Eric Knickerbocker
26 March 2007
Maria Montessori was a leading figure in education during the early 1900s, though at least in America, her name is known mainly to more affluent and well-educated persons. [1] That is ironic, as at one point she achieved international acclaim and some of those who studied her methods include the prominent psychologists Anna Freud, Jean Piaget, Alfred Adler, and Erik Erikson. Her university education began first in physics, math, and science, then progressed into medicine, and later involved advanced degrees in psychology and philosophy before culminating in a chair of anthropology at the University of Rome. Her techniques in teaching children initially at the preschool age and eventually up into elementary and middle school were in many ways revolutionary for their time and still are highly relevant today following the more Rousseauean psychological tradition.
Montessori carefully monitored the learning behavior and play patterns of children without interference before developing a set of experimental curricula that turned into astonishing successes. Based on these successes, she proposed a formal model of education that suggested children develop best when they unfold at their own internal rates with a minimal of adult guidance, a bit like flowers watered once a day and placed for a few hours in the sun. It will prove of interest to look at her biography and her contributions in some depth before extending some of her theoretical principles into the pedagogical world of higher education. Even those areas that do not translate directly—one can hardly picture college-level students playing with blocks, buttoning play buttons, or tracing sandpaper alphabets with their fingers—will still be evocative of her underlying values and philosophy and accordingly will be treated in some depth.
Montessori was born in Italy in 1870 to a well-educated but largely undistinguished middleclass Roman Catholic family; a few years after her birth, her parents moved to Rome taking the little girl with them. As a teenager, Montessori was interested in engineering, but by her high school graduation, she had her mind set on a medical degree, a degree women were not allowed to pursue at the University of Rome. In 1890 she instead began the formal study of physics, mathematics, and the sciences, though her impeccable grades eventually opened the doors for her to the impossible and in 1896 at the age of 26 she was the first female physician to graduate from Italy (Ballero; Craig 65). The following year, she had established a private practice and joined the staff at the university (Ballaro). In 1901, the university appointed her director of the newly established orthophrenic school with which it was affiliated; before Montessori took charge, Tim Seldin writes that the school was essentially an asylum for developmentally disabled children “most of whom were probably retarded or artistic” (9). While director of the school, her work paired her with Dr. Montesano, a fellow physician with whom she had a liaison resulting in the birth of their son. According to Crain, Montesano’s parents apparently objected to the prospect of their son marrying Montessori (the reason why was not explained), so she sent her son away to a wet nurse to avoid the early termination of her career by scandal, though she visited her son faithfully and he took over her business affairs after her death (65).
Very little was made of Montessori’s brief relationship with Montesano, and her reforms in the orthophrenic school soon brought her acclaim. Faced with the challenge of directing such an endeavor, she sifted through the available research about mentally handicapped children and unearthed two nearly forgotten French physicians from the previous two centuries, namely Jean Itard and Edouard Séguin. Itard had done research involving a feral child nicknamed “the Wild Boy of Aveyron” who spent the first decade of his life alone. This “natural savage” appeared to be almost unteachable in many respects, prompting Itard to posit discrete periods of human development. In spite of his contributions, his work did not fully trace out the various stages of learning and Montessori turned to Séguin, whose work had been much more thoroughly developed (Seldin 9). In particular, he had developed a “set of didactic apparatus” that were designed to engage the motor-sensory sides of the developmentally disabled including “dressing-frames for the development of co-ordinated movement of the fingers, solid geometric insets consisting of a series of cylinders of varying proportions; a series of blocks, color boxes, plane geometric insets, cylindrical sound boxes, and alphabet boxes” (Hardy 296). In other words, he had them buttoning buttons, threading threads, building blocks, tying strings and a number of other related tasks (Crain 65). According to Mattie Crumpton Hardy, except for a few minor modifications involving features such as color and texture, Montessori adopted this set of instruments wholesale from Séguin along with two other devices (a graduated series of blocks and geometric inserts) from Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel, the German educator who introduced the world to both the word “kindergarten” and its correspondent reality (299).
