The Ultimate Montessori Blog

This article is the transcript  of  the first part of Dr.Montessori\’s lecture delivered in Rome. She speaks about the essential part of Montessori courses and the attitude of the adult towards children. The second part  of this lecture will appear on this blog shortly.

Education is a very vast field which includes many varied sciences. However, I believe that although in the intentions of educators they are meant to be beneficial for the ones who receive them – today’s theories and practice are all built on a false base, in as much they are all founded on the erroneous principle, both unique and simple, that it is always the adult who educates the child, who helps him and forms him. Following different theories he may do so with severity, and even with violence or by urging him with sweetness and prizes; but no matter how he does it, he incurs in the same error: that it must be the adult to do everything for the child.

And if – as in modern times – the adult comes to the conclusion that he should act for the child only when he has understood him, and therefore, only after he has come to know exactly which are his needs – and that in consequence he should study the child in order to lead him according to the inner qualities he has so discovered – even then the educator is at the same point because his action is still based on the principle that it is education which moulds the child.

We want to express another principle which is not an idea but has derived from a long and multiform experience. Our principle is that one must limit the action of the adult upon the child so as to give him the possibility to develop without having always on top an oppressive will which is stronger than his own.

Certainly – expressed in this way – this is nothing new. But we want to consider it not as an idea but as a positive experience which has been realized. Also we want to consider the question from an angle different from the general. We want to consider apart the child and the adult so as to illustrate their differences. These are more clearly shown if one realizes the different tasks they fulfil. The adult is a strong being full of will power that transforms the environment and concentrates most of his activity on the external world. The child is a being who also accomplishes a great task but whose work is profoundly different and opposed to that of the adult. His work is to form man. The child who builds man is that personality which we must always have in front of us; we must always feel the child’s mission which sometimes is obscure to us. In fact, while it is true that the mother brings the child from the unicellular stage to that of the new – born baby, it is also undisputedly true that from infancy to adulthood it is the child who does the work. It is the child who builds man.

It is evident that he does not do so at random but following the dictates and the impulse of nature. Of course it is also evident that he could not build man without the aid of the environment and of the assistance of the adult, but the fact remains that it is not the adult who creates and moulds the child.

All he can do is to help the child in his task: whereas generally the adult alludes himself – especially in the psychic field – of almost being able to create the child’ that he can form the child’s intelligence and sentiments. Consequently he oppresses him with aids which the child does not need. These excessive aids represent an obstacle because – as our experience has shown us – every unnecessary help of the adult, every substitution of the adult’s activity for that of the child, arrests the latter’s development. We have expressed this in one of our principles: “every unnecessary help is an obstacle to the child’s development”.

Today it is generally recognised that in its qualities and strength our organism must always be considered from its roots; and as it is the child who makes the adult, it is easy to realize that a well or poorly developed child will be a strong or a weak man. Also easy to realise should be how great is the responsibility of giving the child unnecessary help. It is in this that the conclusions of out study differ from those of the great majority of educators whose opinion is instead that all sorts of help must be given to the child during the period of his growth.

This principle of limiting the help of the adult so as to harm the child, so as not to arrest his development, is one of the most fundamental in our method of education which promotes instead the need of devoting very delicate care to the child. We must assume the attitude of becoming observers, to be prudent and humble so as not to overstep the limits we have set for ourselves. In practice this means having a positive respect to the growth manifestations of the child. On the other hand we must also say that, if we did not give the aids that these manifestations show to be necessary, we would be failing in our duty as educators. We must give what is necessary and sufficient but nothing more. The responsibility to give these necessary aids becomes something powerful and imposing to our feelings.

Put upon this plane, the concept of education – education itself – represents more than anything else a help to the life of the child, because by doing so we help the child to grow following the spontaneous activity dictated by the laws of development.

However, to be able to follow the spontaneous activity of the child involves the necessary of a preparation. This can be either cultural or acquired through experience, but it must be based upon a most fundamental self transformational which without doubt is of moral type in the sense that it implies the need that the adult understands that his mission lies in a sphere opposite to that which has been thus far understood. That is that the adult must pass from the role of a commanding creator to be obeyed to the role of a scientist who studies how best he can help the process of developing life.

On this plane the teacher becomes the helper and no longer the moulder of the child. That is why we say that in our school the teacher must first of all learn to moderate her own intervention. She must become humble and conceive herself that she is neither the maker nor the moulder of that mind which she sees developing under her own eyes. That is why we have been the first to preach as a fundamental requirement that it is necessary that the teacher become passive as little by little the child becomes active. It is easily understood that if the teacher is always active, if she is the one who always teaches, preaches, says and moves, then the child must necessarily be the one to absorb, to follow, to repeat and be passive. This depicts the situation in orthodox schools and describes the relation between these two personalities: the teacher who gives and the child who receives.

