The Child, the Unknown
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009(This article is written by Mr. A.M. Joosten. Joosten, is a familiar name in the Montessori Circles around the world. After Dr. Maria Montessori lit the lamp for the Montessori movement in India in 1939. Mr. Joosten continued the work of Dr. Montessori for a very long time. She appointed Mr. Joosten as her personal representative in India, and he served as the Director of the Indian Montessori Training Course until 1980. Mr. Joosten was an acknowledged authority on the Montessori Method of Education.)
There cannot be many educated people today who have not read the famous book “Man the Unknown” by Alexis Carrel. In it one might look for a chapter with the title used above, but in vain. Yet, more than a chapter, one should expect it to head a preface or introduction. It might even be an explanation of the stirring title of Carrel’s book. It is almost self-evident that we can hardly hope to unveil the mysteries of “man the unknown” unless we know the “child” all men have been. The key to the present lies in its past. The very fact that man is still largely unknown to himself is the result of man’s ignorance of the child. Is it not the child who constructs man the adult? This unquestionable truth is, however, hardly taken into consideration. Even where a certain amount of lip-service is rendered to it, its practical implications and full significance are hardly realized. This becomes evident when we recognize that, among all the attempts at human and social reconstruction, education, i.e., help given to the development of man from birth to adulthood, still occupies a very minor place, especially education at life’s beginning where the help it can and should offer is most needed. It is clear, too, when we consider that education however carried our, according to whatever method, is still largely confined to instruction and an instrument of adult enterprise and ambition rather than selfless service rendered to the child himself.
The actual meaning given to the term “reconstruction” reveals itself in the efforts made to achieve it. These efforts are mainly directed towards a more efficient exploitation of the natural resources of our environment, towards their extended accessibility to mankind as an undivided whole, towards a better and fairer distribution of the wealth they yield. They also consider an evolution of social forms etc., but they as yet hardly envisage man himself and, if reconstruction does not aim at man and his personal development, how can it claim the qualification “human”? If man himself is not placed at its centre and recognized as its starting point, all peripheric attempts cannot achieve their aims. Does not ultimately and primarily anything done in the field of man’s activity, social life and organization, depend on man who wields them and expresses himself through them? Even if we renew the whole world and leave man untouched, our miseries can only increase, our problems remain unsolved and greater problems present themselves. It is an old saying that new wine can only be put in new skins and that a new patch on an old garment will cause further tears. A “new man” is needed to inhabit and rule the new world which is taking shape and has already far surpassed the preparation of the men who live in it.
Human reconstruction must be based upon the child, man in the becoming, as on its corner stone. If man is indeed largely unknown, we must turn our attention first of all toward the child, the unknown. We must discover the child and then approach him according to the knowledge thus gained.
At this point it is interesting to recognize that “the unknown” itself is unknown. It is not enough to realize that there are things we do not know and to resolve that we shall try to know them. There are, in fact, two kinds of unknown entities: those that are as yet unknown or insufficiently known, because not yet or insufficiently studied by the human intellect; and those which can never be known by merely applying our intellect to their discovery. There is an unknown which passively awaits our study and scientific exploration. There is another kind of unknown which can never form an object of study, unless it presents itself to our consciousness as such, unless, in other words, it reveals itself to us actively. There are things which we discover, there are those which have to discover themselves to us. We cannot study something which “does not exist” as far as we are concerned. Nor can we resolve to discover it, exactly because it is not yet an “it” to us. At the origin of any genuine discovery there always lies a “revelation”:- unexpected, unsought. Something seems to “come into existence” at the moment of discovery. But there, too, we must make a distinction between two kinds of discoveries. There too, there are those where the object of our discovery waits for us to move towards it and those where it is like a subject moving towards us. In the first case this “coming into existence” of the object of our discovery is only an impression, as for instance at the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. He did not know its existence. He did not for years endure the most unbearable frustrations of his ambition to sail westwards to the Indies, which he did know existed, and when finally he left Spain with his three tiny ships, he did brave storms and calms, hunger and thirst, untold dangers and the mutiny of his