Montessori method

“ So, by persistent and repeated experiment, the child attains a habit of correcting his own mistakes. This habit he carries over into the other willed activities of his life.
The Montessori method presents three steps in the home development of the child’s will. First, we must give our children as wide and free an opportunity as possible to be active, especially with their hands, along those lines which will lead to muscular control. Second, we must not interfere with a little child’s concentrated occupation through play. ”

“ Then have again a brief discussion: Is the Montessori system adapted to American children? Is it a benefit to them? Is it wise to develop the mind of a young child rapidly? What is the effect in its later education? Compare the system with that of the kindergarten. See: "Dr. Montessori's Own Method," by herself (Stokes) , and "A Guide to the Montessori Method," Ellen Yale Stevens. (Stokes.)
Close this meeting with a talk by a trained kindergarten teacher, if possible, who can set before the club members the advantages of her work. ”

“ Montessori claims that intellectual result differentiates her work from the appliances of the kindergarten.
As we said above, the difference between the Montessori method and the views of American reformers lies not in a difference of opinion as to the value of liberty, but rather in a different conception of the best use to be made of it. Physically the pupils of a Montessori class are freer than they are in the classes of most American educators with whose views this book has been dealing; intellectually they are not so free. ”

“ The most discussed features of the Montessori method fall naturally into three groups. It should be noticed that none of these exercises are absolutely original, but they are sufficiently peculiar to demand consideration in any description of Montessorianism. They are connected with (1) activities of practical life, (2) sense training and (3) the formal studies of the elementary curriculum. (1) When the child first enters the school, even while he is beginning to find himself, he may take part in the activities of practical life. ”

“ Madame Montessori believes that repressing children physically while they are in school and teaching them habits of mental passivity and142 docility is mistaking the function of the school and doing the children real harm. Scientific education not only needs freedom for the child in order to collect data, but liberty is its very basis; “liberty is activity,” says Madame Montessori in her book called “The Montessori Method.” Activity is the basis of life, consequently training children to move and act is training them for life, which is the proper office of the schoolroom. ”

“ We succeed in teaching the child to dress himself without his really being aware of it, that is, without any direct or arbitrary command we have led him to this mastery. As soon as he knows how to do it, he begins to wish to make a practical application of his ability, and very soon he will be proud of being sufficient unto himself, and will take delight in an ability which makes his body free from the hands of others, and which leads him the sooner to that modesty and activity which develops far too late in those children of to-day who are deprived of this most practical form of education. ”

“ There are forty little beings—from three to seven years old, each one intent on his own work; one is going through one of the exercises for the senses, one is doing an arithmetical exercise; one is handling the letters, one is drawing, one is fastening and unfastening the pieces of cloth on one of our little wooden frames, still another is dusting. Some are seated at the tables, some on rugs on the floor. There are muffled sounds of objects lightly moved about, of children tiptoeing. Once in a while comes a cry of joy only partly repressed, "Teacher! Teacher!" ”

“ This attitude is well justified by school conditions in some places; but where the schools are good, it ignores not only the obvious advantages of school life quite aside from instruction in written language, but also the almost complete absence of strain afforded by modern methods. Now that the Montessori system adds a new and promising method to our resources, it is the more unreasonable: for as a fact normal children are eager to read and write at six, and have plenty of use for these accomplishments. ”

“ They are moving pictures, they are gone! What might they not have been, what might they not have contributed, [Pg 178] very especially to the host's children, in the way of lessons and knowledge and education, had they remained long enough to be guests! What? Education? But the children all go to school, and to the best to be had; and the little one there is just starting in under the Montessori method. You should see how amazingly, from fifty-seven varieties, she can select and grade the different shades and colors. ”

“ The Montessori apparatus is common to all the children, but so long as a child is using one piece of apparatus no other child must interfere. This develops a sense of limited tenant-right, dependent upon work; such a sense does not run counter to anything that is desirable in later years. For very young children, this method is hardly applicable, because they are not yet sufficiently constructive. But as they acquire skill it becomes more and more possible to interest them in the process of building. ”

“ The Montessori material carries out the fundamental principle of Pestalozzi, which he tried in vain to embody in a successful system of his own: it "develops piece by piece the pupil's mental capacities" by training separately, through repeated exercises, his several senses and his ability to distinguish, compare, and handle typical objects. In the kindergarten system, and particularly in the "liberal" modifications of it, sense training is incidental to constructive and imaginative activity in which the children are pursuing larger ends than the mere arrangement of forms or colours. ”

“ The discipline to which the child habituates himself here 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. ”

“ From the practical side of the school, we have with our methods the advantage of being able to teach in one room, children of very different ages. In our "Children's Houses" we have little ones of two years and a half, who cannot as yet make use of the most simple of the sense exercises, and children of five and a half who because of their development might easily pass into the third elementary. Each one of them perfects himself through his own powers, and goes forward guided by that inner force which distinguishes him as an individual. ”