Moving beyond these lessons from her progenitors, Montessori was astute in her observation of these children, carefully documenting their behaviors, noting what appealed to them and what methods worked and what techniques fell short. The results appeared nothing short of miraculous: within a short time, many of these children were passing standard sixth grade tests, reading and writing at the same age levels as their peers. Montessori’s response was to believe that if developmentally disabled children could catch up to normal school children in the public schools, it was obvious traditional education needed reformation, but the Italian Ministry of Education did not agree and denied her access (Seldin 8). She left the school in 1901 to resume studies in psychology and philosophy at the University of Rome and in 1904 became a professor of anthropology. In 1907, the university was astounded when she gave up both her private medical practice and her faculty chair to pursue a new mission in life: it seems that in spite of the negative reception from the Italian Ministry of Education, she had never gotten the idea of reforming public elementary education out of her head (Hall 124; Ballaro).
Montessori’s big break came later that year in 1907 when she had the opportunity to found Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House), a school with fifty pupils in a tenement in the slums of San Lorenzo, Rome. These children, “the sons and daughters of unemployed laborers, beggars, prostitutes, and criminals,” (Craig 65) were all very poor, and displayed aggressive, violent, and impatient behavior (Seldin 9). They were in class from “dawn to dusk,” were fed twice a day, bathed, and given medical attention (8). Drawing on her experience with handicapped children in the orthophrenic school, Montessori was delighted when in a week’s time, the children were visibly transformed, journeying from restless, bored, and apathetic to deeply engrossed in their studies. To a watching world, the miracles were being multiplied (8).
The success of Montessori’s efforts attracted worldwide recognition. From 1910 to 1920, numerous books began cropping up that tended to either glowingly praise or sternly denounce her work (Hall 126). By 1911, her methods had been integrated in Switzerland; in 1912, popular author Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote the breathless A Montessori Mother in an effort to answer the nearly constant questions she fielded from many other parents curious about her first-hand experiences with the new methods (Hall 126); in 1913, she was invited to speak in the United States for the first time and Alexander Graham Bell and his wife established the Montessori Education Association in their home in Washington, D.C. (Ballaro); in 1914, William Heard Kilpatrick’s The Montessori System Examined appeared with a comparison of an inferior Montessori to a superior John Dewey whose work had begun earlier and exceeded hers in both scope and magnitude; in 1915, she returned to the United States to address an animated audience at New York’s Carnegie Hall; that same year at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, her “glass house” exhibit was featured in which interested persons could watch her methods in action (Ballero). In 1917, the Spanish government requested that she establish a research institute in their country (Ballero). Every two years after 1919 Montessori conducted training workshops in London, alternating with other countries in the off years (Hall 126). Some of the best-known persons to be instructed in the Montessori method include the German-born U.S. psychologist Erik Erikson, Austrian psychiatrists Alfred Adler and Anna Freud, and Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (Seldin 9). Her own country of Italy responded to these series of successes by appointing her as the inspector of schools, though her dedication to teaching independence and free thinking inevitably clashed with the totalitarianism of Mussolini’s fascism; in 1933, that position officially ended when she was forced into exile and her schools were shut down by order of the government (Ballero; Hall 127).
The peak of her fame lasted in the United States somewhere between five years (Craig 65) and possibly as many as nine or ten (Wilcott 161), though it fared better in other countries, eventually leveling off in many of them as well, particularly after the regime of fascism (Hall 127). At least two years before her initial first visit in 1913, the American press was going ballistic over her work and it seemed that anybody and everybody was talking about Montessori this and Montessori that and Montessori something else (Wilcott 147). In 1912, Montessori officially released The Montessori Method in the United States, in which her ideas on education were spelled out in plain English (and not her native Italian). Presided by John Dewey, her December 1913 appearance at Carnegie Hall—in which she lectured in Italian to “overflow crowds” (Wilcott 148)—saw at least 1,000 people turned away. Not only were the great enthusiasts Alexander Graham Bell and his wife present, but so was the president’s daughter Margaret Wilson, as was S.S. McClure, the publisher and editor of McClure’s Magazine, as well as a number of other prominent dignitaries too numerous to name; during her visit she also consulted with the Rhode Island Board of Education who had officially implemented her technique previously (Wilcott 148). By 1915, at least sixty-five Americans had traveled to Rome, including prominent educators like Jane Addams of Hull House and Howard Warren of Princeton University, to study under the doctor (Wilcott 148).
