#3quotes from Montessori

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Maria Montessori is a controversial figure in education. She is considered by many to be a true visionary, while others consider her methods to be detrimental. She was highly critical of formalised education systems and believed they actually obstructed children's potential to learn. She saw transmission methods of teaching as a great travesty, and worked incessantly to create alternative methods of education that were more child centred and which led to greater levels of engagement with learning. In her widely read and cited book The Montessori Method, she outlines some of the drivers in her radical reworking of education:

"Often the education of children consists of pouring into their intelligence the intellectual content of school programmes. And often these school programmes have been compiled in the official department of education, and their use is imposed by law upon the teacher and the child. Ah, before such dense and wilful disregard of the life which is growing within these children, we should hide our heads in shame and cover our guilty faces with our hands!" (p 48)

Montessori was particularly vocal about what we now term 'behaviour management'. She opposed the 'sit still and face the front' approach and advocated that children could and should move freely around as they learned. She saw discipline not as something imposed upon the child, but rather something the child learnt to adopt within their own self mastery journey:

"We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself and can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life. Such a concept of active discipline is not easy to comprehend or to apply. But certainly it contains a great educational principle, very different from the old-time absolute and undiscussed coercion of immobility." (p 78)

Maria Montessori was especially keen to promote what she called 'education of the senses,' where teachers facilitate exposure of all the senses to stimuli with the aim of helping children to experience the world around them. This is not confined to the 'five senses' but also extends to sensing of weight, resistance, movement, balance, temperature, space and other senses.  In this way she believed that a holistic education of the entire body, mind and spirit could be achieved:

"We have been mistaken in thinking that the natural education of children should be purely physical; the soul, too, has its nature, which it was intended to perfect in the spiritual life, - the dominating power of human existence throughout all time. Our methods take into consideration the spontaneous psychic development of the child, and help this in ways that observation and experience have shown us to be wise." (p 269)

Reference
Montessori, M. (2008) The Montessori Method. Blacksburg, VA: Earth Angel Books.

Previous posts in the #3quotes series
Paulo Freire
Ivan Illich
John Dewey
Lev Vygotsky


#3quotes from Montessori by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.