Herbartian education comes up in this chapter, so it will be helpful to know who he is.
Johann Friedrich Herbart 1776-1841: "In education he emphasized the importance of relating new concepts to the experience of the learner so that there would be less resistance to apperception of new ideas. He stressed the need for moral education through experience and brought the work of teaching into the area of conscious method." [more here]
Herbart's 5 steps:
"The five formal steps prescribe the order and method of procedure in an ideal lesson. PREPARE the mind for the reception of the new matter by repetition of questions which freshen the pupil's recollection of ideas related to the subject of the coming lesson. Next PRESENT the matter clearly, developing it in an orderly method. Then, or pari passu by comparison or illustration ASSOCIATE the new ideas or facts with those already familiar. After this GENERALIZE the results and finally APPLY the knowledge gained in some form of practical exercise." (Another site lists steps 4 and 5 as ILLUSTRATE the lesson's major points, and TEST students to assure they learned the lesson.)
More about Herbart
Enough background, here's the chapter:
Chapter 14 - Movement and Mental Assimilation
The teacher/directress's main job is to introduce children to learning materials and get them to the point where they're working with those materials. It's during the time that they're touching, moving, and manipulating the materials that learning is taking place. This is very much based on Herbart's philosophy [he said that the brain is like a vacant stage, and ideas clamor to take the stage. They gather in clusters with other similar ideas in the same way that children separate into groups on the playground according to what they have in common. It's a cute idea, but Charlotte Mason didn't buy it and had a lot to say against it.] Maria used the example of a hostess who wants two ladies to live together. She introduces them (the book likens this to Herbart's 'presentation') so that now the ladies recognize each other (likened to Herbartian 'apperception'). But it takes more than that to get them living together. In the same way, a Montessori directress does more than introduce the child to the materials. She has to get the child interested enough to explore and continue to use the materials on his own.
Children are always moving, they're never perfectly still [except when they're zoned out watching TV?] Montessori said that movement was necessary for the child to 'create himself,' as his senses take in information that grow his intellect and personality. [Charlotte Mason was very clear that physical movement did nothing to enlarge or enhance the mind. Only ideas and mental activity develop the mind. Physical movement developes the physical body.] Montessori said that physical movement was necessary to learn - children can't learn just by seeing and hearing. [Partially right - the brain does need to be engaged to learn. Passively receiving information via TV doesn't really teach. The mind needs to be in gear, actively taking the knowledge. Maybe Maria noticed that kids whose minds were engaged were alert and not in a vacant trance, and she confused the symptom of movement and thought it was the cause rather than the effect?] Maria said that children couldn't learn their colors if we just showed them different colors. They had to touch and feel the color boards. They wouldn't learn to read by hearing the letter sounds.They needed to handle and feel the shapes of the letters [this doesn't sound logical to me - I just don't believe it. If manipulatives speed up the process, I'd attribute that to increased interest from the child, not to the role of physical movement itself in the process.]
Maria said that physical movement and mental activity had to work in concert. She said that schools who break up intellectual effort with periods of physical movement [recess?] were like a man hopping on his right foot to refresh himself after hopping on his left foot! Nature designed the mind and body to work together: if the man used both feet and walked instead of hopping on one foot, he wouldn't tire in the first place. Maria thought that organized sports required thought while physically playing, so that would be better for developing character than gymnastics (?), but eurythmics was even better yet Eurythmics (teaching music through physical movement) requires 'interior analysis' during listening, and 'a corresponding external activity.' Therefore, Montessori believed it might 'bring about something almost resembling a moral transformation of character.' [Charlotte Mason mentioned eurythmics in her books, and not favorably as it regarded developing the mind.]
As a sidenote, the author points out that Montessori relied on practicing life skills instead of calistenics ('drill') or gymnastics for exercise/coordinaton.
While some advocated letting children run free and natural, Montessori thought that such unfocused movement did nothing for their intellect. Instead, she thought a child should channel his movements into perfecting something in himself as a way of building up his inner character. Such activities might include washing tables, arranging flowers, doing a puzzle - but the child had to want to do it. His wanting to do the activity made it his choice of work, which built up a child's confidence. Since the child needs to be free to develop/create his own self/personality, it would be wrong for his teacher to pressure him into doing any kind of character-enriching activity. [Charlotte Mason felt that it was wrong for a teacher to pressure children to learn with rewards, or threats, or too much influence over them - but not because children needed freedom from constraint to be who they needed to be. For her, it was because it destroyed their pure motive for learning. The whole idea of children needing to be free to create their own selves sounds very Rousseau-influenced, too much like the philosophy of 'I gotta be me!' and too TCS to put much stock in. I think Charlotte Mason is a better balance of child respect combined with an acceptance of their fallen nature that needs some gentle guidance.]
In contrast to Herbart's '5 steps' that focus only on the child's invisible inner mind, which is too personal and sacred for us to tamper with, Montessori felt that education should concern itself with the more visible 'peripherals' of the child - his five senses and his muscles. The child's inner self must be left alone to grow in its own way. All we can do is provide the best conditions for his peripherals [maybe the peripherals themselves are part of the 'prepared environment' that the directress orders?] and let the child work on his own inner 'centre.' So, Montessori's method provides opportunities for the child to use his muscles and his senses by presenting an environment that invites him to explore and handle and do. Every item in the classroom is carefully selected, and the goal is for all the children to be always busy at one activity or another.
Yet a room full of beautiful Montessori props is useless if the students are ignoring them. The teacher needs to make sure that a 'point of contact' is made, where the child's movements are actively involved in the music, or puzzle, or whatever materials are there. If the child's body is engaged, then his mind is engaged. Children are exposed to color, shape and sound every day in their real life, but engaging their minds so that they focus on them is what brings those things to their notice. How does the teacher make a 'point of contact'? After getting the class's focus on her by doing a group activity or song, she has to work with one child at a time. She might move a chair silently, and then challenge a child to see if he can do it without a sound. Children sometimes even help other students to take on a challenge. The goal is get the students concentrating and interacting independently with the materials. When their bodies are engaged with something intellectual, their minds are concentrating, and their focus can be intense enough not to mind distractions.
Once children have mastered the materials, they like to do it again and again until they have an explosive 'aha!' experience and intutively realize some new concept with an unusual mental leap. It's like an inspiration of genius. One common example in her schools was that pre-reading children would suddenly just start writing words.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book, and it just occurred to me that the subject of books hasn't even come up! How strange that the concept of passing ideas from one mind to the next through stories and poems and talking hasn't even been mentioned!
Read the next part of this series, or start at the beginning.
CM's Letter to the Editor regarding Montessori
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