Yoga

I've been meaning to try yoga for a couple of years, for stretching, mainly. Driving to a class is inconvenient, so I wanted a DVD that I could follow on my own. Basic Yoga Workout for Dummies (Sara Ivanhoe is the instructor) was a good choice, the instructor goes really slow, explains everything step by step, and even tells where you should be feeling it. And it's strictly breathing and stretching, no new age spiritualism. For someone like me who won't be going to a class, it's the perfect place to begin.

Now I'm ready for something else, a routine that takes you through 20 minutes of stretching without stopping for a few minutes between each pose to explain things, so that you spend an hour to do twelve stretches. I'm trying Yoga Zone Ultimate Collection, it has more than one disk and got great reviews at amazon.com.

Others that were recommended:
Yoga Zone beginner videos
Crunch: Candlelight Yoga for a relaxing, flowing practice, with a similar difficulty level
Rodney Yee for beginners
Yoga Zone Intermediate Flexibility and Stress release
Beyond Basic Yoga for Dummies
Crunch Fat Burning yoga video that has the same upbeat instructor
Living Arts

Name That Earworm

I was tagged by MerryK at Beth Spera in Domino to play the earworm game.

"This game is simple. It has one rule: Name the song(s) that are ruthlessly stuck in your head at the moment (scientific name: earworms) And be honest. Ruthlessly honest."

Yesterday it was a song from Little Orphan Annie, but today I'm FREE!

I wish I knew what was playing in my head right now. It's a very short clip of orchestral music, rather high and ethereal, alternating between a major and a minor chord. My suspicion is that it's from the Two Towers soundtrack, because we just watched that movie a couple days ago. I have a bad habit of remembering music from a movie without remembering which movie it belongs to.

Also:
The Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera (I've not seen the movie, but I heard the song once years ago and it's been in my head ever since)
The battle music from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Quite thrilling.

"Merry so kindly tagged almost everyone I knew," and Pippin and my Mom did the rest. So I'll have to tag--You! Ha, you're it.

:D

Earworm Game

I was tagged by Pipsqueak at the Common Room to do "this Earworm thingy."

"This game is simple. It has one rule: Name the song(s) that are ruthlessly stuck in your head at the moment (scientific name: earworms) And be honest. Ruthlessly honest."

It's been an odd morning, with the strangest songs running through my mind. In fact, they're so unusual for me that I had to look them up to know what to call them.

Gee, Officer Krupke from West Side Story
"Thou Art Worthy" chorus
Mother's Little Helper by the Rolling Stones

I'm going to tag Miss Roxie (who will undoubtedly have some interesting song running through her mind!)
BetsyPage (I can't even imagine what kind of music runs through her mind!)
Dawn ;) who will probably name a beautiful song :)
Donna-Jean, who, no matter what I think she might post, will post something totally unexpected !

Pride and Prejudice

I finally started the book! I just picked it up and read chapter 1 aloud. As it happens, my sons were listening and they enjoyed it. It was a short chapter. They asked me to continue, so I read three more chapters.

I think that, without the movie, I would have missed a lot of the humor of the dialog. This is a case where I'm glad I saw the movie first. My friend at Thimble Cottage has her book and has been informed that we've started and gotten to chapter 4. Miss Roxie has probably read ahead of both of us by now.

If anyone wants to join us, you should know that we're all using the Barnes and Noble pocket-sized Collector's Library edition of the book so we can refer to page numbers.

We're about to finish up our family readaloud, which has been Little Men. We've decided to spend this new year in Howard Pyle's King Arthur series. We'll read as many as we can until we either read them all, or get tired of them and decide to move on to something else.