Yet not everyone in America was singing her praises. Different explanations have been offered as to why her fame was so short-lived on American shores, but Paul Wilcott’s 1968 “The Initial American Response to the Montessori Method” puts up a forcible argument that suggests in her very reception were sown the seeds of her own destruction. Initially, critics such as Kilpatrick (already mentioned above) argued that her ideas were not new: “we have in this country a body of educational theory superior to Froebel and Montessori alike” (149). Wilcott further writes that the National Educational Association dealt with claims that Montessori was “effeminizing” education; he then cites Elizabeth Roth Shaw who argued that if Montessori had her wish, the next generation would consist “of tea-tasters, piano-tuners, perfumers, dry-good experts and other sensory specialists” (149). Then too, Montessori was a hard woman to catch; many who traveled a long way to see her were turned away and there was apparently a sense with some of her schools that she “washed her hands” of them (149–150). But Wilcott believes her greatest downfall was the inordinate praise she received from all sides.
Her work championed “science, feminism, and libertarianism” and the writing on Montessori’s methods, Wilcott argues, was plagued by “gross sentimentality and moral absolutism” (151). We see a glimpse of this allegation in the preface of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s A Montessori Mother, mentioned previously: “In many ways, this ‘Montessori System’ is a new religion which we are called upon to help bring into the world, and we cannot aid in so great an undertaking without considerable spiritual as well as intellectual travail” (viii). As a scientific corpus, praises of Montessori’s work were lauded far and wide; as an overture to feminism, Montessori herself was esteemed by many devotees who had met her as being nearly perfect in thousands of ways (evidently, she did have a lot of natural charisma); as a champion of libertarianism, some critics said it went overboard into licentiousness (see Nature much more than Nurture subheading below), whereas those in the Froebelian [2] camp felt that her methods were not free enough (152–155). Of those who felt she made too much of liberty were the Jesuits and Paulists, a true irony given Montessori’s deep Catholic faith, the Catholic spirit that permeated her method, and the fact that her spirituality was a significant source of inspiration behind her attempts to better the world (154). Wilcott argues that more than anything else, however, her praises were simply oversung and overwrought to such a degree that they resulted in unrealistic expectations, promising more than any one system or person is capable of delivering, and thus people turned away in disillusion to look elsewhere. Why was she praised to such high heavens? According to Wilcott, it was because she happened along at a time in which feminism, the triumphs of science, and the abolition of Victorian mores were all dominant and intersecting forces (161).
Earlier, Jean Itard and Edouard Séguin were mentioned as men from whom Montessori drew inspiration. She talks to some length about Itard and his discoveries in chapter ten of The Montessori Method entitled “Nature In Education–Agricultural Labour: Culture Of Plants And Animals.” She writes of how the feral child—his name was apparently Victor [3]—was abandoned in the wilderness and left for dead, how he was recovered by hunters, and how his naked body had been scarred from wild beasts and other lacerations. He was taken to Paris under the custody of Itard, who adapted to the ways of his pupil rather than forcing the boy to adapt to civilized life. This meant, among other things, that rather than making the boy slow his pace to that of pedestrians, Itard would race after him through the streets of Paris: the boy had never learned what Montessori terms the “walking gait,” only the “running gait” (Montessori 153). Victor never did learn to speak and his education was excruciatingly slow. He was captivated by nature and would sit enthralled at the sight of the moon or clap his hands and yell shrilling if the sun burst out from behind a cloud: Montessori captures the sense well when she writes, “The child in his life of frightful abandonment had found one happiness; he had, so to speak, immersed himself in, and unified himself with, nature, taking delight in it—rains, snow, tempests, boundless space, had been his sources of entertainment, his companions, his love” (151).
Montessori demonstrates that detaching from nature was a transition that Victor had to go through, made easier by Itard’s patience and the small ways in which he demonstrated the benefits of civilized life. At one point, Victor even ran away; Montessori recounts the event and what she takes from it quite movingly:
I believe that there exists no document which offers so poignant and so eloquent a contrast between the life of nature and the life of society, and which so graphically shows that society is made up solely of renunciations and restraints. [...] It is true that civilised life is made by renunciation of the life of nature; it is almost the snatching of a man from the lap of earth; it is like snatching the newborn child from its mother’s breast; but it is also a new life.
