Education Quote by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne’s line lands like a polite insult with a knife edge: the problem isn’t ignorance, it’s secondhand cleverness. He’s not romanticizing “the simple folk” so much as skewering the educated classes who mistake borrowed logic for wisdom. “Reason incorrectly” is the tell. He assumes reason is powerful but fragile; once it becomes a social performance, it turns into a tool for self-justification, status defense, and tidy explanations that outrun reality.

The intent is defensive and surgical. Montaigne, writing in the 16th century amid the Wars of Religion, watched elites marshal elaborate arguments to sanctify brutality. In that climate, education didn’t reliably produce clearer thought; it produced better rationalizations. The peasant becomes a foil: less trained in rhetorical gymnastics, less tempted to build grand theories, more likely to stay tethered to lived experience. It’s skepticism as moral hygiene.

The subtext also exposes Montaigne’s signature move: distrust systems, trust observation. His Essays repeatedly puncture the confidence of scholars and theologians who treat certainty as a virtue. This quip compresses that project into a social preference. He’d rather talk with someone unarmed by fashionable arguments than with someone eager to win.

Still, there’s an aristocratic wink here. Montaigne can “prefer” peasants precisely because he has the leisure to choose them, turning humility into a kind of superiority. The line works because it flatters doubt while indicting the educated ego, reminding us that bad reasoning is often just intelligence put in costume.