenes from life around him, larding them with models of good Latin, proper manners, and a living wit. He composed these dialogues to repay his open art of study, which included both discipline and delight: "you must discipline your character in order to win self-control and to find delight in things productive of utility rather than [of] pleasure. . . . For my part, I know no other art of learning than hard work, devotion, and perseverance." [ 12 ]
 
¶ 13
 		 Some may say that this passage admits a rather faint delight and so it might seem to those who torpidly find satisfaction in happenstance pleasures. But the artful hedonist. like most others, closely calculates utilities, and delight is most often found in things of use to an active spirit, not in things pleasurable to a voluptuous passivity. Men work hard at play, they persevere at sport, they are devoted to a laugh. Utility has many shapes and the effort to win self-control is exerted differently in different situations. The ways of study are as diverse as the ways of men, for both result, not from conformity to outward precept, but from the aspiration to assert inward control over the moving conjunction between one's self and one's circumstances.
 
¶ 14
 		 Study — if all follow it to its highest end — may have a single goal, or so we Platonists believe; but the path, the course of study, that leads to the goal will differ for each: thus the study appropriate for the quiet cleric will not suit the proud prince, the worldly merchant, or the sturdy artisan. Study itself is neither a single path nor the final goal; it is the motivating power by which men form and impose their character upon their role in life. Through study each man reaches out to the resources of nature, faith, and reason, to select from them as best seems to suit his situation and to develop powers by which he can turn the accidents of time, place, and station into a work of achieved intention. In this art of study, each component of culture has a part to play, and every component of art, literature, science, and thought can be seen as educational in a rigorous sense. In one of these, which well illustrates my point, Erasmus was a giant.
 
¶ 15
 		 From Theognis through Valerius Maximus right down to John Bartlett and his compendium of Familiar Quotations, there stretches a continuous tradition, a wisdom literature for the busy man of affairs. As the hurried man is a perennial type — one now encounters specimens bedecked in beard, long hair, and beads — he is not about to disappear, and hence he has his claim on culture. Therefore, we may perhaps object to the inelegance of Bartlett's work. Whereas its mechanical listing of sayings, with little concern for context or connection, reduces it to an efficient work of reference, and little more, its great predecessors encouraged haphazard reading, and thus they served both as works of reference and as regaling bedtime books, as improving recreation for any idle moment. [ 13 ] But still, in substance and function, Bartlett's Quotations is of a piece with Erasmus' Adages and Apothegms. And we, who are wont to sneer at rushed seers who mine their erudition from Bartlett's pages, might consider Erasmus' preface to his Apothegms, for there he offered the pedagogical justification for all such works.
 
¶ 16
 		 Erasmus dedicated the Apothegms to the son of a friendly duke with the hope that the work would prove useful in the education of the duke-to-be. For the learned, Erasmus avowed, the moral writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero were the most instructive, but these repaid only careful, extended study, the kind of study for which busy men had neither the time nor the taste. Was all then lost? Must power be the province of the boor? He thought not. The ancients had another tradition of moral learning, the apothegm, "which in a few words does rather by a color signify than plainly express a sense . . . , and which the longer you do consider it in your mind, the more and more does it still delight you." [ 14 ] Such apothegms were the studies suited to buoyant spirits who would learn best with a laugh, a frown, and a pouting smirk. From these studies, from these recreations taken up with ease in unexpected pauses, active people could acquire a vital wisdom with which to manage the affairs of life. The work was an educative treatise, a book to be lived with, mulled, and internalized; Erasmus offered it to the prince and the ubiquitous adolescent, "to all children and young striplings that labor and sue to attain the knowledge of good learning and honest studies.'' [ 15 ]
 
¶ 17
 		 Whenever education functions primarily as a process of study, adages, sentences, commonplaces, apothegms serve as a staple substance in popular education, in the education of busy people of every type. Here, however, a question may be raised whether in fact this education is a popular education or whether perhaps self-set study is an education designed to perpetuate privilege and to create elites. By its means, the rich may get richer, the powerful more powerful, the cultured more cultured, while the common man gets more common yet. For instance, during the period separating Hesiod's Works and Days and Franklin's Preface to Poor Richard's Almanac, most collections of wise saws and modern instances were compiled for men in high places, in places at least as high as that of Shakespeare's justice. Pithy wisdom easily catered to the powerful. Thus, during the twelfth-century Renaissance, William of Conches compiled a book of moral extracts for the future Henry II of England. [ 16 ] Thus too, Erasmus told how proud Caesar would copy down every wise riposte he heard, and when a specially barbed insult would be directed at him, he would react, not with anger, but with delight, noting down the phrase, eagerly awaiting the moment when he could return it with barb yet further sharpened. [ 17 ]
 