When instead we enter into the concept that the child develops through his own activity with the help of the teacher, yes, but only with the help which enables the child to choose spontaneously his various activities, then even theoretically one can easily concieve a school in which the teacher is in the beginning fairly active, giving some initiations, offering the several means of development etc. but who retires more and more as the child, working by himself, gradually enters a path of spontaneous and orderly activity. It is also easy to realise that to conform to the increasing activity of the child, the greater this becomes the more the teacher withdraws, thus bringing about a sort of transmission of powers; the teacher who retires and the child who does always more. Just because she can retire the teacher feels the satisfaction of one who has succeeded in her task for now the active child is really advancing securely on the road of development which will produce the man.

One can recognize a good Montessori teacher when one finally sees her in a corner of the room, sitting with an air of satisfaction on her face and doing nothing except observing her whole class which is engaged in good, animated and vivacious activity, by means of which all the individual children are busy developing and instructing themselves.

And seeing her thus, one is reminded of the words of St. John the Baptist who answered the people who told him that the person he had baptised was taking his place: ”It is convenient that He grow and that I diminish”. Because St. John was the Precursor and had come only to fulfil this mission.

For the teacher this should be a very clear fact. But to realize this situation in Practice, not only a different preparation of the teacher is necessary but also a different school, different even from the many which today are included in the terminology “ New Education”.Many confuse them with our schools. For example: hearing of open air school, people say: “They are Montessori Schools”. No, because children can be slaves of education and oppressed by the adult in the open air as well as in the room.

In our conception, to be educated the individuals must have the possibility of living in conditions that permit spontaneous activity. The school we advocate must be different in respect to freedom of the spirit and not in respect to freedom of the respiration. The school which provides for the spontaneous activity of the child must necessarily contain means for the development of the intelligence and therefore be adapted to this activity. The school must be organised and constructed not upon a new concept of the adult.

Whatever this may be but upon the guide which the child himself has given. The environment of such a school must be built for him. I might almost say by him the sense that although the child materially cannot make his own environment, we as servants of the child, as his helpers, can construct around him an environment which gradually with experience of new conditions in his life - the child has shown to be the one suitable to him. In other words, we must create an environment suitable to the child; an environment adapted to the psychic life of the child.

All our innovations can be resumed in these two principles: the preparation of the environment and the limitation of the intervention of the teacher.

These two very simple ideas should not be limited to schools; they should be applied throughout the whole life of the child, also in the family: for the parents and the home environment form the other portion of infantile life: the home life. And if one interprets as help to life, the same principles must prevail there.

Also the parents therefore must learn to treat their children in a different way, to seek not to overwhelm them with their strong personalities. On the contrary they should allow freedom to the activities of the child.

This concept of more indirect and more delicate treatment towards infancy does away somewhat with what we have been accustomed to conceive and to actuate towards children. In fact, to the old concept where the adult intervenes too much with material help and psychically wants to mould the child, is inherent the fact that the adult things he must continue to correct the child until the latter is able to correct himself and thus conform to the example suggest by the parents; whereas the delicate action of the adult should be to encourage the expressions, the initiative, the activity, and all that is on the road of good development.

In this new conception the adult should be the person who always encourages, the person who appreciates everything positive that the child does; who does not pretend not to see what the child does if he wishes it to be seen; the person who listens patiently and joins when he is asked; the person who is always present as a vivifying force. Because one should realize that the child is uncertain in the formation of what he has not yet formed, that he finds himself in a world which he does not know and which is new for him, and who therefore needs and asks the adult’s approval and encourage.

If this is done, the child gives manifestations and takes initiatives which are surprising and which must be seconded. From this we see that the adult should be there not, only to observe in order to give what is necessary but also to gather what the child has to offer so that nothing which comes out of his mind should be lost, so that nothing should go astray because the child did not feel sure whether he should or not have continued on the path he had undertaken.

This is all the more true for the teacher who – as I said – must be patient, respectful and always encouraging. But how much more difficult she will find this second part: that is, of encouraging the spontaneous expressions! Because whoever corrects something which does not go, receives a clear sign for he finds himself confronted with a strong, clear and something even violent reaction of the child.

But when there is a delicate manifestation of the mind that unfolds itself, the signs are not so clear and very often, if the adult has not a fineness of heart, if he is not imbued with a special sense of charity, of love, of interest in this mind which is awakening, he may not notice these delicate manifestations.

(To be continued …)