Articles > Montessori education - is this a model for a better world? | Andrew Green
Montessori education - is this a model for a better world? | Andrew Green
If we are trying to bring up our children to help create a better, more eco-sensitive world, I feel that it is vital to think about how best we can encourage them to be –
- Confident enough to not have to express the same opinions as those around them;
- Able and used to questioning received opinion;
- Able to think differently, way outside the boundaries of conventional thinking on any relevant subject.
It is their education or, more specifically, how and where they are educated, which is the key to this. Simply speaking, the world will not change unless the people in it change and until people’s values and priorities become aligned to a more eco-sensitive way of life.
It was in the years immediately after the turn of the 20th century that radical philosophers began to examine the process of education. Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw included education in their swingeing attacks on the mores and conventions of Victorian society. Maria Montessori opened her first ‘Casa dei Bambini’ (Children’s House), in the slums of Rome, in 1907; Rudolf Steiner opened his first school in 1919; Summerhill School was founded, in 1921, by A S Neill.
In their different ways, all of these radical educational pioneers were pointing the way towards an education for an independent, free-thinking person. But all of their ideas were so challenging to educational orthodoxy that, in the ensuing century, just about none of what they were saying has found its way into mainstream educational thinking.
The views of Steiner, Neill and Montessori – in particular – are all of vital interest, not least because they all thought that the school system was so bad that there were no parts of the current system that they wanted to keep in any respect. It is well worth looking at exactly what they were saying, and how well their ideas might fit in with a principle of ‘education to change the world’, particularly Montessori whose ideas, I feel, might be unjustly written off because of the yuppie connotations of the ‘Montessori Nursery’.
Montessori’s central belief was that children should be allowed freely to choose between activities, with no interference from adults. Her intention was that her methods could be applied to children of all ages. I think that modern day parents and teachers might consider that there is something cute, fey and mumsy about what passes for the modern ‘Montessori Nursery School’. But contrast these with Montessori’s characteristically acerbic and incisively angry attack, in ‘The Secret of Childhood’, on the whole regime of adults’ control of children:
The adult … considers everything that affects the psyche of the child from the standpoint of its reference to himself, and so misunderstands the child. It is this point of view that leads to a consideration of the child as an empty being, which the adult must fill by his own endeavours … as a being without an inner guide, whom the adult must guide step by step from without. Finally, the adult acts as though he were the child’s creator … And in adopting such an attitude … [he] cancels the child’s personality [my emphasis].
And, in The Montessori Method, on the subject of discipline in schools, she emphasised that:
Discipline must come through liberty … We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. [my emphasis]
Much of the work of Montessori was geared to the needs of young children, for she believed that it is our youngest children who are most damaged by conventional education. As did John Holt who, having been a teacher, subsequently became a passionate advocate of home learning:
Children of one, two or even three throw the whole of themselves into everything they do. They embrace life, and devour it; it is why they learn so fast and are such good company. Listlessness, boredom, apathy – these all come later. Children come to school curious; within a few years most of that curiosity is dead, or at least silent.
In recent decades, ‘Montessori’ nurseries have been proliferating in well-off neighbourhoods. But does the Montessorl approach really present a useful alternative? Or does it just serve to provide, as one disillusioned father put it to me, “crammers for the yuppie fast-track”?
Maria Montessori believed that the young child’s medium for learning is play, which she referred to as the child’s “work”:
When a little child works he does not do so to attain an outward end. The aim of his work is the working … his work, is the satisfaction of an inner need, a phenomenon of psychic maturation.
A central tenet of Montessori’s philosophy is that, left to their own devices, with the right materials and in a beautiful environment, young children will choose order over disorder:
They worked quietly, each one intent on his own task; they went about walking quietly, to get fresh work or to put back what they had been doing ,.. They took their own material, put the school tidy, and if the teacher came late, or went out leaving them alone, everything went just as well.
But, since the children’s play is regarded as a form of work, when a child uses the materials to further his fantasy play, this is to be discouraged:
… a little boy of four and a half, who had an extremely vivid imagination, so much so that when he was given an object he did not observe its shape but (talked) … continually, imagining himself someone else, and it was impossible to make him fix his attention on the objects themselves. [my emphasis] .
At a Montessori school which I visited, any behaviour which moved away from a state of Montessorian calm and order, towards what is, to my mind, an equally natural childhood playfulness was nipped in the bud with: “you’re being silly” or “who’s making that big noise?” Calmness and order are thus regarded as the child’s natural states and anything else as a potentially damaging aberration.
I think that this is a fallacy. Having been with my own children growing up, I’ve seen than happily and seamlessly alternate between chaos and order – tipping a box of toys out on the floor and then, two hours later, tidily putting then away. Young children love both chaos and order and, if we try to make them like one or the other, we will simply be, as Montessori herself put it, cancelling the child’s personality.
However, there is no denying that the humane, gentle and non-directing approach which Montessori advocated is very attractive. The irony is that, because Montessorian reading, writing and arithmetic teaching is so successful, it is easy for a Montessori school to start satisfying the needs of ambitious, pushy parents, rather than the needs of children. This is a problem which a Montessori teacher I spoke to particularly identified with the upmarket London establishments.
Although the so-called ‘didactic materials’ play a central part in Montessori’s educational philosophy, it is perhaps this aspect that creates the main weakness, rather than strength of the approach. Fine, if we want our young children to learn literacy and numeracy skills at an early age. If we don’t, they are a distraction and can constrain children too much, within a system that otherwise places so much emphasis on freedom.
As Alison Stallibrass, in The Self-Respecting Child, her classic study of young children at play, notes:
The children’s choice must be absolutely spontaneous … They must feel free to do nothing if that is what they prefer, and they must feel that what they are able to choose to do is what they want to do more than anything else at the moment … If there is an adult supervising the children’s play who has a preconceived idea of what the children should be doing, or guides them and directs them in any way, however gently, little will be discovered.
Montessori took children from a chaotic and disordered slum background and presented them with a calm, peaceful and ordered world – who would not prefer that?
But the underlying issue here must be that, if we extrapolate observations of children in a particular environment, set up by someone with a particular idea on how children behave, onto all children in any environment, we will be forcing our children into a model of our own making.
The Montessori model has very great value as an educational philosophy, but I don’t believe that such a rigid idea of how children should behave and learn will move us towards a truly better world.
© Andrew Green, July 2014