Maria Montessori ch 6

Maria Montessori Her Life and Work by E. Mortimer Standing

Chapter 6

The Montessori method is a "living system." You can't single out any one part of it, any more than you can reduce the Charlotte Mason method to narration or living books. It needs all of the tenets, working together. Montessori's 'prepared environment' needs a 'directress' between it and the students, which also requires liberty and the teacher's non-intervention [I'm not familiar with Montessori, so the terms are a mystery to me.] The most fundamental principle in Montessori is the difference between children and adults [unlike CM, where children are seen as not all that different from adults, except that they lack knowledge and experience.] Montessori saw children as growing and changing, while adults had reached the 'norm of the species,' and were more static. A caterpillar has certain characteristics and a certain diet. Then it stops eating and becomes a chrysalis. Then it reaches its norm and is finally a butterfly. In the same way, children pass through different stages until they finally reach the 'norm,' the butterfly stage. Even their proportions change--they start with large heads and their bodies gradually catch up. Their minds also have different developmental stages:

From birth to six years, they're in the "absorbent mind" stage. They absorb impressions, sense of self, language from the world unconsciously for their first three years, and consciously for the next three years. The unconscious absorbent mind is out of our reach, there's nothing we can do to teach it, it has to do its work on its own. But we can provide the best conditions for it to work, such as a prepared environment. The unconscious absorbing mind creates faculties, such as memory, ego and will, so that, by three years old, the child can consciously manipulate his environment and process information, mostly through his hands. The absorbent mind needs a prepared child-friendly environment where it can move freely and get what it needs independently.

From six to twelve years, children experience a period of 'uniform growth.' They grow at a more steady rate, are more stable, and get sick less often. This is when children grow mentally and collect cultural knowledge. Their ego grows (making them more boastful and competitive), they develop a herd instinct that makes them crave peer acceptance, and they become reasonable and concerned with issues of fairness and conscience. What worked with the absorbent mind doesn't work with humans in this stage of development, but the tendencies of this age can be harnessed and taken advantage of by the teacher. Thus, a Montessori grade school would look nothing like a Montessori kindergarten.

From twelve to eighteen, children are in a period of transformation, first with puberty, then adolescence. This is a delicate time of bodily changes, mental growth, emotional turbulence and self-consciousness. Adults need to be sympathetic, understanding and help build the child's confidence. An inferiority complex at this age could set up social problems that last a lifetime. Montessori envisioned land settlements ('Erde Kinder') where adolescents' entire lives would revolve around social adjustment: a 'prepared environment' just for teens. (I'm not making this up!) As in the other stages, independence and confidence are the goals.

Children would be taught to have faith in God for their inner selves, and faith in themselves and their abilities to succeed in society.

My Thoughts

This smacks of 1970's pop psychology to me. I don't see that the child is taught how to control their own impulses and taught what their duty to others is, as Charlotte Mason emphasized. This is what comes, I suppose, of Montessori picking up her ideas of childhood development from a medical/psychological perspective in insane asylums.

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

Montessori Ch 5

Maria Montessori Her Life and Work by E. Mortimer Standing

Chapter 5

What distinguished the Montessori method is that her students worked on their own, of their own accord. Maria believed strongly in spontaneous intellectual activity and based her method on it. If students have to be coaxed to work, then their subjects aren't being presented properly. Working is natural and the mind was designed to work. So, all that needed to be done to get students to do the work that came naturally (sorting, comparing) was to remove hindrances. [CM also believed that learning came naturally, and that, with the right kind of lessons, children wouldn't need to be coaxed to do their schoolwork.] Infants, for instance, work hard to make sense of the world they're born into. As humans, we never complete the process of making sense of the information that comes into our lives like random jigsaw puzzle pieces. Sizes of things in relation to one another stumps children, so they willingly work with Montessori cylinders trying to work out the size concept in their minds [but do Montessori children working with cylinders figure it out any sooner than children who naturally mature into that understanding without the benefit of Montessori cylinders?] Time (past, present and future) is vague to children, a mysterious concept.

Children have to learn the difference between what's real, what's imaginary, and what's a dream. To Maria, filling them with stories was confusing. It put adults in the position of perpetuating the confusion between real and imaginary. Parents tell children fantasy stories, and then punish the child for lying. In earliest years, reality is amazing enough to enchant children. They don't need fantasy.

Even with all the confusing mysteries and frustrating complexities of the world, children are always eager and ready to learn about it. They never give up and get tired of learning. Every day, they wake up excited about discovering, experimenting, examining. Even babies are never idle. They're constantly busy exploring and trying things.

