The Montessori Method
L i BRARY^ OCT. -2 1916. The Psycho Copyright, 1914, by Lightner Witmer, Editor. Vol. VIII, No. 1 March 15, 1914 :Author: Lightner Witmer, Ph.D., jiC University of Pennsylvania.
Critics of Montessori claim that there is nothing new in the Montessori method?that even her apparatus for sense training is derived from Seguin and Bourneville?that many schools for the training of feebleminded children employ apparatus equally as good as hers, and some, notably the Massachusetts Training School at Waverly, under Dr Fernald, have developed sense training apparatus which is far superior. But these claims?true enough so far as they go?miss the mark, for no one can invent or discover an educational method of entirely original elements. What is new about the Montessori method?and it can in my opinion be considered a new method?is the particular combination of elements, the peculiar emphasis laid upon certain ideals and certain details of procedure. Above all, Montessori is the first to do?and with striking success?what others have only talked about.
Others, like Montessori, employing their talents in the education of feebleminded children, have, from Seguin to Fernald, believed and asserted that the methods of training feebleminded children were applicable to the training of normal children. Montessori applied them, giving the world the first convincing demonstration that methods which are successful in developing the mental capacities of feebleminded children, are even more successful in developing the mental powers of normal children.
Others, philosophical educators from time immemorial, have characterized the educational process as an unfolding of the child s natural aptitudes and powers. But no one except Montessori has had the courage to make this a fundamental classroom principle. Is the teacher an “instructor,”?a builder who places brick upon brick and mortar to erect the edifice of a child’s mind? Or is the teacher an “educator,” a “kindergartner,”?the grower of a plant who waters and cultivates the soil in order that the plant may develop leaf and flower in accordance with its own nature? Montessori, like Froebel, accepts the latter alternative, but unlike Froebel she makes it the cardinal principle of the teacher’s practice in the school room.
In the Casa dei Bambini, at Rome, I saw little children three to seven years old, independently and resolutely setting about and executing fairly difficult tasks. They did not wait for the teacher to provide them with the material they needed, nor if they failed in accomplishing a task did they look to the teacher for assistance. They were let alone to work and grow in their own way. And yet there was much direction; a well conceived set of apparatus was provided upon which the children could work and through some of this material Montessori had been able to secure the really remarkable result of teaching four and five year old children to write without effort or even the knowledge that they were being taught penmanship. As they served one another at luncheon they had the tottering and unsteady gait of little children, and yet everything was carried forward with precision. The greatest failures in this room were teacher-visitors from England and America, who could not be restrained from helping children whom they saw making mistake after mistake. These spectators were gradually to acquire from the Montessori school the understanding to let the child alone to work out his own salvation.
In how many American kindergartens do dear little children still sit on nice little stools waiting for devoted teachers to tell them what to do! Like little birds in a nest they sit with their mouths wide open until the foster mother bird drops in the appropriate worm. Where the teacher’s help is reduced to a minimum in the Montessori school, it is at a maximum in many kindergartens. Where the Montessori teacher is told to repress herself, the kindergarten teacher is too often the conspicuous center of the performance. The children like marionettes respond to hidden strings which are being pulled at the dictates of a symbolic philosophy, honeyed over with the affectation of an exaggerated mother love.
The Montessori teacher is to be tied and gagged in the classroom, but not blindfolded. She is an observer who must note carefully the stages of development through which her children are passing and see that the proper agencies are provided which will make it possible for them to take the next step forward. She places her apparatus, the materials of instruction, as it were upon shelves. It is the teacher’s duty to see that they are all in place and ready to be seized upon by the child as he requires each piece for his individual development. But she is not to give the child what she thinks he needs, much less to insist upon his using it; she must not point out the objects on the shelf nor lift the child in her arms that he may reach them. She must not even show the child that a chair may be employed to get at the shelf. She must permit the child to make this discovery for himself. The demands of his own nature for occupation will teach the child the ways and means of satisfying these demands. The best kind of education, according to Montessori, is that which the child gives himself.
