Improving the understanding

 I have been wondering what it would have been like to have had a good education. Montaigne, who had an unusual one, wondered about the same thing. Here’s his lament:

In truth the care and fees of our parents aim only at furnishing our heads with knowledge: nobody talks about judgment or virtue ... We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.

 

Setting aside the troublesome sense of right and wrong for the moment, I’m wondering what he would say about improving the understanding.

I’m having a hard time imagining a better way than the course he took in retirement. He read what others had said and then tried to pin himself down — to find out what he thought.

The record of that struggle is The Essays.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 153-4.