“ Daily instances of very original, undirected imaginative play on the part of Montessori children show a subtle force at work in the method which results in a spontaneous unfolding of the imagination. The games and plays which we teach our children in kindergarten and primary school are carried on by the Montessori-trained children without adult supervision. Leaving their work, they run to the garden or playground, imitating with great freedom and beauty of imagination the activities of the gardener, the baker, the artisan, the street vender, and the traveling musician. ”

“ Montessori alone. The incidental features which she has frankly taken over from other modern educators she has chosen because they fit into the fundamental form of her own scheme, and she has unified them all in her general conception of method. The system is not original in the sense in which Froebel's system was original; but as a system it is the novel product of a single woman's creative genius.
As such, no student of elementary education ought to ignore it. The system doubtless fails to solve all the problems in the education of young children ”

“ Clearly, however, while Montessori is neither the tremendous innovator nor "wonder-worker" she has been represented to be, her method is not merely the latest fad. Her indebtedness to the past and the comparative worth of her system are fairly evident to one acquainted with the history of education, but it would also seem that she is in harmony with modern progress and has made some contribution to educational practise. ”

“ I was more than an elementary teacher, for I was present, or directly taught the children, from eight in the morning to seven in the evening without interruption. These two years of practice are my first and indeed my true degree in pedagogy. From the very beginning of [Pg 33] my work with deficient children (1898 to 1900) I felt that the methods which I used had in them nothing peculiarly limited to the instruction of idiots. ”

“ Very much less external discipline is required, and attention is secured without difficulty. To succeed in this method, certain conditions are necessary, which Madame Montessori successfully produces among the very young. The tasks must be attractive and not too difficult. There must, at first, be the example of other children at a slightly more advanced stage. There must be no other obviously pleasant occupation open to the child at the moment. There are a number of things the child may do, and he works by himself at whichever he prefers. ”

“ Thus we have been drawn into a false and narrow way, from which we must free ourselves, if we are to establish true and living methods for the training of future generations.
To prepare teachers in the method of the experimental sciences is not an easy matter. When we shall have instructed them in anthropometry and psychometry in the most minute manner possible, we shall have only created machines, whose usefulness will be most doubtful. Indeed, if it is after this fashion that we are to initiate our teachers into experiment, we shall remain forever in the field of theory. ”

“ Montessori started her original school in Rome do not, indeed, lack counterpart in large cities the world over. When one reads her eloquent "Inaugural Address" it is impossible not to wish that a "School within the Home" might stand as a centre of hopeful child life in the midst of every close-built city block. Better, of course, if there were no hive-like city tenements at all, and if every family could give to its own children on its own premises enough of "happy play in grassy places." Better if every mother and father were in certain ways an expert in child psychology and hygiene. ”

“ The sheer fascination of tucking cards under the edge of a rug will keep a baby happy until any ordinary supply of cards is exhausted; and the wholly sensory appeal of throwing stones into the water gives satisfaction enough to absorb for a long time the attention of older children—to say nothing of grown-ups. The Montessori apparatus satisfies sense hunger when it is keen for new material, and it has besides a puzzle-interest which children eagerly respond to. ”

“ The same is done for ornamental plants and for gardening, which is the work yielding the best income for deficients, when they are of an age to practise a profession.
But this side of education, though it contains, in the first place, an objective method of intellectual culture, and, in addition, a professional preparation, is not, in my opinion, to be taken into serious consideration for child education. The educational conception of this age must be solely that of aiding the psycho-physical development of the individual ”

“ The sense exercises constitute a species of auto-education, which, if these exercises be many times repeated, leads to a perfecting of the child's psychosensory processes. The directress must intervene to lead the child from sensations to ideas—from the concrete to the abstract, and to the association of ideas. For this, she should use a method tending to isolate the inner attention of the child and to fix it upon the perceptions—as in the first lessons his objective attention was fixed, through isolation, upon single stimuli. ”

“ My idea was that in order to establish natural, rational methods, it was essential that we make numerous, exact, and rational observations of man as an individual, principally during infancy, which is the age at which the foundations of education and culture must be laid.
"To measure the head, the height, etc., does not indeed mean that we are establishing a system of pedagogy, but it indicates the road which we may follow to arrive at such a system, since if we are to educate an individual, we must have a definite and direct knowledge of him." ”

“ Our ordinary method of teaching reading and writing is a utilization of the sense of sight, alone. In some instances the children in the primary grades of our schools begin writing by a system of tracing letters and words offered them in large script. This is purely a muscular process and rarely absolutely successful, because it involves fine muscular co-ordination for which the child of five or even six years is not ready.
The Montessori sandpaper letters and movable alphabet offer the child a chance to utilize his sense of touch in learning the symbols of thought. ”