XXX.Maria Montessori

XXX MARIA MONTESSORI Professoressa Maria Montessori, 1870, one of the foremost modem educators, doctor of philosophy, anthropologist, psychotherapist, professor of psychiatrics at University of Rome. Was first woman medical student at University of Rome. Treated nervous diseases and insanity, and, following the steps of Itard and Seguin, experimented and worked for many years with feeble-minded children, evolving a highly efficient didactic apparatus for training the senses; idiot children passed the same examination as normal children taught by the old method for the same length of time. Has overwhelmed contemporary educators by completely revolutionizing present methods of training young children. She demands for the child complete freedom for development; against the restrictive discipline of the common school, whose idea of goodness is absolute immobility, and which, more often than not, annihilates the individuality of the child and converts him into an automaton, she has established the principle of discipline through liberty. Useful activity is her key to discipline and selfcontrol. Through self-imposed tasks children learn muscular control. The sense of touch, with its spinal nerve supply, is the base of her sense training. A retentive muscular memory of shapes, sizes, textures, etc., is developed, and causes the phenomenon of "explosion into writing" which has aroused so much discussion. (Children of four years are suddenly able to read and write without being conscious of the steps by which they have arrived; so in place of the laborious, mechanical, ineffective process of our common schools there is keen interest and tireless application in their play-tasks.) Doctor Montessori transformed the worst tenements in Rome into child gardens called "Houses of Childhood." Models of her houses of childhood have been formed all over the civilized world and her didactic apparatus is now sold and used in a number of schools. An English translation of her book, The Montessori Method, appeared in 1912 (F. A. Stokes Co.), and in response to popular demand Doctor Montessori, in 1913, opened a training class in Rome for a limited number of pupils. Her scientific training, her exhaustive study of child psychology, together with her personal experimentation and teaching of children, her sympathy for and keen understanding of the needs of the child, make Doctor Montessori a unique figure in the educational world. The selections are from The Montessori Method and from the articles of Josephine Tozier in McClure's Magazine, 1911-12.

Discipline.—The pedagogical method of observation has for its base the liberty of the child; and liberty is activity. Discipline must come through liberty. Here is a great principle which it is difficult for followers of common-school methods to understand. How shall one obtain discipline in a class of free children? Certainly in our system we have a concept of Maria Montessori 495 discipline very different from that commonly accepted. If discipline is founded upon liberty, the discipline itself must necessarily be active. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an invidual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life. Such a concept of active discipline is not easy either to comprehend or to apply.

But certainly it contains a great educational principle, very different from the old-time absolute and undiscussed coercion to immobility. A special technique is necessary to the teacher who is to lead the child along such a path of discipline, if she is to make it possible for him to continue in this way all his life, advancing indefinitely toward perfect self-mastery. Since the child now learns to move rather than to sit still, he prepares himself not for the school, but for life; for he becomes able, through habit and through practice, to perform easily and correctly the simple acts of social or community life. The discipline to which the child here habituates himself is, in its character, not limited to the school environment, but extends to society. The liberty of the child should have as its limit the collective interest; as its form, what we universally consider good breeding. We must, therefore, check in the child whatever offends or annoys others, or whatever tends toward rough or ill-bred acts. But all the rest,—every manifestation having a useful scope, whatever it be, and under whatever form it expresses itself,—must not only be permitted, but must be observed by the teacher. Here lies the essential point; from her scientific preparation, the teacher must bring not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific 496 Liberty and the Great Libertarians curiosity, and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. The teacher must• understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Such principles assuredly have a place in schools for little children who are exhibiting the first psychic manifestations of their lives. We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at the time when the child is just beginning to be active: perhaps we suffocate life itself. Humanity shows itself in all its intellectual splendour during this tender age as the sun shows itself at the dawn, and the flower in the first unfolding of the petals; and we must respect religiously, reverently, these first indications of individuality. If any educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of this life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks. It is, of course, understood that here we do not speak of useless or dangerous acts, for these must be suppressed, destroyed.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in the case of the old-time discipline. And all this because our aim is to discipline for activity, for work, for good; not for immobility, not for passivity, not for obedience. A room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom very well disciplined indeed. If we can, when we have established individual discipline, arrange the children, sending each one to his own place, in order, trying to make them understand the idea that thus placed they look well, and that it is a good thing to be thus placed in order, that it is a good and pleasing arrangement in the room, this Maria Montessori 497 ordered and tranquil adjustment of theirs—then their remaining in their places, quiet and silent, is the result of a species of lesson, not an imposition. To make them understand the idea, without calling their attention too forcibly to the practice, to have them assimilate a principle of collective order—that is the important thing.