men in order to discover America. America “put itself” in his path. It blocked his progress beyond, to the Indies he wanted to reach. In fact, on putting feet on its virgin soil, it was virgin only to him and his men. Even then he did not realize it, called it India and to-day its original inhabitants are still called Indians. Yet, America had always existed as a distinct continent, different from the Indian sub-continent. It was not new in itself, it only acquired newness in the minds of the European People. It was “re-created” by their consciousness. So was the case when electricity was discovered and so many other unknown energies and mysteries of nature. In all these cases, the object of discovery was passive. There is another kind of unknown too. Here we may think of the greatest and profoundest and essentially most inaccessible. “Unknown”, God Himself. The human mind and the human heart can “discover” the existence of God. His existence can even be proved by the human intellect, although our hearts do not need such proof. This is so, because God, in His infinite mercy and love, wants to be discovered. Nature and its laws compel us to discover Him, Who created them? God has created the human being, his soul, his mind, so that he could discover his Creator, so that he would do so. That confers upon man, the creature, not only the privilege but the duty to discover his Creator. This, in fact, is the very purpose of his being: to know, to love and to serve God. To ignore or neglect this duty is to make one’s life purposeless. It then becomes like salt not used to flavour, thereby losing its purpose and becoming worthy only of being trampled underfoot and cast away.
We meet here an unknown, reaching our actively to be discovered, but this is not all. Although our minds and hearts can discover this greatest of all incognita, they can, at the same time (and that too because of His dispositions), know only that He exists. At this point our created and finite resources of knowing reach their utmost limit. We are utterly incapable of knowing His Nature and His will. Philosophies have tried, but were doomed to all shot of their aspirations in this respect as long as they depend only on human strength of mind. By its very created nature it is unable to achieve knowledge going beyond the discovery of God’s existence. It can say that He is, it can also try to define how he is not, but it cannot with any degrees of precision say who He is and how He is. This does not, however, mean that we cannot know something about His Nature. What we know about this ineffable mystery God has and had to reveal to us, His personal activity is thus the indispensable condition for any such discovery made by man and of the development of the knowledge gained thanks to this inestimable gift.
Returning to the child “the unknown”, we can see something similar with regard to his discovery, as to that of any living creature. There are discoveries with regard to them which our intellect can make by actively applying itself to them. There are also discoveries of even deeper and more important realities which we are utterly incapable of making unless these living beings themselves reach our and discover hidden depths of their being to us.
In order that they may do so, conditions have to exist which enable or attract them to this active unveiling of their secrets. Even the child, who, as a human being, has a will of his own, cannot “will” this. It cannot deliberately create the necessary conditions, even less at an early age when both will and consciousness are still in course of formation. We, on the other hand, however intelligent and strong-willed we may be, however well-trained in science and research, are at least initially, equally helpless. How could we create conditions and opportunities for the emergence of something the very existence of which we ignore? Something, therefore, which as far as we are concerned, “does not exist.” If we were conscious of its existence, nature and requirements, we would already have discovered it and merely follow up our initial discovery. With respect to living beings we face, therefore, a problem only accident, or Providence, can solve. Such discoveries are, on the one hand, no merit of ours. Our only merit, (but that too is a great one), lies in having an open and receptive mind, eyes that can see and are not blind; humility which enables us to admit into our consciousness what we did not know; love which with its warmth makes us go forwards to value and cherish this gift. They are, on the other hand, the sudden and unforeseen actualizations of latent potentialities within those living beings, a development of their nature.
The greatness of Dr.Maria Montessori’ s work and life belongs to these two kinds of discoveries. She has drawn attention to unknown values of childhood which lie passively in waiting to be discovered. They have been waiting for thousands of years in spite of the great progress made by scientific exploration. Man in his efforts to explore the unknown had turned his back on himself, concentrating instead on the forces and treasures of matter, towards abnormality rather than normality: towards man the adult rather than the child. And, when at last the adult did turn his mind to the child, he did so in order to know rather than the child: to the child as a supposed product of adult reproduction and moulding rather than towards the child, creature of God and constructor of man.
