Posted by David Kopel:
What is Montessori?
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_05_20-2007_05_26.shtml#1180126467
Last Saturday, Slate's Emily Bazelon, the mother of a child in an
Montessori pre-school wrote an [1]article titled "The Cult of the Pink
Tower: Montessori turns 100�what the hell is it?" She stated that "In
many ways, Montessori education remains a cult: No one outside the
fold (and lots of families inside it) really knows what exactly it
is." So I will now reveal the secret; there's much to explain, in
terms of pedagogical technique, but here's the deep philosophy of
Montessori education. Montessori is not for everyone, but I believe
that the world would be a much better and kinder place if every family
had the opportunity to choose a Montessori school....
Montessori is a superb method for children to achieve a high degree of
proficiency at many important academic skills. But Montessori is also
something much more profound than a high-quality type of learning.
If you talked with someone who jogged several miles every day, and you
asked her "Why do you spend all that time on road work?" it's possible
that she might answer "Because it helps me run faster over longer
distances." It�s true that the direct benefit of running a lot is that
the runner gets better and better at running. But it's more likely
that the runner might answer something like this: "Running strengthens
my heart, my lungs, my legs and the rest of my body. Running builds
concentration and focus that stay with me even when I'm not running.
Running clears my head, and so when I'm running, I sometimes have
insights into lots of different things in my life. Running helps me
get the rest of my life under control." Notably, the main direct
benefit of running--building speed and stamina for running--wasn't
even mentioned.
All these same points can be made about Montessori education. Yes,
Montessori does help children grow much more proficient at reading,
writing, research, and mathematics. (And these skills have a great
deal more practical application in modern society than does the
ability to run fast.)
Yet the most important benefits of Montessori education lie beyond the
direct academic skills that are acquired by mastering the Montessori
materials. As with running, the academic skill-building is what the
children actually do, but what they achieve is much more than just
academic enrichment.
Responsibility, Self-Control, and Independence
Although most students need to do language and math work every day,
students are generally free to choose the works that interest them,
and to stay with them as long as they want. ("Works" can include
Montessori manipulatives, such as "the pink tower" of blocks, or
written work such as math problems or writing in a science journal, or
other projects.) The major part of the day consists of long blocks of
time in which children have the freedom to totally engross themselves
in activities, with deep concentration. These large blocks of time are
one of the ways in which Montessori differs from most other
educational approaches.
One of the important premises of Montessori is that children have a
natural love for learning. When given the opportunity to engage in
meaningful, interesting, self-directed work, children show that they
can achieve high levels of focus. It is relatively rare for a Jarrow
classroom to become disorderly or excessively loud, or to need
repeated orders from the teacher for quiet.
The quiet (not silence, since conversation is perfectly legitimate
while work is being done) and the order do not come from external
control imposed by the teacher. They come as a natural result of the
children exploring a fascinating environment of learning
opportunities. Interacting with others, while not disturbing the
concentration of other parties, is one of the many social skills
taught by Montessori schools, and research suggests that Montessori
children tend to develop greater social competence. (M.M. Boehnlein,
"Montessori Research," The NAMTA Journal 13(3), 1988.)
The Teacher is not the Center of Attention
Another way in which Montessori cultivates responsibility,
self-control, and independence is that teachers take the focus off
themselves. The point is not for the students to passively absorb
knowledge from the teacher, but for the students to teach themselves,
with the teacher providing guidance when appropriate. A student works
for the satisfaction of learning, not for the teacher's praise. "This
helps develop his will and helps him be present to the work for its
own sake," explains one Montessori scholar.
After introducing a material, teachers generally leave the child to
work it our herself, intervening only when the child needs guidance to
move on to a higher level.
"Help the Child to Help Himself"
Maria Montessori explained that her method aimed to help the child "to
act, will, and think for himself," and so many of the Montessori
materials foster independence. The "Practical Life" tools in the
Toddler and Primary classroom help children build autonomy in their
daily lives--as by learning how to use buttons or zippers. Other
Practical Life tools--such as pitchers of water to be poured back and
forth--help the child learn to use her body as she directs. During the
first months of school, Toddlers show their parents the "up and over"
way to put on a jacket�so that a 21-month-old can put on a jacket by
herself, rather than needing someone to hold it for her. "Help the
child to help himself" is a core element of Montessori.
More generally, the curriculum always keeps practical application in
mind. For example, Upper Elementary (grades 4-6) math work with
percentages frequently uses percentage skills to solve real-life
problems--such as calculating discounts on a product, or figuring the
rate of return on an investment.
The Montessori materials also foster independence through the
principle of "control of error." That is, the materials allow the
child to discover whether he has made a mistake, rather than needing
to go to the teacher to see if the work is done properly. For example,
the "cylinder block," used in the Primary (ages 3-6) classrooms, is a
block of wood with ten cylinders cut out from it. Each cylinder has a
knob on the top. The cylinders are all the same height, while their
diameter increases from narrow to fat. The object of the work is to
learn about size relationships, by putting each cylinder into its
proper hole, increasing order of size. If a child puts a thin cylinder
in a wide hole, by the end of the work he will have a fat cylinder
left over, which doesn't fit in the remaining hole. Thus, the child
can see that he has made a mistake, and use his intelligence to
discover the proper places for each cylinder. He does not need to go
to the teacher to ask for assistance.