If, after they have understood this idea, they rise, speak, change to another place, they no longer do this without knowing and without thinking, but they do it because they wish to rise, to speak, etc.; that is, from that state of repose and order, well understood, they depart in order to undertake some voluntary action; and knowing that there are actions which are prohibited, this will give them a new impulse to remember to discriminate between good and evil. The movements of the children from the state of order become always more coordinated and perfect with the passing of the days; in fact they learn to reflect upon their own acts. Now (with the idea of order understood by the children) the observation of the way in which the children pass from the first disordered movements to those which are spontaneous and ordered—this is the book of the teacher; this is the book which must inspire her actions; it is the only one in which she must read and study if she is to become a real educator.

For the child with such exercises makes, to a certain extent, a selection of his own tendencies, which were at first confused in the unconscious disorder of his movements. It is remarkable how clearly individual differences show themselves, if we proceed in this way; the child, conscious and free, reveals himself. Our idea of liberty for the child cannot be the simple concept of liberty we use in the observation of plants, insects, etc. The child, because of the peculiar characteristics of helplessness with which he is born, and because of his qualities as a social individual, is circumscribed by bonds which limit his activity. An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis 498 Liberty and the Great Libertarians must intervene to help the child to a conquest of these various obstacles. In other words, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish, in a rational manner, the social bonds which limit his activity.

Little by little, as the child grows in such an atmosphere, his spontaneous manifestations will become more and more clear, with the clearness of truth, revealing his nature. For all these reasons, the first form of educational intervention must tend to lead the child toward independence. Independence.—No one can be free unless he is independent: therefore, the first, active manifestations of the child's individual liberty must be so guided that through this activity he may arrive at independence. Little children, from the moment in which they are weaned, are making their way toward independence. What is a weaned child? In reality, it is a child that has become independent of the mother's breast. Instead of this one source of nourishment he will find various kinds of food; for him the means of existence are multiplied, and he can to some extent make a selection of his food, whereas he was first limited absolutely to one form of nourishment.

Nevertheless, he is still dependent, since he is not yet able to walk, and cannot wash and dress himself, and since he is not yet able to ask for things in a language which is clear and easily understood. He is still in this period to a great extent the slave of everyone. By the age of three, however, the child should have been able to render himself to a great extent independent and free. That we have not yet thoroughly assimilated the highest concept of the term independence, is due to the fact that the social form in which we live is still servile. In an age of civilization where servants exist, the concept of that form of life which is independence cannot take root or develop freely. Even so in the time of slavery, the concept of liberty was distorted and darkened. Our servants are not our dependents, Maria Montessori 499 rather it is we who are dependent upon them. It is not possible to accept universally as a part of our social structure such a deep human error without feeling the general effects of it in the form of moral inferiority. We often believe ourselves to be independent simply because no one commands us, and because we command others; but the nobleman who needs to call a servant to his aid is really a dependent through his own inferiority. The paralytic who cannot take off his boots because of a pathological fact, and the prince who dare not take them off because of a social fact, are in reality reduced to the same condition.

Any nation that accepts the idea of servitude and believes that it is an advantage for man to be served by man, admits servility as an instinct, and indeed we all too easily lend ourselves to obsequious service, giving to it such complimentary names as courtesy, politeness, charity. In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence. This concept will be the foundation of the dignity of the man of the future: "I do not wish to be served, because I am not an impotent." And this idea must be gained before men can feel themselves to be really free. Any pedagogical action, if it is to be efficacious in the training of little children, must tend to help the children to advance upon this road of independence. We must help them to learn to walk without assistance, to run, to go up and down stairs, to lift up fallen objects, to dress and undress themselves, to bathe themselves, to speak distinctly, and to express their own needs clearly. We must give such help as shall make it possible for children to achieve the satisfaction of their own individual aims and desires. All this is a part of education for independence.

I spent two years, with the help of my colleagues, in preparing the teachers of Rome for a special method of observation and education of feeble-minded children. Not only did I train teachers, but, what was much more important, after I had been 500 Liberty and the Great Libertarians in London and Paris for the purpose of studying in a practical way the education of deficients, I gave myself over completely to the actual teaching of the children, directing at the same time the work of other teachers in our institute. I succeeded in teaching a number of the idiots from the asylums both to read and to write so well that I was able to present them at a public school for an examination together with normal children. And they passed the examination successfully. These results seemed almost miraculous to those who saw them. To me, however, the boys from the asylums had been able to compete with the normal children only because they had been taught in a different way. They had been helped in their psychic development, and the normal children had, instead, been suffocated, held back. I found myself thinking that if, some day, the special education which had developed these idiot children in such a marvelous fashion, could be applied to the development of normal children, the "miracle" of which my friends talked would no longer be possible. The abyss between the inferior mentality of the idiot and that of the normal brain can never be bridged if the normal child has reached his full development.

While every one was admiring the progress of my idiots, I was searching for the reasons which could keep the happy healthy children of the common schools on so low a plane that they could be equaled in tests of intelligence by my unfortunate pupils!