My Thoughts

Charlotte Mason also marveled at children's abilities to keep busy learning all the time. See chapter 7 (pg 65) of Home Education, the first book in her series. But rather than devise apparatus to speed the process, she says, "Nature teaches so gently, so gradually, so persistently, that he is never overdone, but goes on gathering little stores of knowledge about whatever comes before him." I suspect that a child's natural environment is the best place for him to figure out concepts, and that a contrived Montessori environment isn't necessary. Perhaps, considered from the perspective of a long life, it isn't really even helpful, since children will learn those concepts with or without special equipment like cylinders. There are better ways to spend money than on tools specifically designed to teach what will be picked up in the course of a normal childhood.

----------------------------------

Read the next part of this series, or start at the beginning.
CM's Letter to the Editor regarding Montessori
About the Pictures in the Book

Five Weird Things - The Game

I was tagged by Pipsqueak of The Common Room to play.

"Rules: People who get tagged need to write an entry about their 5 quirky habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next 5 people to be tagged and list their names."

1. I perform one-man renditions of booming orchestral pieces, which usually means an arrangement for humming, singing, whistling, and hand-slapping.

2. I've tried the wardrobe several times. And the closet. No snow or trees yet, but I'm still looking.

3. I know two different ways to hold a fork and three different ways to hold a pencil, and use them all.

4. I coated my hair in talcum powder once. It was a makeup test for Gandalf; but it didn't work.

5. I took a couple weeks of thinking and analyzing (alright, overanalyzing) before I wrote this. (See below.)


Five People I Tag:
Tim's Mom of Rusticanda
Just Here for Now and Madam Blueberry of Sunny Day
Anyone else who wants to participate
And...and that's all.


What do we mean by weird? Something that isn't normal. What defines normal in this case? Is it what is usual for homeschoolers? Or usual for our time? Or usual for humanity throughout history? Is it what ought to be despite what is? But how can we know what ought to be? (For although our Lord lived a perfect life, it doesn't model for us the specifics of modern living.) When we speak of a weird trait or doing, do we mean something unique that separates us from the rest of humanity, or do we mean something that does not conform to our abstract idea of an average person? Is weirdness absolute and objective, or is it something that each person defines for themselves? If the latter is the case, then how can we be sure that we are all talking about the same thing? Unless, of course, the purpose of this survey or game is to get an idea of the average idea of weirdness.

In a nutshell, without a definite "normal" there can't be a definite "weird". I suppose telling weird things about myself to people I've never seen, via a journal that doesn't materially exist, might seem weird to some.

Tag, I'm It! (Doesn't this game have a name?)

I was tagged by BetsyPage!

Four jobs you've had in your life:

1. babysitter
2. fast food worker
3. military cook
4. drug store cashier

Four movies you would watch over and over:

1. Pride and Prejudice (the BBC/A&E miniseries)
2. Our Mutual Friend (BBC miniseries)
3. Wuthering Heights, the old black and white with Lawrence Olivier and Merle Oberon)
4. Bambi

Four places you have lived:

1. Rhode Island
2. northeast Florida
3. Okinawa
4. San Diego

Four TV shows you love to watch :
I don't watch TV, but if I did:
1. a vegetarian cooking show
2. a remodeling show
3. Eduardian House/Colonial House series
4. almost any cooking or home improvement shows

Four places you have been on vacation:

1. The Grand Canyon
2. Seoul, Korea
3. Yosemite
4. Epcot Center

Four websites you visit daily:

1. Ambleside Online yahoogroups (I'm on no-mail and check the list online)
2. CMSeries yahoogroups
3. GCM message board
4. The Common Room blog

Four of your favorite foods:
1. Pad Thai
2. cake with sugar icing, especially the corner piece with LOTS of icing
3. baked salmon or sushi
4. peanut butter or sweetened coconut

Four places you would rather be right now:

1. back in Dallas with my Ambleside Online friends
2. Ambleside, England
3. in the theater seeing the Narnia movie
4. at a Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo, Hawaii

Four bloggers you are tagging:

