Montessori chapter 3

This is from Maria Montessori Her Life and Work by E. Mortimer Standing.

Chapter 3

Maria's success attracted a lot of attention. Visitors came from around the world, more schools were set up, and she was persuaded by friends to write a book to safeguard her miraculous method in case anything happened to her. Her method seemed to come from nowhere because she had no teacher training, she was a medical doctor. Froebel [of Kindergarten fame] was influenced by Pestalozzi, who was influenced by Rousseau, who was influenced by John Locke. But Maria had no recognizable educational influences. She was influenced by Seguin and Itard, who were unknown in the educational field. And they were influenced by Pereira, who educated deaf mutes in Spain.

Maria was practically an overnight sensation. She decided to quit working at her school in order to evangelize the world with her discovery. She would live off her book royalties and travel to give courses in her method. [A friend just today speculated that perhaps Charlotte Mason never achieved the kind of household-word status that Montessori and Waldorf did because she was focused on improving the education within England, while Montessori and Steiner actively promoted their methods to the world at large.]

She went to America and impressed Alexander Graham Bell, who was interested in deaf mutes, and Thomas Edison. Five thousand people came to hear her at Carnegie Hall. She set up a model classroom at the San Francisco World Exhibition. But, although the movement started off so enthusiastically in the US, she didn't stay to help mold it. She returned to Europe. And, without her guidance, the movement became 'diluted' in the US as less and less teachers were trained by her and understood her original method.

In Europe, special schools were built with everything downsized to children's scale. Her books were translated into many languages. In 1919, she went to England amidst much acclaim [this would have been during the last years of Charlotte Mason's life.] EM Standing notes her insight into children, her strong yet charming personality, her devotion to her mission, as some of the reasons for her popularity. But she was afraid that people would think of her method as merely a miracle for kindergarten, and she felt that what she had discovered would have implications into adulthood, and would permeate homes and all of society in a few generations. But that would only happen if her principles were adhered to exactly [Charlotte Mason said the same thing about her own principles.] And she felt that the only way to prevent her ideas from being misunderstood and misapplied was to stop traveling and evangelizing, and devote herself to study and development of her method to older children, and give lectures to pass on her vision directly to as many people as possible. She lectured in India during WWII and met Ghandi. She traveled and lectured into her old age, with the help of her son Mario [she had a son? The book never mentioned that development! There was no mention of her marriage or any of her personal relationships, except her mother.] She died suddenly in 1952 in Holland at the age of 81. She was Catholic, and was buried in a Catholic cemetary in Holland.

This isn't the end of the book, it's just the opening biography. I think the rest of the book deals with her method.

Read the next part of this series, or start at the beginning.

Sunlight, sort of

It were an excellent lightbulb that were made just in the midway between this and the old one. The one is too like a tungsten and says nothing and the other too like the doctor's office's flourescent bulbs, evermore bluish.

(Read Tim's Mom's earlier post if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

New Term

We're starting Term 2 on Monday. That means that I need to make sure we have all the books we need, divide etexts into 12 readings, and print off a schedule for each student. I started last night.

My Year 4 student, age 9, is having trouble with Year 4. He doesn't understand It Couldn't Just Happen, Madame How and Lady Why, Kon Tiki, and Age of Fable. He's struggling with Poor Richard. He's hopelessly behind in Robinson Crusoe, even though that's one we have on audio CD. I've been trying to catch him up, reading to him, re-working his schedule, trying an easier version of a book. But it's been three weeks and it just isn't happening. Plus we have other issues to focus on in the area of self-discipline.

So, I'm removing him from Year 4. He did Year 3 just a few months ago (come to think of it, that was a struggle for him, too.) So I'm creating a Year 3 1/2 for him for the next two terms, then he'll start Year 4 over again next year when he's a little older. Here's what he'll be doing:

History: A Child's History of the World by Virgil Hillyer (the whole book)
Historical literature: Otto of the Silver Hand and/or Men of Iron, both by Howard Pyle
Geography: Elementary Geography by Charlotte Mason (online here, but missing a few pages)
Nature Reading: Bambi (we have this, unabridged, on CD, read by yours truly)
Science: The Sciences by Edward Holden (online here)
Math: continue with his Math-U-See
Daily copywork and studied dictation
Typing program
Literature: Heidi and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew

He'll join the rest of the family for Plutarch, Shakespeare, poetry, art, music appreciation, and nature study. He'll be reading A Child's History of the World, The Sciences, Elementary Geography, and (maybe) Otto of the Silver Hand. I'll be reading aloud Men of Iron, Heidi, Five Little Peppers, and I already read Bambi onto a CD. I hope to schedule him so that he has one or two things to read, and one thing to listen to every day.