Responsibility for One's Education
In the elementary grades, students conduct long-term research and
writing projects. Not only do they take responsibility for seeing a
major task through to its completion, they also learn how to uncover
information for themselves, rather than having it fed to them.
When Montessori children move on to other schools, their new teachers
usually applaud the ability of Montessori children to complete
assignments, including long-term projects, without monitoring, and to
take responsibility for their learning--whether by remembering to
bring pencils to class every day, or by getting themselves to the
library when they need to conduct research.
Helping and Teaching Others
To foster the development of the child's will does not mean that the
child becomes willful. To promote independence is not to promote
isolation. To be inner-directed is not to be self-indulgent. To the
contrary, responsibility, self-control, and independence lay the
foundation for a wide variety of cooperative interaction and
friendship. A pair of four-year-old boys who have developed some
self-control can play together longer and more happily than a pair of
boys whose only controls are externally imposed. An Upper Elementary
classroom filled with students who can concentrate and who can
persevere on long-term projects can decide to perform Romeo and
Juliet.
All students are also teachers. All classrooms are multi-age, so that,
for example, Lower Elementary includes first, second, and third
graders. The older children often help the younger ones learn how to
do works, and also act as role models. At some schools, older students
(e.g., Upper Elementary) may spend time each week reading to one or a
few younger students.
So while there is nothing in Montessori formally called "character
education," the whole Montessori experience is integrated to cultivate
responsible, self-reliant, caring people.
Respect
The true heart of Montessori is profound respect for the fundamental
dignity of every individual. While Montessori is used in a wide
variety of secular and religious schools, Dr. Montessori's philosophy
is very profoundly influenced by Catholic teaching of "the inherent
dignity of the human person."
Again, the classroom materials play an important role. For example,
works are usually done on a small cloth mat laid out on the floor; the
mat sets the boundaries of the work, and guides the other children in
moving so as not to disturb others at work.
This is one of the ways that Montessori education teaches respect for
the environment. This includes respect for the classroom
environment--putting works away properly so that next person can use
them, and working with others in constructive ways. It also includes
respect for the macro environment, as children learn about ways to
care constructively for the global and community environment--and to
respect individual differences, and the different choices that
individuals make.
The attitude of respect toward children enabled Maria Montessori to
develop the insight that children learn and think very differently
from adults. Adults may start their learning with abstraction--as when
college students listen to a chemistry professor lecture about
principles of chemistry, even when the students have never observed
the chemical reaction that is being described. Doctor Montessori (the
first woman to graduate from an Italian medical school) began looking
at education from the child's point of view, and recognized that
children do not learn the same way that adults do. She also saw that
adults often greatly underestimate the intellectual capacity of
children, because the children are not able to express themselves
fully in adult-style communication.
Respect for the child, therefore, opened the way for the insight that
children learn best from sensory approaches to knowledge before
attempting abstraction. The first step in learning to read is to trace
one's fingers over sandpaper cutouts of the letters of the alphabet.
"From hands to mind" is the practical foundation of the Montessori
Method.
"Respect" in Montessori is not a code word for hierarchy, in the sense
of "students must respect the teacher." Certainly students must
respect the teacher. And the teacher must respect the students. And
the students must respect each other. Of course since nobody is
perfect, nobody at in a Montessori school achieves this high standard
of respect every single moment during the school year.
Respect is why students are allowed to choose their works, why they
are guided to independence, and why they are motivated by their own
joy of learning rather than the need for external validation.
Respect does not mean that everybody is supposed to pretend to like
everybody else all the time. Respect does mean that conflicts are to
be resolved with consideration for the dignity of everyone involved.
Respect is the foundation for access to the highest possibilities of
learning.
Tim Seldin, president of the Montessori Foundation, explains that
"Montessori is a way of life. It is a philosophy about how human
beings ought to live their lives and treat one another. It is an
attitude of respect for each human being, no matter how young or how
old. It is a sense of partnership, rather than power and authority."
("Montessori in the Home," Tomorrow's Child, Spring 2000, p. 5.)
Once one enters into an attitude of respect for the child, then one
can begin to understand how much teachers and parents (and also the
students in their roles as teachers for other students) have to learn
from the child. As Kathy O'Brien, the head of a Montessori school in
Maryland writes:
Dr. Montessori believes that the child has lost much of his natural
grace and charm because often his only value is seen in that some
day he will be an adult. Montessori says the child has its own
value, "the child and the adult are in fact two different and
separate parts of humanity which should interpenetrate and work
together in the harmony of mutual aid...having reciprocal
influence." It is easy for us to accept that we adults aid the
child, but the child is also an aid to the adult and should be a
formative influence on the adult world. A child can change the
hearts of adults. In the presence of a child hardness disappears.
Dr. Montessori says: "The child can annihilate selfishness and
awaken the spirit of sacrifice," tenderness and affectionate care.
"The love which then begins is like a revelation of the moral
greatness of which man is capable when his child obliges him to
feel as a parent. In this way does God move and form the adult
through the child."
References
1. http://www.slate.com/id/2166489/
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