1. Miss Roxie
2. Tim
3. Thimble Cottage
4. Mama Squirrel

CM's Letter to the Editor regarding Montessori - paraphrased

I wanted to re-read the Letter to the Editor of The Times that Charlotte Mason wrote about Maria Montessori. It was that letter that prompted me to find out more about Montessori, to see what made it so different that CM didn't like it. But, in order to pinpoint exactly what Charlotte Mason took issue with, I had to re-word her letter into dumbed-down English so I could understand what she was saying. And, having done the work, I thought I'd post it. :)

I'm guessing that this letter is from 1918, or thereabouts. Thanks to Aimee Natal, not only for posting Charlotte Mason's letter, but for redirecting me to its new location on the web.


Note that this is my own paraphrase. You can read CM's original wording here. (I think Charlotte Mason made up the story about the toe-writing schools in Kranconopolis.)

Update Jan 2010 - Aimee took the original offline, but I found a scan of the original draft of this at the new Charlotte Mason Digital Collection of archives, hosted at Redeemer University College in Canada. I wish I could provide a quick link, but the direct link doesn't seem to load. Go to their search page, here. Then, search for the term "Montessori." Choose this one: "Draft articles by Charlotte Mason with copy letters to newspapers". That will open up a multi-page pdf file. Scroll through the images, and it starts at about the third image - there's a total of five or six pages.

~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ .

Dear Sir,

I'd like to remind your readers of an experiment that was tried a hundred years ago in the city of Kranconopolis. One of their citizens had been very impressed by the abilities of a man who had lost both of his arms as a child, but had made up for his lack of fingers by using his toes. The man was a bit of an artist, and he painted pictures, wrote, knitted, and carved with his toes. No matter what he crafted, his work was better than the work of most people who had hands.

One person who observed this recognized an educational principle: that whenever there's a deficiency, Nature never fails to make up for it by compensating in another area. He reasoned like this:

'Progress in any skill is the result of concentrated focus. Children who have hands don't do well at writing because it's too easy to write when you have hands. So they take it for granted and don't give it their full attention. But what if we taught them to write with their toes? That's a lot more challenging and interesting. Then they'll be sure to pay attention, and they should make great progress.'

The idea caught on. The people of Kranconopolis, who loved hearing about new and novel ideas, eagerly supported his idea, and several Toe-Writing schools were established. Children between the ages of two to six had the most success because their muscles were more flexible. Besides, they were fascinated by their toes and they loved the carefully graduated exercises with needles, toothpicks, and skewers. Of course, their hands had to be tied behind them so they wouldn't use their fingers, but once that was done, their progress was remarkable. Many people went to see, and Toe-Writing schools were started in several neighboring states. With observant and carefully trained teachers, the children learned to read and write at about the same time they normally would have in spite of their handicap because they weren't as restless when they were busy with their reading lessons. No distractions such as songs or stories were used that didn't encourage toe-writing, either directly or indirectly.

As I said, the results were amazing. When they finally went to other schools, they were a full year ahead of their classmates. But that wasn't all. The friendly support and attention they had received from people visiting the schools gave them an easy, relaxed manner. And, because their toes were so important, they required some care, and the children got used to walking delicately, which made them graceful and dignified. Toe-Writing was lauded as one of the most important scientific developments of the age, and Toe-Writing schools became even more widespread than the previously popular 'Tasting Schools.' People reasoned, 'After all, isn't tasting good things a lot like bribery?'

I hope I won't be accused of writing flippantly about a serious and noble endeavor. The insightful article in the educational section of November 6's Times about The Montessori Method compels me to comment about such items as the cheerfulness and contentment of the children. If children have a pleasant room that's made comfortable for them, and friendly visitors who make nice comments about what they're doing, it's only natural that they'll be relaxed and open. If the school appeals to children and their parents, and they have to be clean to be allowed in, then of course their parents will make sure they're clean. America has understood for a long time how to make free American citizens out of the diverse crowds of immigrants who come into the country using practically the same methods that Dr. Montessori uses. The delightful spontaneity of her young Italian students isn't limited to her schools. It's just as evident in every English home and cottage school, as well as in our summer schools. No child under the age of six should go to a school that doesn't allow him the full freedom to run, or squat, or lay face down on the floor if the mood strikes him.