Maria Montessori - Chapter 2

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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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. ;) ]

Read the next part of this series or start at the beginning.

Sunlight!

We found a "Compact Flourescent Sunlight Bulb" at Walmart and put it in our family room. And it makes it look like we opened a window! Even the shadows it casts look nicer. I love it, if we had a few more, it could always look like daytime in here.

This could change my life!

All Mozart

I promised a friend I'd post this. I still haven't listened to it yet. They boast 24 hours of Mozart.

http://www.live365.com/stations/mozartmp3

About the pictures in the middle of the book

There's a center section of photos in the book about Maria Montessori. The first is a portrait of her, a very strong-looking, handsome woman. A picture of little kids outside on "washing day," washing clothes in wooden sinks and hanging them on a short clothes line. A beautiful, orderly classroom with shelves, drawers, and a walled little corner with things hanging from the wall. It looks like it could be kitchen utinsels, but the picture is too small to make it out. A little boy (three or four) at a table with two sandpaper touchboards. Each board has some areas that are smooth, and some areas that are covered with sandpaper to teach "rough" and "smooth." (It seems like a lot of work to me to teach something that kids will learn just from handling things in the routine of their daily lives.) Large paper cut-out cursive letters with a boy of about ten arranging them to make words (who cut out all those letters?) A girl writing words on a lined chalkboard. Number rods. The manipulatives to teach addition are longer than the child! I imagine that, these days, manipulatives have been scaled down to a more handleable size. Four children arranging events along a long timeline. The timeline is so long (twenty feet?) that it's laying outside on the lawn. Children working with a pegboard to figure out a mathematical equation. And, finally, an aged Maria Montessori with a small child.

At first glance, the materials look impractical and expensive. I would think that children, being designed to learn, could learn without special equipment, or, when equipment helps, that simpler is better. I may be showing my CM bias. Earlier this evening I was wondering why I decided to read this book (what was I thinking!) And then I remembered. I had read an editorial that Charlotte Mason wrote in the early 1900's reacting to the flurry of interest in Maria Montessori when she was the newest trend in education. I thought I'd understand CM's letter better if I understood more about the Montessori method. So, here I am, reading the book, but I feel so biased that I'm not sure I can read with an open mind.

So, this will be Maria Montessori as seen through the eyes of a very biased CM educator.



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If you want to know more about Charlotte Mason, you can start with this FAQ. You can also read CM's six-volume series online, including an in-progress modern English paraphrase, here.

Maria Montessori Her Life and Work ch 1

Miss Roxie still doesn't have her copy of Pride and Prejuduce, so we aren't starting that book yet. So, what shall I read?? I'm itching to start The Lord of the Rings, but I can't find a copy I like, something small and hardbound that fits nicely in my hand and is lovely to hold and look at. Which leaves the book about Maria Montessori that I've been talking about reading for months. So, that's what I'm going to read. Here's what I got out of the first chapter.

Maria Montessori Her Life and Work by E. Mortimer Standing, written in 1962

Chapter 1

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was born in Italy, an only child. She sounds like a determined, confident (perhaps to the point of bordering on arrogant), and ambitious child. She wanted to be a mathmetician in an era when women only had nursing or teaching careers open to them. So she went to an all boys school! Then she changed her mind and decided to go for biology, then changed her mind again and decided to be a doctor against her father's wishes. She was the only girl in her medical classes, and, because of rules about co-ed dissections of cadavers, she had to dissect after dark by herself - a spooky prospect, but she was determined enough not to let that deter her. She held her own when the guys gave her a tough time and earned their respect, though not necessarily their affection. She paid her own way through the university by tutoring.

