February 2022 10? Thursday
In the winter vacation, I read Stefan Zweig's biography Montaigne. Michel de Montaigne (1533- 1592) is a French thinker and essayist. When he was young, he was deeply influenced by humanism. At the age of 38, he returned to Montaigne Castle and lived in seclusion for ten years, reading, thinking and writing. In that narrow, irrational and violent era, he calmly examined and examined human nature.
This book is the last biography of Stefan Zweig, and it is also one of the works he is still working on in the last days of his life. The war, violence and arbitrary ideology that Zweig faced when writing this book seemed to be a portrayal of the era in which Montaigne lived all his life. However, Montaigne's persistent sense of freedom and his justice and wisdom made Zweig regard it as his spiritual model, so he originally wrote the title "Thank Montaigne" for this book.
After reading this biography, I was first amazed at Montaigne's father's educational ideas and methods.
Montaigne's father completed a decisive step to let the family enter the aristocratic world from the citizen world. Because he took part in the Italian war, he got the title of "Lord Montaigne". He transformed Montaigne Castle into a noble manor.
Montaigne was born in such a noble family in the first half of16th century. From the moment he was born, his father pinned his lofty mission on him. In the middle of the16th century, a plan to educate his son was made in that distant castle-a plan he thought through. From the beginning, he invited friends with knowledge and humanistic spirit to discuss with them how to train his son into an outstanding talent with humanistic spirit and upper-class thoughts. This educational method did have surreal ideals at that time, but it was consistent with modern views in some aspects.
When he was still nursing, his father sent him to the home of a poor lumberjack in a very small village outside Montaigne Castle for original ecological upbringing. His father hoped that he would not feel like a member of the upper class or privileged class from the beginning, but hoped that he would learn to "be more oriented to those who helped me, rather than trying to cater to those who didn't care about me." Montaigne's simple and frugal life in the shabby charcoal-burning worker's hut played an excellent role in his health. Montaigne once wrote that when he was a child, he was very used to that simple food. Therefore, he always prefers to eat only the food that farmers are used to making with bread, lard and garlic, rather than candy, jam and cake.
My father took him back to Montaigne Castle three years later. A learned friend suggested that after becoming strong, you should make your mind agile. His father has firm educational goals. He said that he would not raise his son to be a dude, nor would he just be a businessman and collect money. His son should work hard and live in the crowd at the highest level-these people, because of their ideological advantages and their education and culture, can influence the fate of the times at the political meeting of the king and influence events with their own realm. Their spiritual home is no longer narrow. In the world of humanism, the key to this spiritual kingdom is Latin, so my father decided to give this magical tool to his son Montaigne as soon as possible. So a strange experiment was carried out in Montaigne Castle. My father paid a lot of money to hire a German scholar, consciously invited a person who didn't know French at all, and hired two helpers with perfect knowledge to help him. Under the most severe ban, they are only allowed to speak Latin with their children, not other languages, and there is a rule that once father, mother and servant want to tell him something, they must first let the teachers learn by themselves which Latin words and idioms to use, so the whole family in this castle will jointly carry out ideal educational practice and learn Latin for a four-year-old child. The expected result of such a move was finally achieved easily: the future French writer, when he was six years old, could not even speak a word of his mother tongue French, and then he learned to speak the purest and most perfect Latin, without books, grammar or compulsion, which was just thorns and tears. In this way, this ancient cosmopolitan language became his first language and mother tongue, so that in his life, he almost preferred reading books written in Latin to books written in his own mother tongue grammar. This method of letting my son learn Latin without much effort and books seems to be just a game, which makes the child feel no difficulty at all, which is completely contrary to the strict education implemented with sticks and hard rules at that time. It is an education that interests and shapes oneself according to one's inner hobbies.
A tutor put forward a view that if people suddenly and forcibly wake up a child from sleep in the morning, it will do harm to the child's delicate brain, so they came up with a way to avoid even the slightest heartbeat from stimulating the child's nerves: wake up Montaigne lying in his children's bed with music every day, and flute players or violinists will wait around this children's bed and gently wake up the sleeping Montaigne from the dream with the melody of music. However, such a moderate method should be followed with the strictest caution and seriousness. Montaigne once wrote, "I don't have a moment to wait."
? Positioning children's educational goals from an early age, providing an environment conducive to growth, not only paying attention to physical experience, but also paying attention to the cultivation of thinking. Language training is carried out from the perspective of core culture, so that this kind of training is completely free from any pressure, control and bad environment, and education happens quietly without knowing it. Educating children in this way, as Montaigne wrote: "He should teach me to distinguish between knowledge and my own duties by awakening my free will and my own wishes, not by coercion; My mind and wisdom should be improved very slowly in complete freedom, not tough and arrogant, and there should be no abnormal pressure. "
After reading this biography, I am really amazed at Montaigne's father's educational ideas and methods, which still have positive reference significance today after 400 years.