Maria Montessori

“ Usually only those wounded at heart by the difficulty of being understood by others, or discouraged by the coldness or rudeness of other people, or oppressed by disillusion, or filled with a sense of painful loneliness or need of expansion in some other way, feel in music the voice which opens the doors of the heart and causes a health-giving flood of tears or raises the spirit to a lofty sense of peace. Only they can understand how necessary a companion for humanity music is. We know, of course, to-day that music is an indispensable stimulant for soldiers rushing forth to die. ”

“ Why spoil something already perfect just for the annoyance of plunging into an analysis which has no apparent purpose? Indeed, to impose upon people who can already read the task of reducing every word to its primal sounds, would be to demand of them an effort of will so gigantic that only a professional philologist could apply himself to it with the necessary diligence, and then only because he has his own particular interests and aims involved in such work. ”

“ These are quiet hours of work in which the children use only a part of their energies, while the other part is reaching out after something else; just as a family sits quietly by the fireside in long winter evenings engaged in light manual labors requiring little intelligence, watching the flames with a sense of enjoyment, willing to pass in this way many peaceful hours, yet feeling that a certain side of their needs is not satisfied. ”

“ We succeeded in teaching history and even pedagogy by means of "reading." And, in truth, does not reading embrace everything? Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit [201] guided by the single passion for reading. Our task is to offer the child the instruments of education, to keep pure within him the springs of his intellectual growth, of his life of feeling. ”

“ When the children are seized with this passion for accurate expression of their thoughts in writing, when, spontaneously, clearness becomes the goal of their efforts, they follow the hunt for words with the keenest enthusiasm. They feel that there are never too many words to build with exactness the delicate edifice of thought. Problems of language come to them as a revelation. "How many words are there?" they ask. "How many nouns, how many verbs, how many adjectives? ”

“ Without positive replenishment in reality there never will be a spontaneous flight of the mind; this is the unsurmountable difficulty of the common schools in their attempt to "develop the imagination" and to "lead to education." The child who without any impelling force from within is artificially "borne aloft" by the teacher, who forces him into the "abstract," can at most learn only how to descend slowly like a parachute. He can never learn to "lift himself energetically to dizzy heights." ”

“ These horrible daubs so carefully collected, observed, and catalogued by modern psychologists as "documents of the infant mind" are nothing but monstrous expressions of intellectual lawlessness; they show only that the eye of their child is uneducated, the hand inert, the mind insensible alike to the beautiful and to the ugly, blind to the true as well as to the false. Like most documents collected by psychologists who study the children of our schools, they reveal not the soul but the errors of the soul ”

“ How is it possible to lead a child to perform abstractions if his mind is not sufficiently mature and he is without adequate information? These two points of support are, as it were, the feet of the psychic man who is traveling toward his highest mental activities. We shall always see the repetition of this phenomenon. Every ulterior exercise of inner development, every ulterior cognition, will lead the child to new and ever higher flights into the realm of the abstract. ”

“ GRAMMAR
NOUN LESSON
We may call persons and objects by their name (their noun) . People answer if we call them, so do animals. Inanimate objects, however, never answer, because they cannot; but if they could answer they would; for example, if I say Mary, Mary answers; if I say peas, the peas do not answer, because they cannot. You children do understand when I call an object and you bring it to me. I say for example, book, beans, peas. If I don't tell you the name of the object you don't understand what I am talking about; because every object has a different name. ”

“ During the drawing lesson, in the placid silence which comes from work, and while the children are intent on their designs, the teacher may begin her reading aloud. It sometimes happens that the substance of what she reads will be sufficient to engage the interest of the whole school. But this is not always an easy task. It is more often the musical quality of the teacher's execution which will attract the little ones with a sense for art and bring them to that motionless attention which is the evidence of eager enjoyment. ”