At one point, she was discouraged and ready to give up. As she walked home, she saw a beggar woman with a toddler. As the woman begged for money, Maria watched the child happily playing with a scrap of paper, totally oblivious to her plight of poverty. That inspired Maria not to give up, so she continued with her medical training.

When she graduated, her mother supported her, but her father still disapproved. Critics who disapproved of a woman doctor were ready to heckle and protest at her first medical lecture. Her father was persuaded to attend by an acquaintance and she was so brilliant that she earned his approval and even stopped the critics from causing a scene at the lecture. She was chosen to represent Italy at a feminist convention in Berlin. She spoke out for working women, then went to another convention in England to speak against child labor.

As a doctor, she was assigned to a psychiatric clinic, where she had to visit insane asylums. There, she saw idiot children (?) mixed in with the lunatics and her heart went out to them. After being given their food, the children would scavenge the floor for crumbs. The nurses were disgusted by the children's lack of refined manners, but Maria realized that they had no toys, they were treated like cattle, and grabbing crumbs were their way of reaching out for tactile experiences to feed their minds. She thought that they might benefit from some kind of educational attempt. She began to work with two French doctors whose lives were dedicated to 'defective' children - Jean Itard (who worked with deaf mutes) and Edouard Seguin (famed for his work with deficient children). Maria told an educational congress that those children were entitled to an education as much as normal children. The result was an orthophrenic school in Italy, with Maria as its director for two years - 1899-1901. Deficient children from regular schools were deposited there, as well as the idiot children from the asylums in Rome. Maria visited London and Paris to learn how others were dealing with these kinds of children. Then she returned to Rome to observe and study the children themselves. She spent 13 hours a day with the children, and then she stayed up late writing her observations and assembling plans for their education.

She decided that the method that was working for these children should be used with all children. After all, if the methods were rational enough to get through the mind of even imbeciles, wouldn't it work with anyone? [This, I think, is what alarmed Charlotte Mason - that someone would have so little respect for the personalities of children that they would presume to think that methods that worked for idiot children would be good for all children across the board.] With her direction, these defective children learned to read and write and even did as well on public exams as normal children. While the world marvelled at the miracle she had wrought with imbeciles, she was wondering why normal children weren't scoring higher on their exams than defective children. She decided it was a lack in their education. She felt that the methods she had used with idiot children could 'develop and set free the personality' of normal children.

In 1901, she gave up her position at the school and went back to the university to study philosophy and psychology, and to reflect on her theories about education. She felt a need to clarify her vision and theory. She translated long books by Itard and Seguin from French into Italian, a labor of love for her admiration of their work. She also studied the nervous diseases of children and was an examiner/lecturer at a teaching college. In her lectures she emphasized that the teacher's duty was to help, not to judge, and that real mental work doesn't exhaust the mind, but nourishes the spirit (that sounds CM-ish!) Some of her students said, "Her lectures make us want to be good."

There is a story of how, as a doctor, she paid a housecall to a woman who had just given birth to twins who were nearly dead. She lit a fire, held the babies and brought them back to life. Years later, the mother credited Maria as being their real mother, since it was she who had given them back their lives.

Read the next part of this series.
Read about the pictures in the book.
Read Charlotte Mason's Letter to the Editor about Montessori that prompted me to read this book.

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If you want to know more about Charlotte Mason, you can start with this FAQ. You can also read CM's six-volume series online, including an in-progress modern English paraphrase, here.

Miss M's New Kitchen

Miss M got a little kitchen set for Christmas. She has an assortmrnt of little dishes and toy food that have been collected over the past twelve years since her big brother was a toddler. She doesn't seem to know what to do with the stove or the oven. I guess I haven't been the best example!

I made her a little teabag. It's a tiny bean bag with about ten pony beads inside. She knows exactly what to do with that. She puts the little bag in her little toy mug with pretend water from the toy sink, and then pops the cup in the little toy microwave oven to make tea, just like Mommy.

The teabag

She probably needs a little toy blender so she can make pretend green smoothies! LOL!

Christmas!

One of the things I love about Christmas - cards and pictures! We hang the cards from the top of the doorway between our dining room and family room, and we put the pictures under the glass on our table so we can see them throughout the month.

Daddy and Miss M.