In this field of discovery there lie Dr.Montessori’s empathic and ardent efforts to show the child as the real source of man’s royal prerogatives.
Man is indeed a king in creation, but is he so on account of his physical strength, fully visible only in the adult? Certainly not! Physically unarmed, weak and defenceless, he is inferior to almost all the animals that surround him. Then by size? No, even there he cuts only a modest figure. On account of his numerical predominance perhaps? But who are the millions of men against the myriads of insects alone? No, if is man really king, he is so because of his spirit, his soul, his will and his memory. Yet, who bestows these great gifts on him? Does he inherit them? Do royal parents invest their children, (all parents, all children) with these powers? Not that either – we neither inherit them nor do we receive them as a gift.
We meet here a kingship conquered afresh by each member of this royal race. Man neither inherits his royalty nor can he leave it in legacy or bestow it as a dowry on any other man. He can and does leave the conquests made during his reign, but not ever the power and the instruments with which he makes them. These have to be built up and conquered by every man coming into this world. The only inheritance man does receive is the capacity to achieve this unique construction and innate discipline the obediential urge to do so according to universal, immutable laws which guide its progress step by step, phase by phase, from conquest to conquest. Yet, this inheritance he does not receive from his parents, but only through his parents from his Maker.
The real king, therefore, is the child rather than the adult who inherits (and here it is a real concrete inheritance) from the child he once was. The adult is in reality a kind of Viceroy only who wield the sovereign privileges an executive powers he receives from the child. Already, therefore, we discover the child is a quite and unknown and ignored aspect of his being the child neither weak, nor helpless, but strong and autonomous, under God: wealthy beyond measure in constructive energy and capacity. In truth, the child as father to the man. The child not indeed as the builder of merely material monuments and works, but as the builder of a spiritual monument, the greatest work in creation; man himself.
All the manifestations of human greatness all the expressions of man’s unique position have their basis in the efforts made by the child. Man is great and unique on account of the civilization he builds and never ceases to build. But it is the child’s efforts to construct his intelligence and will, as well as the basic motor co-ordinations which enable him to do so. Man is great and unparalleled as the conqueror of space, as an invader of the who surface of the earth. Man’s living space is a longer bi-dimensional, but extends to the third dimension as well. Not because of any motor endowment like the animals with wings or the fish in the oceans, but because of his spiritual faculties which render him capable of overcoming his natural physical limitation. Yet, those spiritual organs exist and can be utilized, because the child built them for us. Man can and does live in all climates, at all altitudes in marshy land as well as in the desert, under the tropical and as well as in the icy regions within the arctic and Antarctic circles. No adult can ever adapt himself to conditions profoundly different from those of his native country. It is the child which has this power and ensured the stability in their new surroundings of any migrating people.
The Hungarians who live in the heart of Eastern Europe, far from their original homeland in Central Asia: the Fins at Europe’s Northern fringe: the Burmese in Burma and the Aryans in India: they all became natives in a country not native to theirs race by virtue of their children born in these new surroundings and adapting themselves not superficially and painfully, but essentially and joyfully without and lingering nostalgia.
If man does indeed synthetize within his person all the functions and possibilities which in animals are distributed over different species, each characterized by one or a few of them, this is entirely due to the human child who, born without any fixed behaviour pattern and behaviour limitations builds upon a basic fund capable of almost unlimited diversification and specialization and the power and the urges to achieve them. Man’s almost infinite variations rest upon the child’s basically uniform, informed and undetermined endowment of potentiality and on his powers of actualization.
And what do we offer to this royal child to assist him in his efforts? Consciously practically nothing! The environment in which he lives almost as an outcast of society, at best as one is told to wait in a shabby waiting shed before he will be granted admission in a splendid audience – chamber on becoming of age (and losing the very powers that would enable him to absorb and utilize these splendours), this environment is the most accidental and circumstantial imaginable. Yet, it is from his environment that the child draws the material which will realize his potentialities and give shape to his personality. He will be rich according to its riches, cultured according to its cultural contents. He will make his own the manners not merely displayed around him but to him. All this long before we start “educating” him deliberately. By that time he is already who he will be and the additions, or subtractions, consequent upon education are like varnish applied to an object fixed in shape: decorations of an object which may hide or deform its real structure, but cannot obliterate it: mutilations and polish touching only the surface. They will cract and blister and finally fall away under any stress and strain (and who can any longer deny that stress and strain have become almost normal features of human life today? And then leave us naked in its original shapelessness.