¶ 18
 		 Even in its most open components, the tradition of self-culture has seemed allied to elitism. Hence, we shall have to return to the question whether self-education through personal study is intrinsically an education for the privileged, and incompatible with the democratic ethos of modern life, or whether it merely appeared to have been so because its more eminent exponents happened to have lived in times and places where none imagined that privilege would pass. This problem will be a proper concern while assessing the present-day state of study, but to dwell on it here, while considering the historic character of study, would project an anachronistic concern back into the past. 
 

 

Endnotes
Note 1 "Les sentences peintes dans la 'Librarie' de Montaigne," Montaigne. Ouevres complètes. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Editions Gallimard, 1962, pp. 1419-1427. [Back]
Note 2 Montaigne, "Of Training," in Montaigne. Selected Essays, trans. C. Cotton and W. Hazlitt. New York: The Modern Library, 1949, pp. 116-128, esp. 117. [Back]
Note 3 Montaigne, "Of the Education of Children," Ibid., pp. 14-53, esp. pp. 20-22 and 50-51. For Seneca's skepticism about the importance of teachers, see Seneca. Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere. 3 volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917, Letters XXXIII, XL, LII, LXXXVIII, CXI, and especially LXXXIV, which is a source of Montaigne's essay, "Of the Education of Children."[Back]
Note 4 The best source on the Adages is Margaret Mann Phillips. The 'Adages' of Erasmus: A Study with Translations. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1964; Erasmus' description of them is from his dedicatory epistle to Lord Mountjoy for the first edition, June, 1500, in Francis Morgan Nichols, ed. and trans., The Epistles of Erasmus from his Earliest Letters lo his Fifty-First Year. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962, Vol. I, p. 243. [Back]
Note 5 Erasmus to Bude. Brussels, October 28, 1516, in Ibid., Vol. II, p. 415. [Back]
Note 6 For a good discussion of the method of study embodied in de Copia, see R. R. Bolgar. The Classical Tradition and Its Beneficiaries. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964, pp. 273-5. The text, de Duplici Copia Verborum ad Rerum, is in Opera Omnia in Decem Tomus Distincta. Hildesheim, W. Germany: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1961, Vol. I, pp. 4-110. It was basically a work on Latin usage, designed to be used as we might use Fowler's Modern English Usage, except that it was meant to improve the user's spoken as well as his written rhetoric. It suggested that the user make and frequently study a personal commonplace book. [Back]
Note 7 For Erasmus' work on the New Testament and the Church fathers, see Preserved Smith. Erasmus: A Study of His Life, Ideals and Place in History. New York: Dover Publications, 1962, Chapters VII and VIII. [Back]
Note 8 Ibid., p. 195. [Back]
Note 9 First quotation: Erasmus to Botzhem, 1523, in Epistles, op. cit., n. 4., Vol. I, p. 337. Second: Erasmus. The Enchiridion of Erasmus, trans. Raymond Himelick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963, p. 37. [Back]
Note 10 Erasmus. The Praise of Folly, trans. John Wilson, 1668. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1958. The satirical tone of The Praise of Folly provoked criticism from those who thought it was not sufficiently improving. Erasmus' defense of the work can be found in his letter to John of Louvain, January 2, 1518, Epistles, op. cit., n. 4. Vol. III, pp. 208-210. [Back]
Note 11 Erasmus. The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester K. Born. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1968. Born's long introduction is a useful discussion of the "mirror of princes" tradition. [Back]
Note 12 Erasmus, "The Art of Learning," trans. Craig R. Thompson. The Colloquies of Erasmus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 460-1. [Back]
Note 13 John Bartlett. Familiar Quotations, 13th ed. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1955. [Back]
Note 14 Erasmus, "Preface," trans. Nicholas Udall. The Apothegms of Erasmus, 1964. Boston, Lincolnshire: Robert Roberts, 1877, p. xxii. The Apothegms was based on Plutarch, but had so many additions and expansions that it was more than a translation. [Back]
Note 15 Ibid., p. xiv. [Back]
Note 16 Lynn Thorndike. University Records and Life in the Middle Ages. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944, p. 9, n. 4. [Back]
Note 17 Erasmus, "Preface," Apothegms, op. cit. n. 14, pp. xxv-xxvi. [Back]