 |
Beyond the Basics: What Children
Really
Get Out of Montessori
by Tim Seldin
President of the Montessori Foundation
Information provided
by: www.montessori.org
When we try to define what our children really "get"
from Montessori, we need to expand our vision to include more
than just the basics. Of course they learn to read, do four-digit
mathematics, recognize geometric shapes, and identify the
parts of a plant and a mollusk. They also learn how to be
a contributing member of a community. A Montessori school
is more than a classroom. It is society in a microcosm, and
the skills and lessons they learn in this environment extend
well beyond the definition of academic success. They are life
lessons that were very much needed at the time when Dr. Montessori
developed her teaching methodology, and they are life lessons
that are still very much needed by our children today.
"The basic nature of our society and the family itself
have changed radically, and only an equally radical change
in education will suffice". John Dewey, School and Society,
1899.
In her recent book, The Schoolhome (Harvard University
Press, 1992), Dr. Judith Rowland Martin writes that she was
not very impressed when she first encountered Montessori education.
She understood that Montessori schools placed children in
multi-age classrooms and used manipulative learning materials,
which may have been very unusual during Montessori's lifetime,
but has since been incorporated into most early childhood
and many elementary classrooms thanks to the Open Classroom
movement of the 1960s.
However, Dr. Martin's understanding of the value of the Montessori
approach became clearer when she came across a statement in
Dorothy Canfield Fisher's book, A Montessori Mother,
in which Fisher disagrees with the universal interpretation
given to Montessori's "Casa dei Bambini" or "Children's
House."
In A Montessori Mother, one of the first books about Dr. Montessori's
work, first published in 1912, Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote,
"The phrase, `Casa dei Bambini,' is being translated
everywhere nowadays by English-speaking people as "The
Children's House," whereas its real meaning, both linguistic
and spiritual is "The Children's Home (or Children's
Community, ed.)." Fisher insisted upon this rendering,
which she felt offered a much more accurate and complete insight
into the character of the Montessori classroom.
Dr. Martin recognized that "This misreading of the Italian
word `Casa' as `house' has effectively cut off two generations
of American educators from a new and intriguing vision of
what school can and should be. Read `casa' as `house' and
your attention is drawn to the child-sized furniture, the
Montessori materials, the exercises in practical life, the
principal of self-education.
But if you read `casa' as `home' and you begin to perceive
a moral and social dimension that transforms your understanding
of Montessori's idea of a school. Once I realized that she
thought of school on the model of a home, the elements of
her system took on a different configuration. Where before
I had seen small children manipulating concrete learning materials,
I now recognized a domestic scene with its own special form
of social life and education."
Reynolds realized that what Montessori had established was
not simply a classroom in which children would be taught to
read and write. The Casa dei Bambini represented a social
and emotional environment where children would be respected
and empowered as individual human beings. It was an extended
family, a community in which children truly belonged and really
took care of one another.
Montessori described this sense
of belonging as "valorization of the personality,"
a strong sense of self-respect and personal identity. Within
this safe and empowering community, the young child learned
at the deepest possible level to believe in herself. In an
atmosphere of independence within community and personal empowerment,
she never lost her sense of curiosity and innate ability to
learn and discover. Confident in herself, she opened up to
the world around her and found that mistakes were not something
to be feared, but rather the endless opportunity to learn
from experience.
This special relationship that is so common between Montessori
children and their teachers and schools is very different
from and much more dramatic than the experience most children
have in school.
Many Montessori students describe their experience in words
quite similar to these written by Frances Merenda, a 1990
graduate of the Barrie School in Silver Spring, Maryland.
"I started in Montessori at age 2. I'm a product of the
entire system. I did well in the lower grades and upper school.
But still, many people wondered if I had been prepared for
college, whether I could `make it' in a `real school.' The
skepticism of so many acquaintances was so disconcerting that
I never bothered to step back and see what 15 years of trust,
respect, teaching, and learning had done for me. When I went
off to college at Northwestern University, I left my support
system and community behind and entered a world that was much
colder and uncaring. At first, I deeply missed that sense
of belonging. I didn't realize that Barrie had not only given
me a second family, but had also taught me how to build new
friendships, support systems, and community wherever I go.
Now, at Northwestern, I have used my years of experience in
community building to cultivate secure relationships with
people I have come to know. Barrie did more for me than just
prepare me academically for college, it prepared me for anything
to which I chose to apply myself. I feel prepared for life
and I wouldn't want it any other way."
To understand how this evolved, it's helpful to understand
the world in which Montessori lived at the time she developed
her educational approach.
Montessori was a professor of medicine, specializing in psychiatry.
At that time, there was no such thing as Freud's `talking
cure.' There were basically two approaches to the treatment
of disturbed individuals. The most common and familiar to
modern readers was to confine people who acted strangely to
insane asylums. The second, and almost forgotten, approach
was the "Moral Education" movement that spread across
Europe and North America during the 1700 and 1800s. These
therapeutic communities were villages set off in the country
where chronically despondent or non-violently dysfunctional
individuals lives in group settings with caring individuals.
