by Maria Montessori
Ref: Educating the Human Potential By Dr.Maria Montessori
The six-year-old who comes from a Montessori class, for whom primarily this further course is devised, is already possessed of many cultural interests and has a deep passion for order and even for mathematics, so often regarded as an obstacle to the average child. Moreover, his hand is already controlled, possessed and directed by the mind in minute movements. The practical work done in our early schools found such public approbation that our scientific manual exercises have largely been adopted by schools professing other methods in regard to most aspects of education. In this more advanced period, we continue to afford children the opportunity to learn through hand activity, especially in mechanics and physics. For instance, the children learn the laws of pressure and tension by being asked to build an arch of stones, so placed as to hold together without need of cement.
By building bridges, aeroplanes, railroads (calculating the curvature), they become familiar with the principles of Statics and Dynamics as part of the daily school routine, wherever our method is properly applied with full equipment. Wherever possible mechanical contrivances are introduced for every detail of practical life, that our children may be fitted to take part in a civilisation which is entirely based on machines.
In their adoption of this part of our method, some modern schools, especially in the United States, have gone too far so that children in this intellectual stage of growth are made to occupy themselves solely with these machines, devised as they are for developing intelligence. In such schools, freedom too has entered with the machines, children being allowed to choose their work, which is so far good. But whatever cannot be learnt in this way is barred out, as insignificant and negligible, as mathematics and other abstract subjects, considered as beyond the child’s comprehension by free and spontaneous activity. These schools based on practical work are opposed to the so-called “ old-fashioned ” schools where mainly abstract subjects are taught and facts memorised; but we oppose both alike.
Personality is one and indivisible, and all mental attitudes depend on one centre. This is the secret which the small child has himself revealed to us by doing work far beyond our dreams and expectations in all fields, including the intellectual and abstract, provided his hand was allowed to work side by side with the intelligence. Children show a great attachment to the abstract subjects when they arrive at them through manual activity. They proceed to fields of knowledge hitherto held inaccessible to them, as grammar and mathematics. I wonder how the theory arose that in order to work with the hand one must have an uncultivated mind, or that a cultivated mind consorted with manual helplessness! Must a man be classified either as a worker with his head or with his hands instead of being allowed to function with his whole personality ? Where is the logic in the view that one sided development can be beneficial to the whole?
In modern conferences, highly distinguished people who have given their lives to the cause of education seriously discuss which is to be preferred, the practical method or an intellectual discipline. But to us the children have themselves revealed that discipline is the result of an entire development only, of mental functioning aided by manual activity. Allow the whole to function together, and there is discipline, but otherwise, it is not! Tribes, groups, nations are the results of such spontaneous discipline and association. There is only one problem, and it is human development in its totality; once this is achieved in any unit — child or nation — everything else follows spontaneously and harmoniously.
Being persuaded then that the whole personality must be engaged, and that it needs centralising first by the cosmic idea, the question comes as to how and when the idea should be presented. From the smaller children we have learnt the effectiveness of an indirect approach, as by addressing older children in their presence, for in our schools, the ages are, to a limited extent, mixed. When we try to show something to the older children, the younger ones crowd around, eagerly interested. This interest has especially has been shown by a child of six towards a chart illustrating the relative sizes of the sun and the earth by globe and point? The younger children were thrilled by the realisation that this invoked in them and was unable to tear themselves away, though the older child for whom the instruction was planned found it rather commonplace and needed some other thing to arouse in him similar interest. There is a difference between such enthusiasm and mere understanding. The point and the sphere touched the imagination of the younger child, leaving him full of enthusiasm for something beyond his former limits, belonging not to the physical environment, which is not possible to grasp by hand. If moreover, this particular illustration left the older child unmoved, it was not that nothing had the power similarly to touch his imagination, bearing him beyond his little world into wider realms by great strides into the unknown universe, but he could not reach without help such marvels and mysteries. It is along this path of the higher realities, which can be grasped by imagination that the child is led between the ages of six and twelve. Imaginative vision is quite different from mere perception of an object, for it has no limits. Not only can imagination travel through infinite space, but also through infinite time; we can go backwards through the epochs and have the vision of the earth as it was, with the creatures that inhabited it. To make it clear whether or not a child has understood, we should see whether he can form a vision of it within the mind and whether he has gone beyond the level of mere understanding.
Human consciousness comes into the world as a flaming ball of imagination. Everything invented by man, physical or mental, is the fruit of someone’s imagination. In the study of history and geography, we are helpless without imagination, and when we propose to introduce the universe to the child, what but imagination can be of use to us? I consider it a crime to present such subjects as may be noble and creative aids to the imaginative faculty in such a manner as to deny its use and, on the other hand, to require the child to memorise that which he has not been able to visualise. These subjects must be presented so as to touch the imagination of the child, and make him enthusiastic, and then add fuel to the burning fuel that has been lit.
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim, therefore, is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorise, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inmost core. We do not want complacent pupils but eager ones; we seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that, we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind, which we find ever ready to receive them, demanding more and more.
Educationists, in general, agree that imagination is important. Still, they would have it cultivated as separate from intelligence, just as they would separate the latter from the activity of the hand. They are the vivisectionists of the human personality. In school, they want children to learn dry facts of reality while their imagination is cultivated by fairy tales, concerned with a world that is certainly full of marvels, but not the world around them in which they live. Certainly, these tales have impressive factors which move the childish mind to pity and horror, for they are full of woe and tragedy, of children who are starved, ill-treated, abandoned and betrayed. Just as adults find pleasure in tragic drama and literature, these tales of goblins and monsters give pleasure and stir the child’s imagination, but they have no connection with reality.
On the other hand, by offering the child the story of the universe, we give him something a thousand times more infinite and mysterious to reconstruct with his imagination, a drama no fable can reveal. If imagination is educated merely by fairy tales, at most, the pleasure it gives will be continued later in novel reading, but we should never so limit its education. A mind that is habituated to seek pleasure only in fantastic tales slowly but surely becomes lazy, incapable of nobler preoccupations. In social life, we find too many examples of this sloth of mind: people caring only about being well-dressed, gossiping with friends, and going to the cinema.Their intelligence is hopelessly buried under barriers that cannot now be removed. Their interest becomes increasingly narrow, centred around the petty self, excluding the wonders of the world and sympathy with suffering humanity. Theirs is a veritable death in life.