“ It is no wonder that reading is one of the rocks on which the rudderless ship of elementary education inevitably runs aground.
Interpreted reading: "Take off your hat and make a low bow." (A Montessori School in Italy.)
The experiments we have succeeded in conducting on the subject of reading are perhaps among the most complete we have made. We found the key to the problem when we discovered that the child passed from the mental reading of the words written on the cards directly to interpretation in action. ”

“ It follows that every single act of the teacher, however insignificant apparently, is, like the acts of the priest in the service, of the greatest importance, and should come from a consciousness thoroughly awake, and full of potentiality. Instead of giving out what she has in herself, the teacher must bring out the full possibilities of the children. ”

“ How many times a plastic pose, a kneeling posture, an ecstatic face, will move the heart of the artist to a sense of joy greater than that which any applause of a throng of people often indifferent or inattentive, can possibly give him! ”

“ The main purpose is to facilitate the child's auto-education through exercises in geometry and often through the solution of real problems. The fact of being able actually to "handle geometric figures," to arrange them in different ways, and to judge of the relations between them, commands the child's absorbed attention. The putting together of the insets, which deal with equivalent figures, reminds one of the "games of patience"—picture puzzles—which have been invented for children but which, while amusing them, have no definite educational aim. ”

“ In fact, attempts have already been made to reach the populace by concerts in the public squares and by making concert halls accessible to people of every class; but after all, do such attempts amount to more than putting the cheap editions of the classics into circulation among illiterates? Education is the prime requisite; without such education we have a people of deaf mutes forever barred from any music. The ear of the uneducated man cannot perceive the sublime sounds which music would bring within his reach. ”

“ Thus drawing comes to satisfy a need for expression, as does language; and almost every idea may seek expression in drawing. The effort to perfect such expression is very similar to that which the child makes when he is spurred on to perfect his language in order to see his thoughts translated into reality. This effort is spontaneous; and the real drawing teacher is in the inner life, which of itself develops, attains refinement, and seeks irresistibly to be born into external existence in some empirical form. ”

“ We have conceived of children according to a fantastic idea of our own, making of them a sort of human species distinct from that to which adults belong. As a matter of fact, they are our children, more purely human than we ourselves. ”

“ It is of course not the lot of all of us to attain the exalted position of greatness whether as artists or technicians. We must content ourselves with assuming an obligation: with giving all the soul and all the skill we possess. We must conceive of ourselves as transmitters of the largess of music to our children. We must deeply feel our calling as bestowers of a divine gift.
The following titles were all used successfully by us in our experiments. ”

“ If, however, from these pupils of ours a whole people could grow up, it would be sufficient to go through the streets with a good piece of music and everybody would come out to hear. All those places where the rough and abandoned wrecks of humanity seek enjoyment, like homeless dogs looking for food in our ash-cans, would be emptied as if by magic. ”

“ The mechanical attention which the child gives to his design frees his mind from idle dreaming and renders it more capable of completely absorbing the reading that is going on; and the pleasure gained from the reading which, little by little, penetrates his whole being seems to give new energy to both hand and eye. ”

“ However, the person who is thus gifted can get a hearing almost as well as the person who speaks. The teaching of reading, then, in this sense, is not merely the teaching of the interpretation of the meaning,—all that would be necessary, if the sole function of reading were to gain new ideas for the reader. Reading, thus conceived, represents really the addition of an art of expression to simple reading, and since this expressive art is purely dramatic, the teaching of reading involves the development of dramatic art. ”

“ Let one of us teachers try to tell the story in the most perfect and complete manner, and these tiny impetuous hecklers listen to us in ecstasy, showing their approval in every form of approbation of which they are capable. By studying such manifestations in the children, we can get sufficient psychological data for determining what reading is adapted to children of different ages, the best ways of reading aloud, and the line of development followed by each child in that hidden mental world of his which is cut off from our gaze. ”

“ The rest of all we say will constitute for the child merely modulated, musical or painful sound. It is in the music of the human voice that the elements of the education of the feelings reside; whether in the prohibition against doing something wrong, we introduce the corrective command, or, in the order to perform some action, we include encouragement, menace, or promise of reward.
Often the command is very simple. When the child is told to do something, he does not refuse. ”