A few years ago I wrote to an educational journal suggesting that schools for very young children be held on the roof, except in bad weather. I still think that long hours in the open air with twice as much time to play as work is what children need. In Germany, as we know, children start school at age six, and a child entering school is proud of the milestone of beginning his eight-year education. But sometimes the preschool child at home is in his mother's way, so he's sent off to some little school they call Kindergarten. Perhaps the flat roof of a bigger school would be a better place to send him.

But 'I tire of unlimited freedom; my chance whims feel like a burden' is as true for children as it is for us grownups, and for the poet who wrote those words. We need the ease and discipline of good habits to save us the effort of having to make lots of minor decisions such as, 'which foot goes after which?' Making liberty a religion will raise up the next generation to be vagabonds. And, as far as Montessori's extensive school diet of geometric forms and colored boards, we know what Dickens said about that in his tragic story of young Gradgrinds at his school. We would all benefit from learning it by heart.

But it isn't the charming manners or the harmony and freedom of the Montessori schools that are attracting so many education experts that Switzerland alone has 70 of these schools. We all strive for these things in our schools, and we're grateful to Dr. Montessori for showing us a way to do it. But let's be honest. Her children can read and write by age four or five, while our own children don't master those skills until age eight. That's what appeals to us about her method. But we forget that education is more than the mechanics of reading and writing. Such skills don't educate any more than mastering shorthand, or Morse Code. But we get excited thinking that, by teaching these mechanics earlier, we'll gain two or three years of school life. But this is nothing new or novel. We've all heard that young boys in the slums of Russia learn Hebrew very quickly because there's nothing else for them to learn. All people who train animals, acrobats and musical prodigies know that the secret of ensuring focused concentration is to shut out any and all other interests and pursuits. If you remove all distractions, you can get young children to do almost anything by channeling all of their effort in one direction.

If we don't count the charming manners, the personal neatness, and the early success at the mechanics of reading and writing, since all of these are pretty generally achieved with similar means, what principles are left for us to imitate? I can't find any principles. All I see is a practice--the practice of learning the shapes of letters and other things by touch instead of by sight. It's hard to see the logic of preferring the less accurate and less active sense of touch over sight. The blindfolded children feeling shapes to discern their form remind me of the famous saying, 'Whenever the nose puts his spectacles on in the daylight or by candle light, the eyes should be closed.' You can try it yourself. Touch whatever's closest at hand that has an outline, such as your own nose or mouth. Even after a lot of patient feeling, you won't know what you're touching unless your memory cheats and tells you. But possibly, if you were to touch certain specified objects for a prescribed number of minutes every day for months, you might finally be able to accurately draw a mouth, or write the letter 'm.' At first, the act of touching is boring. But after a while, it becomes soothing and you enter a tactile sensuous state of being, a little bit hypnotic. If you look at pictures of children in Italy and America doing their touch exercises, they do seem to be in a hypnotic state.

We know that the use of hypnotic suggestion is helping to advance education in some Continental schools. This might be a clue as to why children seem to suddenly and spontaneously have the ability to write, as we've been so excited to read about. But there may be reason for caution here. A child who is too easy will become an adult whose will power has been weakened, and whose brain has been overtaxed so that he's not able to direct his own will effectively. The fact that normal, eager, active children have been beguiled to continuously touch objects seems to indicate that they've been subjected to too much outside influence, whether it's the influence of the touching itself, or the influence of someone else's will.

It's claimed that 'giving the eyes a break by developing and using the sense of touch' is good for education. But we haven't even determined whether this unnatural practice is safe. Blind people learn to read by touch. If we decide to use this method in schools for older children, we'll need lots of bulky books in Braille. But a blind person doesn't need any coaxing or beguiling to learn Braille because he does it out of necessity, and his own will motivates him, canceling any hypnotic effect that the act of sensory touching might have as he learns Braille. We can't make ourselves and our children blind, and why should we? Light and natural, routine use is good for our eyes, it makes them stronger. Darkness and lack of use will make them lazy and useless.

