Essaying and reflective practice in education: the legacy of Michel de Montaigne created by David Halpin

Although the French Renaissance sceptic Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) is a much-admired thinker among many literary historians and some philosophical ones, his oeuvre hardly features in critical surveys of ideas in education. This is strange given that Montaigne offers modern educators an exemplary form of communicative discourse which anticipates contemporary education theory’s emphasis on the importance of reflective practice and learning from experience. While each of these themes is capable of being rendered as repetitious slogans, sound-bites even, Montaigne, through his emphasis on free thinking and self-study, helps to rescue them from such a fate, identifying a dialectical method called ‘essaying’ which has genuine purchase on practice and its improvement.