“ Our success in amplifying and making more complex the early exercises with the rods has made the child's mental calculation more rapid, more certain, and more comprehensive. Mental calculation develops spontaneously, as if by a law of conservation tending to realize the "minimum of effort." Indeed, little by little the child ceases counting the beads and recognizes the numbers by their color: the dark blue he knows is 9, the yellow 4, etc. Almost without realizing it he comes now to count by colors instead of by quantities of beads, and thus performs actual operations in mental arithmetic. ”

“ The individual, all by himself, can put himself into communication not only with human beings actually alive on the earth, but also with those who lived centuries and centuries ago down to the dawn of history. Such communication is made possible not by sound but by the written symbol. The mind takes in these symbols in silence. Books are mute, as far as sound is concerned.
It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two "languages." It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves. ”

“ It is, rather, an impediment to the development of true reading. Such reading exercises constitute, as it were, a foreign body, which operates like a disease to prevent the development of the high intellectual activity which interprets the mysterious language of written symbols and arouses the child's enthusiasm with the fascinating revelations they can give. The eagerness of the [173] child to learn is curbed and cheated when he is compelled to stop his mind from working because his tongue refuses to act properly and must be laboriously trained to work right. ”

“ When a little child begins to read he shows a keen desire to learn words, words, words! Indeed in the "Children's House" we had that impressive phenomenon of the children's tireless reading of the little slips of paper upon which were written the names of objects. ”

“ We now aim at finding an exercise in the actual mechanism of pronunciation which can be started at the moment of its natural development in such a way that its growth to perfection will follow as a matter of course. It is a question of bringing the children rapidly to pronounce without hesitation. In so pronouncing well, in performing extensive exercises in hearing words and in the interpretation of them from graphic signs, the child brings together in a unit of effect the basic processes of reading and writing. ”

“ The idea that analysis must be preceded by construction was a matter of mere prejudice. Only things produced by nature must be analyzed before they can be understood. The violet, for instance, is found perfect in nature. We have to tear off the petals, cut the flower into sections to see how it grew. But in making an artificial violet we do just the opposite. We prepare the stems piece by piece; then we work out the petals, cutting, coloring, and ironing them one by one. The preparation of the stamens, even of the glue with which we put the whole together, is a distinct process. ”

“ When this piece was played they all crowded around the piano, motionless, thoughtful, absorbed; while two or three little ones fell to their knees and assumed various poses. This experience suggested to us the idea of "musical auditions," if you wish "concerts for children."
Children, little by little to be sure, but no less admirably, enter into the spirit of music. After the numerous rhythmic exercises, as soon, that is, as they have mastered the problem of measure, almost any sonata is within their reach. They can handle not isolated movements merely, but whole pieces of music. ”

“ While a high school child is still wasting his mental effort in trying to understand the relation between geometrical figures, which it seems impossible for him to comprehend, our child in the primary grades is "finding it out for himself" and is so elated by his discovery that he immediately begins the search for other geometrical relations. Our children gallop freely along over a smooth road, urged on by the inner energy of their growing psychic organism, while many other children plod on barefooted and in shackles over stony paths. ”

“ The stress we laid on that analysis as a guide to the development of reading was the result of actual experience. Those who followed this work during its initial stages saw how the children, when they read for the first time, interpreting the meaning of the words before them, did so without speaking,—reading, that is, mentally. Interpretation, in fact, is a question of mental concentration. Reading is an affair of the intelligence. The pronunciation aloud is quite a different thing, not only distinguished from the first process, but secondary to it. ”

“ Muscular education has for its object the bringing of the individual to some labor useful for society. This labor must always be executed by means of the muscles, whether it be manual labor, speaking or writing. In a word, the intelligence must subject the muscles to its own purposes and, that the muscles may be equipped for such obedience, it is necessary to prepare them by some education which will reduce them to coordination. Muscular education in defectives accordingly has for its object the stimulation and coordination of useful movements. ”