In Itard’s pages we see the final triumph of the love of man over the love of nature: the savage of the Aveyron ends by feeling and preferring the affection of Itard, the caresses, the tears shed over him, to the joy of immersing himself voluptuously in the snow, and of contemplating the infinite expanse of the sky on a starry night: one day after an attempted escape into the country, he returns of his own accord, humble and repentant, to find his good soup and his warm bed.
It is true that man has created enjoyments in social life and has brought about a vigorous human love in community life. But nevertheless he still belongs to nature, and, especially when he is a child, he must needs draw from it the forces necessary to the development of the body and of the spirit. ( The Montessori Method 153–154)
As we can see from this passage, Montessori clearly believes that there is a necessary transition from the natural child to the increasingly civilized individual. What was appropriate for Montessori was to learn the ways of the child, bringing him or her along by degrees, giving up only what was most necessary to the advancing civilization and avoiding “useless sacrifices” (155). Toward this end, she advocated using agriculture and husbandry as tools, suggesting that just as humanity moved from agriculture to civilization, so too can we introduce children by degrees to society. They learn, among other things, notions of responsibility in tending living things, giving them a sense of empathy and a greater awareness of what the adults in their life provide them (160). They learn the difference between nature and industry, the former of which rewards even modest efforts, the latter of which is dead and inert: nature teaches lessons of divinity, inert objects teach lessons of society (161). They also learn patience and a sense of “confident expectation” (160). Most of all—a key tenet to Montessori which we will cover more fully—the child learns the art of observation (157) and the accompany benefit of “auto-education” (158).
In the case of Victor, the process from nature to civilization was never fully actualized: he never learned to speak or write and his intellectual growth did not go past that of “idiot,” a term Montessori used frequently that today would probably be substituted by a more politically correct one. This failure prompted Itard to theorize that there are key time frames in a child’s education that must be realized or else be lost irrevocably. Taking his lead, Montessori developed the idea of sensitive periods as a very important aspect of her theory, further refining and developing it by unobtrusively observing the behavior and learning patterns of her charges. The idea, since largely substantiated in psychological literature, is that there are key periods in which certain aspects of growth and development take place, such as the well-documented literature on the age of language acquisition: we could call such sensitive periods “windows of opportunity” that soon enough close, perhaps not always to the exclusion of letting in the light, but certainly to the detriment of letting in the fresh air of effortless acquisition. The following table illustrates some of these primary periods:
The environment, for Montessori, was only of secondary consideration, for while it can either be a benefit or a boon, in and of itself it has no force or energy. It is only the life within that really causes development, whether we are speaking of evolution in the large or the learning of a child (106). Montessori argues that it is not nourishment, breathing, or favorable conditions that cause a child to grow; rather, because a child is growing he or she eats, breathes, and benefits from a healthy environment. From this conception, she posits that the stronger a child is, the less the environment will directly affect his or her inner growth.
In particular, then, what Montessori believes it is important to establish is the “liberty” of the child. Likewise, discipline itself is achieved through liberty, for if people are silenced and muzzled, they are “annihilated, not disciplined” (87). What discipline needs to arrest is not action, but harmful action that burdens other people: discipline involves “good breeding” (88). Montessori then illustrates from Notari’s novel My Millionaire Uncle, in which a central character named Fufu is a deviant boy. Yet seeing a little girl go hungry one day, he suddenly feels compelled to drop his lunch in her lap and take off running: his first real act of kindness. For some reason, the experience evokes an emotional response within him and he breaks down, crying. Seeing Fufu thus affected, the little girl, Fufetta, runs over to him and tries to offer him comfort. The teacher, upon seeing the two, reprimands them and orders them inside, effectively crushing the beginnings of empathy within Fufu (91). Montessori argues that educational practices of her day are often guilty of just this sort of act because they are lacking in observation and thus do not discipline but annihilate. Contrarily, teachers may also have the opposite problem and fail to curb behavior that is harmful to others and to themselves, in part because they have given up the idea of finding that ideal balance and grown accordingly indifferent (93–94).