The Montessori method is just one of many experiments being carried out in the interest of educational science. 'I don't believe there's no such thing,' said Betsy Prig [from Martin Chuzzlewit, by Dickens] Would she say that about educational science? And, if she did, would she be right? I think she would, even though every advance we make furthers educational 'science.' Practically speaking, the message of this kind of method seems to be, 'If you develop a child's senses, he'll be educated. If you train his eye and hand so he can earn a living, what more does he need?' But a child trained like that is not even as well educated as the native American Indian children we read about when we were children. Montessori children's senses aren't nearly as acute, and the Indian children had the added advantage of growing up with songs, and dance, and tales and legends. They developed a philosophy of life and even a religion early in their lives.

But Montessori students don't have that opportunity. Yes, they develop one of their senses, but it's at the expense of the sense of sight, which is even more important. And there's no chance to gradually paint a lively backdrop in his mind that will enrich his life. No fairies play in his imagination, no heroes stir his soul, God and the good angels form no part of his thoughts. The child and the adult he'll become are nothing more than a scientifically created phenomena, produced as the result of a lot of sensory tactile experience and a little seeing and hearing. Intangible, vague things like ideas have no place in science, and are thus left out. Science encourages the child to take hold of physical life, matching shapes with shapes and colors with colors. But songs and pictures, hymns and stories are tossed aside like unnecessary garbage. We're grateful to Maria Montessori, the gracious Italian lady who showed us that, if we treat children with courtesy and consideration, we'll see the dignity and grace that are within every child. She showed us that children's rights include the freedom to educate themselves, and she showed us that every human being is precious and worthy of honor, especially during childhood. But I think that's where our gratitude ends. The expensive equipment needed in her method, and the reliance on sensory touch instead of sight, and developing the senses at the exclusion of everything else, are serious mistakes.

I have deep contentions with her method. Man is more than a purely physical being whose brain discharges thoughts in the same way that the liver produces bile. Man's body is merely the physical and spiritually tuned housing for a non-physical being. It's been said about this being:

'Even though darkness might blind his eyes, it can't limit his imagination. Even while confined to bed, he might be, like Pompey and his sons, in various places in the universe. He might be enjoying the vast world within his own mind.'

Anyone who wants to teach children needs to decide whether man is just physical, or something more. It can't be both ways, and even the most trivial detail of the school day will line up with one or the other of these two fundamental perspectives. One method is scientific education. The other is humane education. Both methods cultivate the senses and exercise the muscles, but for different reasons, and with a different goal in mind. To give just one example, scientific education (such an inaccurate phrase for it!) encourages a child to sort various boards by colors in the vague hope that, while handling the colored boards, the child's mind just might secrete wonderful thoughts about all kinds of beautiful colored things. But the humane teacher has his own philosophy. He knows that a child who's playing with colored boards is using his imagination to apply that color to the classroom, or the street, or even the whole world. If the teacher decides to go out of his way to teach something that the child would pick up on his own anyway, it won't be with contrived artificial equipment. It will be with real things that the child recognizes from the world--things like leaves, flowers, beads, scraps of velvet or silk that the child already has mental associations with, and that might inspire more ideas in the child's mind. And the child might do more than mentally pave streets. He might imagine a beautiful tower in the midst of bright gardens with winding brooks and sunny patches of leaves. The humane teacher realizes that the lesson itself isn't the end. The lesson is merely a scrap of raw material that a child uses to help him speculate about the world. Because of that, a lesson is successful only if it lends itself to reflection and imagination. An artist I knew was given blocks of wood and stone to make sculptures for a huge building. He complained to me that he couldn't find any men with initiative to assist him. They kept asking, 'How should I do this?' The artist would answer, 'Do it however you want.' But the assistants couldn't think of any way to do it. They'd been brought up on a mental diet that was utterly lacking in ideas.