Many other educators and psychologists before Montessori, have insisted that psychology, which is the science of mental development, should be made the basis of educational practice. Even the kindergartner talks about the psychology of the child. But no one except Montessori has presented to the world an educational system founded solely upon psychological principles and evolved directly out of the psychological laboratory. Indeed the Montessori schoolroom is a laboratory, and the Montessori teacher is its director. We know practically nothing, says Montessori, of the psychology of the child of from three to seven. Let us learn. Let the teacher of the Montessori classroom learn her psychology from her pupils. This does not mean that a teacher untrained in psychology is to be considered proficient in understanding what she sees in the Montessori classroom or in employing the Montessori method. Indeed no system of education has ever laid such demands upon the teacher to secure an adequate professional equipment from the thorough study of the principles of psychology. And it must be a modern and a comprehensive psychology, involving a knowledge of the functions of the brain, of hygiene, of the home and social life of the child. It must not be philosophy masquerading as psychology, such as we find in Froebel and Herbart.
Others, although only within the last few jrears, have emphasized the social function of the school. Many of us believe that the school must be conceived to be the most important social agency for conserving and developing the human race. No one has ever applied this modern conception of education with the thoroughness of the Montessori Houses of Childhood. In one aspect to which I have already referred, the Montessori teacher is a psychological observer, but in a more important aspect the Montessori teacher is a welltrained, intelligent mother, whose primary function is to see that the growing child is adjusted to his home and social environments. For this reason Montessori has included within her system of education, occupations which fit the child for domestic life, to dress himself, to feed himself, and do his share in caring for the home. The Froebelian kindergarten also emphasizes the mother aspect of the kindergartener but it is a very different kind of mother. The kindergarten-mother-teacher too often seems to make it her prime object to provide the child with a “joy ride” through the year or two preceding his arrival at school age.
These are the distinguishing characteristics of the Montessori method as I observed them in the Montessori schools at Rome, and as I derive them from Montessori’s publications. Many details of her method remain for consideration, but Dr Montessori would, I believe, leave the exact details of her method to the well-trained Montessori teacher, for she would no more wish to prescribe exact formulas for the teacher than she would prescribe them for the child. The teacher must work out her own salvation, as well as the child, and this arouses our expectation of important results from the application of the Montessori method. With Montessori, I believe we know very little concerning the natural aptitudes of the child, and that we tend to circumscribe too narrowly the possible limits of a child’s development. Out of the Montessori practice will come in time the most astonishing revelations as to what may be accomplished in child development. Already as one of its first fruits, we have learned that a little child of four or five may be taught to read and write with no more painful effort than is involved in playing with a set of blocks.
Doubtless there are details of the Montessori system which are open to criticism. However, this is not the time for criticism but for interpretation and understanding. To some it would appear that Montessori dispenses entirely with discipline. I do not believe that she goes farther than to emphasize the importance of providing for the child’s freedom in the schoolroom. Freedom and discipline appear to be contradictory educational principles. Emerson was once asked whether one of his statements did not contradict another. He replied that he had no fear of contradicting himself, indeed he had made the one statement because the world had need of it, and the contradictory statement because the world had need of that too. In the political and social life of the community, an over-emphasis on personal liberty may bring us close to the peril of license. I do not think Montessori’s practice over-emphasizes the freedom of the child in the schoolroom to the point of ignoring the importance of discipline and obedience. Moreover it is primarily a question of what is opportune, and in our present school practice, the Montessori principle of freedom certainly cannot be too greatly stressed. I know a school superintendent in a large city who requires his kindergarten teachers to follow a rigid program provided at the beginning of the school year. To secure well-disciplined pupils for his first grades, the kindergarten teachers are ordered to prohibit their pupils from speaking without having first secured the express permission of the teacher. This superintendent should be required, as an alternative to official decapitation for being an enemy of the human race, to take a course in Montessori with the hope that after having completed it, he would cease exercising his authority to cripple perhaps forever, the natural and free development of the children and teachers under his jurisdiction.
I would distinguish between the Montessori idea and the Montessori system. The Montessori idea is a group of scientific principles put together by an enthusiastic student of modern psychology. No educational system can be successfully conducted in these modern times which does not realize more or less fully that education is a social process, that it must be founded upon the approved principles and demonstrable facts of psychology, that it must look upon the free development of the child as its most important object, and that methods which psychological experts find of service in the educational treatment of exceptional children, must be applied to normal children. The Montessori system comprises a set of apparatus and definite methods of procedure. Whether this system is already complete in itself or whether it must be supplemented by additional materials of instruction and additional methods of procedure, is an open question. I do not believe Dr Montessori wants us to understand that her system is now a closed one. To my mind it is not the least valuable feature of her system, that it will never be closed, but will always develop as our knowledge of the child develops. (To be continued)
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