The tenet of unobtrusive observation is perhaps the centralmost key to the Montessori method. Montessori devoted great time and care to observing both children and their teachers without interfering and developed her method through trial and error and experimentation (Seldin 9; Montessori 108). Everything about the Montessori method involves the teacher accommodating herself to the needs of the pupils, and not the other way around. Observing small children, Montessori paid attention to their patterns of movement throughout the classroom and optimized the environment for the free flow of traffic by her strategic arrangement of the room; she took out the adult-sized tables and chairs and replaced them with smaller ones the children felt comfortable in. By chance, Montessori was to observe a teacher who had forgotten to lock the cabinet and was in the process of scolding the children for taking out the materials and starting to work quietly with them. Seeing this spontaneous behavior, Montessori instated open shelves at a low level where the children could easily reach their own materials and take what they wanted (Seldin 9). These ideas are not that unusual today, but in her time, they were very novel.
What Montessori wanted to encourage, then, was purposeful action in the child, not passivity. As long as the action did not interfere with the rights of others, she found that children learned quickly at their own pace and responded well to an ordered environment shaped especially for their ready learning. In fact, liberty was a key value, for it led to independence. In Chapter 10 of The Montessori Method, she states “Our servants are not our dependents, rather it is we who are dependent on them (98). The idea is simple: if I rely on you to tie my shoes, I am dependent on you. It may seem as if you are serving me, but only when I gain the independence of tying my own shoes will I ever be self-reliant. Concerning children, then, Montessori says “we habitually serve” them, but this tendency can be stifling to their growth as individuals (99). Simply washing a child, feeding and dressing him or her is what a servant might do; and educator, by contrast, is called to go above and beyond, teaching a child by him or herself (99).
It is a form of servitude to make children dependent on external rewards; rather, we should cultivate in them the reward of the independence itself. Montessori relates the tale of observing another classroom in which one child was being punished and another honored. The honored child was wearing a large silver cross and marching around with a sense of importance while the other child was confined to a chair. When the first child’s cross fell off his neck, the child in the chair picked it up. The child in charge did not care about the cross, but to the child in the chair, it was some consolation. The greater reward, obviously, was the industrious work of the first child and not the trinket that pacified the second (103).
At times punishments are necessary, but these are mainly rehabilitative and not based on justice. Essentially, Montessori suggests temporarily isolating the child who offends the others, sitting the child in a place where the activity of the others can be observed in all of its splendor. The idea is that this separation is still teaching the child through example and will help to instill in him or her the value of industry and the contributions of others (104–105).
For Montessori, everything has its place. One of the common mistakes that teachers make is in trying to say and do too much in any given lesson. In general, cutting away any superfluous words and concepts that do not directly deal with the lesson intended is her advice in Chapter IV, “How Lessons Should be Taught.” It is here in particular that we see her experimental psychology coming to the fore, for we do well to remember that Montessori was not so much an educator as a scientist whose observational methods formed the basis of her pedagogy.
One first works directly with the child, presenting a given lesson: for example, a lesson involving the chromatic colors. While teaching about colors, the teacher does not also focus on the material that forms the colored items, on their texture, shape, and size. If color is being taught, color becomes the sole focus of the lesson. The teacher then observes whether or not the pupil responds to that particular lesson: if so, he or she goes back and reinforces the ideas, at first by pointing out the colors, then by asking the pupil to say the colors, then in building on the next item of interest. If the child does not respond or answers incorrectly, the teacher does nothing—which includes not correcting the child—and simply moves on to something else, perhaps returning to that lesson on another day (110).
Using this approach, lessons are uniquely tailored to that particular child’s sensitive periods of learning. Built into this concept as well is one that all education tacitly assumes: knowledge is always constructed from prior knowledge, illustrated by anything from looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary (defined by familiar ones) to the stages of learning one undertakes in the transition from child to fully functional adult.
In his first-rate “Levi-Strauss in the Kindergarten: The Montessori Pre-Schooler as Bricoleur,” Philip A. Dennis fleshes out for us a few ways in which Montessori’s methods become building blocks for more abstract conceptions by comparing the approach of Montessori to the theories of Levi-Strauss. He first frames the question whether people have always, throughout all time, shared a similar cognitive structure or if so-called “totemic” or “primitive” societies shared a thought process that was not only different in degree, but also in kind. What, for example, explains the fact that many of these ancient cultures lacked in abstract thought but were comparatively rich in descriptive detail? At least those anthropologists writing during the time Dennis’ article was published in 1974 rejected extreme views that posited a difference in type as well as degree (3). It is upon this question that Dennis examines both Montessori and Levi-Strauss.