A great danger is threatening the country, and even the world. We're losing our faith in ideas. We're replacing guiding principles with mechanical practices. As I've said in previous Letters to the Editor, the trend in popular education these days is to have contempt for knowledge, and for the books that contain the knowledge of mankind. Instead, 'Education by physical things' is advocated, ignoring the principle that things can only lead to more and more other things. They have no impact on the thoughts of a person, therefore they have no effect on the person's character or how he acts, except to teach him to analyze or make more things. A boy can be taught to build accurately crafted models out of cardboard or lumber. If he was already a neat, careful boy, that training will help him to do whatever job he ends up with. But if he was a lazy boy who learned in spite of his natural tendencies, then everything he learned will only help him in that particular craft. Handicrafts enrich our joy in life, and might help us get a job, but they don't do anything to influence a person's character. That's why children shouldn't do handicrafts (including sorting cubes and cylinders by size, or arranging colored boards) that don't have some practical value or intrinsic beauty. A child is a person, and his education should make him a better person. The ideas that inspire better character are found in books, art and similar things. There aren't enough people of strong character and good judgment. For those reasons and others, I think that any school or educational method that rejects knowledge in favor of scientific equipment and exercises is disastrous, no matter how contented and well-mannered the children seem. Knowledge is the only way to build up character. It's the only thing that feeds and sustains the mind.

Yours obediently,
Charlotte Mason
Ambleside

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.

To read my review of E.M. Standing's book about Maria Montessori and her educational method (reviewed from a CM mom's perspective), start here.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Devotees wanting to become Montessori teachers were offered six-month courses in various locations in Europe taught by Maria herself. The personal contact with her changed the lives of those who took her classes. They came away with not only a teaching method, but new faith in their role as teachers, more hope for society, and more love for children.

I do see a subtle difference in Montessori and CM in a speech of Maria's at a graduating ceremony in one of her courses:

"...we are drawn toward the child, as individuals, as members of society, and for the good of the human race as a whole. The child is an authority; and the adult must make himself in accord with this authority if he wishes to better his conditions."

[My comment: Charlotte Mason had a deep respect for the personhood of the child, but not quite the same faith and reverence. She believed that teachers needed to work with the natural tendencies and abilities of children, but children needed to be under authority. They were too inexperienced, and their reasoning was too uneducated, to put the kind of trust in them that Maria seems to be advocating. CM would never have said that children were in any kind of authority that teachers or society should submit to. I think Montessori (like Rousseau?) thought that beauty and perfection were found in children, and if the rest of the world went back to that, society would be better. But CM felt that children, like everyone else, had imperfections that they needed to control, and if they were taught correctly, they'd be better adults. Rather than adults seeking to recapture or enshrine childhood, CM was more about teaching children to be better, more fulfilled adults by developing the potential they already had. Thus, I think that Montessori might appeal more to unschoolers who have faith that children will get what they need if we leave them alone and give them the freedom to do what they need to do. But CM felt that children needed self-discipline to prevent lazy habits that would be detrimental to him later and limit what he might have been. You can read CM's perspective about leaving children to develop free and unencumbered in Vol 2, ch 7, online here. ]

Montessori is representative of the Century of the Child. Maria thought that war was the result of materialism, people wanting more, because they hadn't had their needs met in childhood, and that was because society was built around what adults wanted without considering children. By transferring the center of society from adults to children, children would be fulfilled, productive, and become adults who weren't dissatisfied and frustrated. And [if I'm understanding this correctly] then there wouldn't be war. People would put their energy to work for harmony and order rather than death and destruction.

She appealed to the education of the spirit, not just the technical or utilitarian. The teacher needed a 'proper attitude to the moral order.' Yet she did this without pushing her own religion (Catholicism) or preaching. When Fascism took over in Italy, her schools were closed down, so she went to Spain. Then civil war broke out in Spain, so she went to Holland, opened a school and continued her work. She never wasted time responding to critics, but focused on continued continued progression forward.

She saw that children love walking along a line on the sidewalk because their disproportionate bodies have a hard time with balance. So she built that into her school routine, making children walk a chalk line. She saw how children like to balance on fences, and that led her to help invent jungle gyms. Her scientific background gave validity to her research. EM Standing concludes this section by saying that she epitomized her ideal for teachers: 'One who combines the self-sacrificing spirit of the scientist with the love of the disciple of Christ.'

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