The Montessori Method. Maria Montessori Montessori

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СКАЧАТЬ actual social activities; and it affords direct preparation for the school arts. The kindergarten, on the other hand, involves a certain amount of group-teaching, in which children are held—not necessarily by the enforcement of authority, yet by authority, confessedly, when other means fail—to definite activities; its materials are intended primarily for creative use by the children and offer opportunity for mathematical analysis and the teaching of design; and its procedure is rich in resources for the imagination. One thing should be made entirely clear and emphatic: in none of these characteristics are the two systems rigidly antagonistic. Much kindergarten activity is free, and the principle of prescription is not wholly given over by the “Houses of Childhood”—witness their Rules and Regulations; the kindergarten involves direct sense training, and the Montessori system admits some of the Froebel blocks for building and design; there are many purely muscular activities in the kindergarten, and some of the usual kindergarten games are used by Montessori; the kindergarten conducts some gardening, care of animals, construction-work, and domestic business, and the Montessori system admits a few imaginative social plays; both systems (but not the liberal form of the kindergarten) work directly toward the school arts. Since the difference between the two programmes is one of arrangement, emphasis, and degree, there is no fundamental reason why a combination especially adapted to English and American schools cannot be worked out.

      The broad contrast between a Montessori school and a kindergarten appears on actual observation to be this: whereas the Montessori children spend almost all their time handling things, largely according to their individual inclination and under individual guidance, kindergarten children are generally engaged in group work and games with an imaginative background and appeal. A possible principle of adjustment between the two systems might be stated thus: work with objects designed for formal sensory, motor, and intellectual training should be done individually or in purely voluntary groups; imaginative and social activity should be carried on in regulated groups. This principle is suggested only as a possible basis for education during the kindergarten age; for as children grow older they must be taught in classes, and they naturally learn how to carry out imaginative and social enterprises in free groups, and the former often alone. Nor should it be supposed that the principle is suggested as a rule to which there can be no exception. It is suggested simply as a general working hypothesis, the value of which must be tested in experience. Although it has long been observed by kindergartners themselves that group-work with the Froebelian materials, especially such work as involves geometrical analysis and formal design, soon tires the children, it has been held that the kindergartner could safeguard her pupils from loss of interest or real fatigue by watching carefully for the first signs of weariness and stopping the work promptly on their appearance. For small groups of the older children, who can do work of this sort with ease and enjoyment, no doubt the inevitable restraint of group teaching is a negligible factor, the fatiguing effects of which any good kindergartner can forestall. But for younger children a régime of complete freedom would seem to promise better results—at least so far as work with objects is concerned. In games, on the other hand, group teaching means very little restraint and the whole process is less tiring any way. To differentiate in method between these two kinds of activity may be the best way to keep them both in an effective educational programme.

      To speak of an effective educational programme leads at once, however, to an important aspect of the Montessori system, quite aside from its relation to the kindergarten, with which this Introduction must now deal. This is the social aspect, which finds its explanation in Dr. Montessori’s own story of her first school. In any discussion of the availability of the Montessori system in English and American schools—particularly in American public schools and English “Board” schools—two general conditions under which Dr. Montessori did her early work in Rome should be borne in mind. She had her pupils almost all day long, practically controlling their lives in their waking hours; and her pupils came for the most part from families of the laboring class. We cannot expect to achieve the results Dr. Montessori has achieved if we have our pupils under our guidance only two or three hours in the morning, nor can we expect exactly similar results from children whose heredity and experience make them at once more sensitive, more active, and less amenable to suggestion than hers. If we are to make practical application of the Montessori scheme we must not neglect to consider the modifications of it which differing social conditions may render necessary.

      The conditions under which Dr. Montessori started her original school in Rome do not, indeed, lack counterpart in large cities the world over. When one reads her eloquent “Inaugural Address” it is impossible not to wish that a “School within the Home” might stand as a centre of hopeful child life in the midst of every close-built city block. Better, of course, if there were no hive-like city tenements at all, and if every family could give to its own children on its own premises enough of “happy play in grassy places.” Better if every mother and father were in certain ways an expert in child psychology and hygiene. But while so many unfortunate thousands still live in the hateful cliff-dwellings of our modern cities, we must welcome Dr. Montessori’s large conception of the social function of her “Houses of Childhood” as a new gospel for the schools which serve the city poor. No matter what didactic apparatus such schools may use, they should learn of Dr. Montessori the need of longer hours, complete care of the children, closer co-operation with the home, and larger aims. In such schools, too, it is probable that the two fundamental features of Dr. Montessori’s work—her principle of liberty and her scheme for sense training—will find their completest and most fruitful application.

      It is just these fundamental features, however, which will be most bitterly attacked whenever the social status of the original Casa dei Bambini is forgotten. Anthropometric measurements, baths, training in personal self-care, the serving of meals, gardening, and the care of animals we may hear sweepingly recommended for all schools, even for those with a three-hour session and a socially favored class of pupils; but the need for individual liberty and for the training of the senses will be denied even in the work of schools where the conditions correspond closely to those at San Lorenzo. Of course no practical educator will actually propose bathtubs for all schools, and no doubt there will be plenty of wise conservatism about transferring to a given school any function now well discharged by the homes that support it. The problems raised by the proposal to apply in all schools the Montessori conception of discipline and the Montessori sense-training are really more difficult to solve. Is individual liberty a universal educational principle, or a principle which must be modified in the case of a school with no such social status as that of the original “House of Childhood”? Do all children need sense training, or only those of unfavorable inheritance and home environment? No serious discussion of the Montessori system can avoid these questions. What is said in answer to them here is written in the hope that subsequent discussion may be somewhat influenced to keep in view the really deciding factor in each case—the actual situation in the school.

      There is occasion enough in these questions, to be sure, for philosophical and scientific argument. The first question involves an ethical issue, the second a psychological issue, and both may be followed through to purely metaphysical issues. Dr. Montessori believes in liberty for the pupil because she thinks of life “as a superb goddess, ever advancing to new conquests.” Submission, loyalty, self-sacrifice seem to her, apparently, only incidental necessities of life, not essential elements of its eternal form. There is obvious opportunity here for profound difference of philosophic theory and belief. She seems to hold, too, that sense perception forms the sole basis for the mental and hence for the moral life; that “sense training will prepare the ordered foundation upon which the child may build up a clear and strong mentality,” including, apparently, his moral ideals; and that the cultivation of purpose and of the imaginative and creative capacities of children is far less important than the development of the power to learn from the environment by means of the senses. These views seem to agree rather closely with those of Herbart and to some extent with those of Locke. Certainly they offer material for both psychological and ethical debate. Possibly, however, Dr. Montessori would not accept the views here ascribed to her on the evidence of this book; and in any case these are matters for the philosopher and the psychologist. A pedagogical issue is never wholly an issue of high principle.

      Can it reasonably be maintained, СКАЧАТЬ