The few, but very important points we have only touched upon here (which are capable or immerse development and elaboration) reveal indeed an “unknown” child. These revelations, however, can be obtained by an active, unprejudiced applications of our mind to the reality of human life. All of them belong to that wealth hidden values which lay passively in waiting for our mind and heart to discover them. Dr. Maria Montessori was the pioneer explorer in this field and we owe her a great debt of gratitude for having done so and helped us to follow her into this unknown world without and within ourselves. A great debt also for having shown us long ignored responsibilities which it may soon be too late to discharge.
Her greatest contribution to the cause of human reconstruction and rescue does not, however, lie here.
There is yet another “child the unknown”. One that the human intellect cannot discover by itself. Not the child revealed to us by one or more of us, but the child actively revealed by himself. The child who is not like a member of a species of which we discover new aspects, new functions and new attributes, but the child who seems almost to belong to a “new species” living in a new environment. We might, indeed, attempt a comparison (imperfect like the comparisons) with the history of evolution (without entering in or committing ourselves to the merits of any evolutionary a theory). The origin of a new species may or may not be due to potential variability of previously existing species, but if it does, we been concomitant changes in their environment to enable these potentialities to actualize and reveal themselves. The close synchronic links between the appearance of successive species and the revolutionary geological transformations of the earth are striking and cannot be dismissed as entirely fortuitous. Yet, even if the environment acts as a kind of “conductory” of evolutionary charges. It does not “cause” them necessarily. The energy which brings them about resides within the living being and its Creator.
When, in 1907, Dr. Maria Montessori started a psychological experiment aiming at determining by scientific tests how abnormal children of a certain age compared with normal children of much younger age, she never achieved the purpose of her experiment. These children, instead, revealed natural characteristic believed impossible. These are by now well-known for the descriptions given by Dr.Montessori in her books. They include, amongst others an amazing degree of concentration: spontaneous repetition of formative activities long after their outer aim seems to have been achieved; a spontaneous and very superior form of discipline and an impressive orderliness and need for order; a capacity to choose freely those activities which correspond to their inner development needs: an almost spiritual appreciation of silence and a strong sense of personal dignity. Also, an explosive capacity to conquer the art of writing and reading (in this succession) at what may be considered an apparently precocious age, and a general thirst for intellectual in all fields of human culture. These phenomena occurred not separately, nor were they differently distributed in individual children. They formed an organic whole and manifested themselves all together, thereby presenting us with what seemed in reality a “new” type child, uniform in its fundamental characteristic, yet at the same time rich in individual variety in the forms they take.