To capture Levi-Strauss’s arguments, Dennis draws on the analogy of the bricoleur, or handyman, versus the engineer. The latter draws abstract schematics and designs things both on paper and conceptually before they are built, whereas the bricoleur, with his ready set of tools, goes around fixing things, improvising with the tools at hand if necessary. A good many people then, whether “primitive” or not, deal with the abstract in terms of concrete metaphors whereas abstraction has much to do with scientific and rational discourse: learned behaviors that are products of the modern era (4). Levi-Strauss proposes a middle between percepts and concepts to explain primitive societies, ultimately suggesting that their ways of looking at the world are binary, such as “hunter/thief, daytime/night-time,” etc (5). Thus, the manifestations of ancient cultures are simply different in degree, but not ultimately in kind: all persons alike think in this way.
The Montessorian pupil, then, has much in common with the bricoleur: rather than abstract analysis, the tools the child has at his or her disposal are those involving the wonders of sense: sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch (6). The concrete world is the young child’s playground and by establishing a controlled environment tailored around learning, Montessori’s method literally uses building blocks to span from the concrete to the increasingly abstract. For example, in a simple exercise in which children match colored side to colored side, building a box of squares according to the pattern on the lid, they learn how units of matter can be positioned together. What they do not know at this point, but which can be introduced later after they have developed a sensory understanding of the concept is that what they have been working with is a sort of real-world metaphor for the binomial cube. Dennis explains that binomial theorem (a + b)3, when fully multiplied out to achieve the a3 + 3a2b + 3ab2 + b3 expression, can be represented physically in the cube. The bottom layer passes up the first a3 in favor of the b3, splits the 3a2b, keeping a2b for itself and donating 2a2b to the top layer, reverses the process for 3ab2, keeping 2ab2 for itself and handing over the ab2 to the top. In other words the bottom layer is 2ab2 + a2b + b3; the top layer is a3 + ab2 + 2a2b. The individual squares, then
become “operators” or “signs”, halfway between percepts and concepts. They stand for abstract ideas, and are “complete” in and of themselves. The blocks not only represent the binomial theorem, they are the binomial theorem. They are not inferior to the abstract algebraic expression, but simply a different way of saying it. (8)
Source: Dennis, Philip A. “Levi-Strauss in the Kindergarten: The Montessori Pre-Schooler as Bricoleur.” 7.
The children have first learned about color, and about shape, and about pattern, each in separate lessons. Now they have put them together to learn how to build blocks. Later—much later—they will return to the blocks to see how the binomial theorem plays out. By isolating single factors at a time—A or ~A—Montessori builds on “binary oppositions, such as nature/culture or in-group/out-group, [which] constitute, according to Levi-Strauss, a ‘least common denominator of thought’” (9).
Dennis concludes his discussion by noting that for Levi-Strauss, the philosophers in primitive societies were far and few between, suggesting to him that the bricoleur simply “stood in for” the modern engineer as its less formal predecessor, whereas for Montessori, the bricoleur naturally “leads into” the more formal systems of the engineer (parenthetical clichés my own, 12). Thus in her chapter on nature, Montessori sees the child “recapitulating,” as Dennis so well says, the transition of culture from agriculture to technology. [4] According to Dennis, for Levi-Strauss, science and technology replace the older systems; for Montessori, they are a natural extension of it (12).
Montessori’s method was based on the assumptions of science, its foundations consisting of observation and experimentation. Montessori was first and foremost a scientist, doctor, and psychologist who happened to become best known for applying these skills to the education of children. While the “sensitive periods” of learning she proposes are not going to have applicability to college-level education per se, they do suggest not only a natural progression of learning but also a very holistic approach to education that begins at birth and ideally continues throughout a lifetime. While many of her methods have become embodied by those, such as Anna Freud, Jean Piaget, Alfred Adler, and Erik Erikson, who emulated her methods and shared her bent toward experimental psychology, and while her approach toward a child-sized classroom has become standard fare, she nevertheless made tremendous contributions to the field of education and looking back at her research can help us in at least two ways.
