Loading...
Hosts & Guests
Transcript
Chapter one of Dr. Montessori's own handbook by Maria Montessori.
This Librevox recording is in the Pulpig Domain, recording by Phil Shenabar.
Introductory remarks.
Recent years have seen a remarkable improvement in the conditions of child life in all civilized
countries, but especially in England, statistics show a decrease in infant mortality.
Yet to this decrease in mortality, a corresponding improvement is to be seen in the physical
development of children, they are physically finer and more vigorous.
It has been the diffusion, the popularization of science, which has brought about such
notable advantages.
Mothers have learned to welcome the dictates of modern hygiene and to put them into practice
in bringing up their children.
Many new social institutions have sprung up and have been perfected with the object of
assisting children and protecting them during the period of physical growth.
In this way, what is practically a new race is coming into being.
A race more highly developed, finer and more robust, a race which will be capable of offering
resistance to insidious disease.
What has science done to affect this?
Science has suggested for us certain very simple rules by which the child has been restored
as nearly as possible to conditions of a natural life and an order and a guiding law have
been given to the functions of the body.
For example, it is science which suggested maternal feeding, the abolition of swaddling
clothes, baths, life in the open air, exercise, simple short clothing, quiet and plenty of
sleep.
Mothers were also laid down for the measurement of food, adapting it rationally to the physiological
needs of the child's life.
Yet with all this, science made no contribution that was entirely new.
Mothers had always nursed their children, children had always been clothed, they had breathed
and eaten before.
The point is that the same physical acts which performed blindly and without order led to
disease and death when ordered rationally were the means of giving strength and life.
The great progress made may perhaps deceive us into thinking that everything possible
has been done for children.
We have only to weigh the matter carefully, however, to reflect, are our children only
those healthy little bodies which today are growing and developing so vigorously under
our eyes, is there destiny fulfilled in the production of beautiful human bodies?
In that case, there would be a little difference between their lot and that of the animals
which we raise that we may have good meat or be subordinate.
Man's destiny is evidently other than this, and the care, due to the child, covers
a field wider than that which is considered by physical hygiene.
The mother who has given her child his bath and sent him in his perambulator to the park
has not fulfilled the mission of the mother of humanity.
The hen which gathers her chickens together and the cat which licks her kittens and lavishes
on them such tender care differ in no wise from the human mother in the services they
render.
No the human mother, if reduced to such limits devotes herself in vain, feels that a higher
aspiration has been stifled within her, she is yet the mother of man.
Children must grow not only in the body but in the spirit, and the mother longs to follow
the mysterious spiritual journey of the beloved one who tomorrow will be the intelligent divine
creation man.
Science evidently has not finished its progress.
From the contrary, it has scarcely taken the first step in advance, for it has hitherto
stopped at the welfare of the body.
It must continue however to advance on the same positive lines along which it has improved
the health and saved the physical life of the children.
It is bound in the future to benefit and to reinforce their inner life, which is the
real human life.
From the same positive lines, science will proceed to direct the development of the
intelligence, of character, and of those latent creative forces which lie hidden in the
marvellous embryo of man's spirit.
As a child's body must draw nourishment and oxygen from its external environment in
order to accomplish a great physiological work, the work of growth, so also the spirit must
take from its environment the nourishment which it needs to develop according to its
own loss of growth.
It cannot be denied that the phenomena of development are a great work in themselves.
The consolidation of the bones, the growth of the whole body, the completion of the minute
construction of the brain, the formation of the teeth, all these are very real labors
of the physiological organism, as is also the transformation which the organism undergoes
during the period of puberty.
These exertions are very different from those put forth by mankind in so-called external
work, that is to say in social production, whether in the schools where man is taught or
in the world, whereby the activity of his intelligence he produces wealth and transforms
his environment.
It is nonetheless true, however, that they are both work.
In fact, the organism during these periods of greatest physiological work is least capable
of performing external tasks, and sometimes the work of growth is of such extent and difficulty
that the individual is overburdened as with an excessive strain, and for this reason
alone becomes exhausted or even dies.
One will always be able to avoid external work by making use of the labor of others,
but there is no possibility of shocking that inner work, together with birth and death,
it has been imposed by nature itself, and each man must accomplish it for himself.
This difficult, inevitable labor, this is the work of the child.
When we say that little children should rest, we are referring to one side only of the
question of work.
We mean that they should rest from that external, visible work, to which the little child,
through his weakness and incapacity, cannot make any contribution useful either to himself
or to others.
Our assertion, therefore, is not absolute.
The child, in reality, is not resting.
He is performing the mysterious inner work of his auto-formation.
He is working to make a man, and to accomplish this it is not enough that the child's
body should grow in actual size.
The most intimate functions of the motor and nervous systems must also be established
and the intelligence developed.
The functions to be established by the child fall into two groups.
One, the motor functions by which he is to secure his balance and learn to walk and
to coordinate his movements.
Through the sensory functions, through which, receiving sensations from his environment,
he lays the foundations of his intelligence by a continual exercise of observation, comparison
and judgment.
In this way, he gradually comes to be acquainted with his environment and to develop his intelligence.
At the same time, he is learning a language, and he is faced not only with the motor difficulties
of articulation, sounds and words, but also with the difficulty of gaining an intelligent
understanding of names and of the syntactical composition of the language.
If we think of an immigrant who goes to a new country, ignorant of its products, ignorant
of its natural appearance, and social order, entirely ignorant of its language, we realize
that there is any man's work of adaptation which he must perform before he can associate
himself with the active life of the unknown people.
No one will be able to do for him that work of adaptation.
He himself must observe, understand, remember, form judgments, and learn the new language
by a laborious exercise and long experience.
What then is to be set of the child?
What of this immigrant who comes into a new world, who, week as he is, and before his
organism is completely developed, must, in a short time, adapt himself to a world so complex?
Up to the present day, the little child has not received rational aid in the accomplishment
of this laborious task.
As regards the psychical development of the child, we find ourselves in a period parallel
to that in which the physical life was left to the mercy of chance and instinct, the period
in which infant mortality was a scourge.
It is by scientific and rational means also, that we must facilitate that inner work of
psychical adaptation to be accomplished within the child, a work which is by no means the
same thing as, quote, any external work or production whatsoever, close quote.
This is the aim which underlies my method of infant education, and it is for this reason
that certain principles which it enunciates, together with that part which deals with
the technique of their practical application, are not of general character, but have special
reference to the particular case of the child from three to seven years of age, i.e. to
the needs of a formative period of life.
My method is scientific, both in its substance and in its aim.
It makes for the attainment of a more advanced stage of progress, in directions no longer
only material and physiological.
It is an endeavor to complete the course which hygiene has already taken but in the treatment
of the physical side alone.
If today we possess statistics respecting the nervous ability, defects of speech, errors
of perception and reasoning, and lack of character in normal children, it would perhaps
be interesting to compare them with statistics of the same nature but compiled from the study
of children who have had a number of years of rational education.
In all probability we should find a striking resemblance between such statistics and those
today available showing the decrease in mortality and the improvement in the physical development
of children.
End of Section 1