The fundamental principal of the Moral Education movement
was respect and kindness. Instead of treating their patients
as prisoners, the staff acted on the belief that within each
human being there is a core of goodness and a "sound
mind." The community lived and worked together as an
extended family, and developed a sense of belonging that is
clearly reminiscent of what we see in our children's classrooms
today.
These communities were much like an Israeli Kibbutz, self-sufficient
farming communities in which each individual was encouraged
to become more independent while contributing to the overall
operation of the village. Patients lived in small homes with
a couple who served as their mentors. Surviving reports suggest
that a tremendous bond developed among those who lived and
worked together. The movement recorded success rates that
were far more effective than traditional approaches; returning
their clients to their home communities as productive, happy
citizens after an average stay of eleven months. A sense of
close personal community and positive human relationships
was proven successful as a means to help bring these disturbed
people back to reality.
Montessori was well aware of this movement through her medical
research into innovative strategies for treating the retarded,
autistic, and emotionally disturbed. She used this same model
with tremendous success in her own work with retarded and
autistic children in Rome, and later hypothesized that even
more dramatic results might be achieved with "normal"
children. Her first "Children's Community" was made
up of 50 inner-city children from dysfunctional families.
In her book The Montessori Method, Montessori describes
the transformation that took place during the first few months
of operation, as the children evolved into a "family."
The children had a sense of becoming the owners of their school.
They were encouraged to rearrange the furniture, prepare and
serve the daily meals, wash the pots and dishes, help the
younger children bathe and change their clothes, sweep, clean,
and work in the class garden. Through their day-to-day involvement
in their classroom community, Montessori saw these children
develop a sense of maturity and connectedness that helped
them realize a much higher level of their potential as human
beings.
While times have changed, the need to feel connected is still
as strong as ever. In fact, for today's children it is probably
even more important.
Whether it's an inner-city child or a child from an affluent
suburb, the sense of community has all but disappeared from
our children's lives. Families regularly move from house to
house and from town to town. Grandparents usually live in
other cities or other states. Both parents work out of necessity,
and when they are at home, they are very, very busy.
The "Latch-key" child has become the norm for this
generation. Many children have the sense that they do not
belong to anything or anybody, which is why gangs, which give
a sense of belonging, have always had a certain appeal for
some children. According to one study after another, astounding
numbers of preteens and teenagers engage in sexual activity
in their homes after school before their parents come home
from work. What is most disturbing is that for most of these
children sex doesn't represent either love or lust, but a
simple need for human contact, to be hugged and touched, a
need to not be so incredibly alone in the world.
Along with whatever else Montessori gives our children, it
definitely gives them the message that they belong - that
their school is like a second family. Studies on the moral
and emotional development of children strongly suggests that
while there are probably a few children in every thousand
who are truly little "gangsters" at heart, a child's
sense of moral reasoning and sense of self are directly related.
Children will normally grow up to be productive, happy, positive
individuals if given the right emotional environment.
It seems
clear that our attitudes about people, the ability to overcome
our tendency to be ego-centric, our willingness to share,
to compromise, to resolve conflicts non-violently, and our
ability to discover a basic sense of self-worth are not qualities
that human beings develop spontaneously, but rather through
years of experience with caring people who convince us that
we belong and give us the opportunity to practice and master
these skills of everyday living. As in all things, we "learn
by doing."
One of the greatest strengths in the approach that Montessori
developed is the three-year age grouping that you will find
in every Montessori school. By consciously bringing children
together in a group that is large enough that it will allow
for two-thirds of the children to return every year, the school
environment promotes continuity and the development of a very
different level of relationship between children and their
peers, as well as between children and their teachers.
For teachers this relationship presents itself as a commitment
that they make to stay with the children in their class for
a prolonged period of time, rather than just jumping from
job to job or from classroom to administration. Montessori
teachers do more than present curriculum. The secret of any
great teacher is helping the learner get to the point that
their minds and hearts are open and they are ready to learn,
where the motivation is not focused on getting good grades,
but involves a basic love of learning. As parents know their
own children's learning styles and temperaments, teachers
too develop this sense of each child's uniqueness by developing
a relationship over a period of years with the child and her
parents.
Montessori schools give our children not only the sense of
belonging to a family, but also of how to live with other
human beings. By creating a bond of parents, teachers, and
children Montessori sought to create a community where individuals
could learn to be empowered, where children could learn to
be a part of families, where they could learn to care of younger
children, learn from older people, trust one another, and
find ways to be properly assertive rather than aggressive.
To reduce these principles to the most simplistic form, Montessori
proposed that we could make peace by healing the wounds of
the human heart and by producing a child that is more secure.
She envisioned her movement as essentially leading to a reconstruction
of society.
Montessori schools are different, but it isn't just because
of the materials that are used in the classrooms. Look beyond
the pink towers and golden beads, and you'll discover that
the classroom is a place where children really want to be
- because it feels a lot like home.
|
|