Not only this. The appearance of these unknown and unsuspected features which made visitors speak of “new children” and of a “discovery of the human soul”, is accompanied by another series of surprising phenomena. Many forms and features of behaviour which have always been considered natural to the child disappeared. Quite independently of any social or moral appreciation by the adult, these children “changed”. They were no longer destructive rowdy, jealous, dependent upon and exaggerated attached to the adult. They lost their fearfulness and shyness. They showed great interest in anything that helped them establish contact with the reality of their surroundings and became almost indifferent to its fanciful distortion in fantastic stories. They preferred what they called work (even where to us it may seem play) and neglected and ignored toys (made by the adult for the child) in favour of the scientifically constructed so-called Montessori Apparatus (which is not a didactic apparatus, but a series of means of development). Certain typically “defective” tendencies in child behaviour and orientation, like fugues, barriers, a craving for power, possessiveness, even lying and certain physical weakness (digestive, respiratory, disturbed sleep etc) vanished. This transformation of character which some have compared to a conversion (conversio morum). But which has nothing to do with a moral phenomenon, was indeed a spontaneous and sudden, total phenomenon. We cannot speak of a cure, far less of a treatment or the result of teaching. It revels a process which takes place spontaneously within the child as if their environment and in the attitude of the adult opened the doors for a revelation of their real personality. This “new child” seemed to have reached a “super-normal” level and, naturally, it was at first believed that Dr.Montessori had stumbled on a number of “extraordinary” children. When the conditions prevailing in their environment in that first “Casa dei Bambini” had been analysed and defined and were then reproduced all over the world, among people of every race, creed, social and cultural background, and when always these same phenomenon occured, it became, however, evident that they represented a more real and true form of child-nature and behaviour. These children were neither “supernormal” not “extraordinary”, but showed a “return to normality” or an unknown level of normality. On the basis of this experience, vested in spatial and temporal extension than any other educational experience, Dr.Montessori then started to use the term “normalization” for this process and could establish a very precise and well defined distinction between normal characteristics and deviations of child nature. This transcends and underlies individual differences and refers to an essential, uniform substratum of these. Just as this sudden revelation of the “unknown” child refers to a single whole of unsuspected characteristics, so also is there a single “lever” which sets this transformation in motion. In Dr.Montessori’s words : “It would not be possible to quote a single example of conversion that did not involve the concentration of activity on an interesting task.
Here, then, we have an instance of the active “self-revelation” which unveils an unknown that we ourselves can never discover on our own. We can only accept it, recognize it and then, in a second phase, study and analyze it. Thereafter we can try to give it stability and to prevent it from ever falling back into oblivion, from disappearing. These are the efforts we can make and are morally obligated to make. The greatness of Dr.Montessori’s work and its unique contribution to both education and child psychology, the basis also of the increasing penetration of her work into that of “human science”, lies exactly and primarily in these efforts. She had the open mind and the true humility to dramatic moment which claimed all her strength of mind and heart, this active shedding of even scientific prejudice, is movingly described in “The Secret of Childhood” (Part II, Chapter II, “Who are you?”). During the rest of her life, in spite of disappointment and misunderstanding, she held on to this great vision of unsuspected reality. But scientifically the nature of these phenomenon, the conditions they required.
The elaboration of this Part of her wok led to what is now called the “Montessori Method” extending from birth to adulthood and influencing even adult life and society. To the basis of the child’s revelation of himself she has responded with the movement that bears her name and which aims at delivering mankind in course of development for the obstacles which held its true nature captive and made the child “unknown”.
Against these efforts of contradiction and misunderstanding which draw their strength form individual and collectively organized prejudice, a kind of unconscious, psychological “vested interest”. Their action and nature have been analyzed in “The Formation of Man”.
If we understand and realize the value of what this child the unknown has revealed if we are conscious of the nature an import of these revelations which belong to the “second type” of incognita mentioned earlier, we must free ourselves from these prejudices as ancient as humanity itself. It is we who have then to convert ourselves. Side by side with a reform of education, there will then needs be achieved a reform of the adult and of adult society based upon man himself. Such a reform which affects at the same time the present and the future will be much more profound and effective than any on the external manifestations of environment whilst leaving man himself untouched.
This reform may fill us with hope, because in placing the child and the laws of his development at its center, we displace man the adult, already fixed and deviated, from this center which he tries to occupy and hold with ever increasing egocentricity and blindness. If we make place for the child at the center of our existence and every effort, (not as someone we have to mould, but as someone we have to help mould himself according to the eternal laws of growth), not man, but God the Creator will be restored to the place, He alone has a right to occupy. We then become his conscious servants and co-operators in His most glorious work; the creation of man. We shall open ourselves to Him exactly where we have always kept Him away; in the education of the child. Then instead of pride and presumption love will be the driving force of our evolving existence. We shall then really heed the warning pronounced 2000 years ago. Let the children be, do not keep them back to Me: the kingdom of heaven belongs to such a these.”
This then, will also be a first step on the road leading to peace. Peace within ourself who have always been fighting our better side in our relations with those who are dearest to us; our children. Peace between child and adult consequently a future humanity who, having grown up in peace and by means of peace, will be peaceful in its relations with environment and with society