First, looking back at the work of Montessori can give us a sort of gauge to see how much different the world of education looks today. The college classroom—particularly the composition classroom—does not look exactly as it did at its inception, much less in the days in which literature and philosophy were halves of the same whole and housed in the same department. Many of the methods and ideas proposed by Montessori already animate the ideas and methods of current college instruction, suggesting that the vision she held of the world lives on. It is almost like reading the writing of an advocate and cheerleader, giving us a sense of measurable progress and recognizing that for all the innovation, there is a traditional core of wisdom as well.
The second way looking at Montessori’s ideas can help us is by giving us a fresh perspective as seen in a different time and a different place. She reminds us of the value of liberty and independence, not only on the individual level, but also in terms of a society able to pull its own weight. Because her approach is much holistic, it has relevance from top to bottom. Because it is based on observation and experimentation, it is a call to recognize that students—even adult students—are unique and that the methods most likely to have the greatest relevance will combine real-world applicability with the more abstract realms of the academy: again, the approach is holistic, not seeing knowledge as compartmentalized, but part and parcel of a single continuous whole. Extracting from her idea that lessons ideally should focus on one thing at one time shows us a concept of learning as a series of stages in which knowledge is not only constructed in degrees, but layered layer on top of layer. This reminder is a good one, giving us a greater conscious awareness to structure our pedagogy in a way that is systematic, one thing logically leading into the next, while simultaneously being very organic and human because it is based on observation and experimentation.
Montessori has been hailed as an educator ahead of her time and contemporary advances in cognitive and behavioral science have vindicated that description. Her value is not found in any special skill or knowledge—she even said of herself that her instincts and her intuition were often wrong—but instead upon her careful observations of what worked and what did not.
Endnotes:
[1] A Montessori education has turned into something of a commodity here in the States, complete with authentic Montessori supply companies. Saralynn Ingrassia, a remedial education teacher in the New York area writes, “I’ve tutored children who attended Montessori schools. Not surprisingly, most of them do very well academically, but it’s difficult to assess whether it is because of the education they receive or if it is because they have the kind of parents who are familiar with Montessori. Then we have the financial/social class factors to consider. Most Montessori schools are rather expensive, so most of the classes are small, they have a large selection of educational materials, and the parents are affluent and well educated themselves.”
[2] Recall that Froebel was the German educator who introduced the world to kindergarten.
[3] New York remedial education teacher Saralyn Ingrassia writes in an e-mail: “I am absolutely fascinated by feral children and am familiar with the sad story of Victor of Aveyron. Sad because, after years of working with the boy and becoming a surrogate father, the doctor [Itard] became frustrated because he couldn’t teach him language, then completely abandoned him. Fortunately, Itard’s housekeeper took him into her home, but it was a cruel act that I could never understand.” If Montessori was aware of this abandonment, she gave no indication in The Montessori Method.
[4] Montessori writes:
“The child follows the natural way of development of the human race. In short, such education makes the evolution of the individual harmonise with that of humanity. Man passed from the natural to the artificial state through agriculture: when he discovered the secret of intensifying the production of the soil, he obtained the reward of civilisation.
The same path must be traversed by the child who is destined to become a civilised man.” ( The Montessori Method 161–162)
Works Cited
Ballaro, Beverly. “Maria Montessori: Background and Early Career.” (2006).
Crain, William C. “Montessori’s Educational Philosophy.” Theories of Development. Prentice-Hall: New Jersey, 2000. 64–85.
Dennis, Philip A. “Levi-Strauss in the Kindergarten: The Montessori Pre-Schooler as Bricoleur.” (1974): 3–16. 13 April 2007 http://links.jstor.org.
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. A Montessori Mother. Ramway, N.J.: Henry Holt and Company, 1912.
Hall, Clifton L. “The First Lady of Education.” (1953): 124–128. 13 April 2007 http://links.jstor.org.
Hardy, Mattie Crumpton. “The Derivation of the Montessori Didactic Apparatus.” (1917): 294–300. 13 April 2007 http://links.jstor.org.
Montessori, Maria. The Montessori Method. Anne Everett George, trans. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1912.
Seldin, Tim. “Dr. Maria Montessori: A Historical Perspective.” Tomorrow’s Child Magazine. 8.5 (2000): 8–11. 14 April 2007 http://www.montessori.org/sitefiles/sample_tc_bts_00.pdf.
Willcott, Paul. “The Initial American Reception of the Montessori Method.” (1968): 147–165. 13 April 2007 http://links.jstor.org.
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