In Italy, an experimental group of apartments was built to house the poor. During the day, the parents would go to work and the school-aged children would go to school, leaving the preschool children unsupervised. It was decided that a daycare should be set up to confine them, and Maria was eager to be assigned to their care so she could test her new theories on 'normal' children. She wasn't allowed a school budget, but she was able to order 'office equipment.' So she had school furniture built and labeled 'office furniture': little tables, shelves, cabinets, and small arm chairs. She began with sixty wild, frightened children between the ages of 3-6. Two unskilled, untrained young ladies were hired to assist her. They had no teacher training, so she didn't need to un-train them.
Though everyone doubted that anything could be done with such disadvantaged children, within six months, the results were surprising. Maria felt that she had discovered a treasure: that all children, even these disadvantaged ones, have inborn characteristics that are natural to all children. Even their impoverished lives couldn't take that from them.
These are the inborn traits she discovered:
1 - They're capable of amazing mental concentration. During a time of discovery or mastery of some task, children can be oblivious to anything but the task at hand.
2 - This can manifest itself in a love (or compulsion?) for repetion of something they've already mastered or something familiar. The Montessori method allows for this necessary repetition.
3 - Children love order and love putting things where they belong. Maria discovered that the window of opportunity in which a habit of order develops is between the ages of 1 and 3 1/2.
4 - Children like to know their options and make choices. If they're trained to be orderly soon enough, they can be allowed free and independent use of classroom resources and be trusted to put them away when they're done.
5 - Children prefer to work at a task than to free-play with toys.
6 - Normal children prefer to do the right thing when they know how to do it regardless of punishment or reward. In Maria's schools, the only reward her students valued was accomplishing a task and getting to move up to the next one.
7 - Children naturally love quiet.
8 - Maria's students rejected candy (only when absorbed with a task?)
9 - Children have their own sense of dignity. As an example, they prefer to have clean noses if only someone will show them how to blow their nose.
10 - Many of her students requested instruction in reading at 4 or 5 years of age. Once they learned the sounds ans shapes of the letters, they were compelled of their own accord to write words on any surface they could find, even though they had never been taught to write, and they were overjoyed to be able to do this. Yet they still weren't reading. They were enjoying the game of making words, but still hadn't made the connection that written words could communicate thought. Maria got them reading by writing some words of her own. She wrote simple instructions, such as, 'if you want a kiss, come to me.' It was days before her students realized that she was writing more than random words, but once they ubderstood, they were eager to de-code her clues and thus began reading.
11 - In a well-run Montessori school, children naturally become harmonious and self-disciplined so that unruliness is nonexistent. Maria's explanation for this was that the cosmic order that holds the universe together is born in each human, and children will naturally yield to it if the circumstances make it natural to do that.
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I'm seeing a lot of the same discoveries that Charlotte Mason found in her work with children - that children want to do useful, organized things and they don't need the prompt of any bribe or reward. And they both noted the dignity that children have. But Maria Montessori seems to have latched onto the physical doing of development - the need to touch and accomplish and write. I don't see any reference to the children's minds - to their imaginations and aspirations and inner yearning for God. In contrast to Charlotte Mason's use of great, inspiring stories from history and literature in which to enrich their imaginations and play, Maria Montessori found that children, when given toys, preferred the accomplishment and busyness of work. Maybe that's because she was working with children from such deprived backgrounds?
[This post composed on PDA. ;) ]
My Thoughts
I'm seeing a lot of the same discoveries that Charlotte Mason found in her work with children - that children want to do useful, organized things and they don't need the prompt of any bribe or reward. And they both noted the dignity that children have. But Maria Montessori seems to have latched onto the physical doing of development - the need to touch and accomplish and write. I don't see any reference to the children's minds - to their imaginations and aspirations and inner yearning for God. In contrast to Charlotte Mason's use of great, inspiring stories from history and literature in which to enrich their imaginations and play, Maria Montessori found that children, when given toys, preferred the accomplishment and busyness of work. Maybe that's because she was working with children from such deprived backgrounds?
[This post composed on PDA. ;) ]
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