Pedagogical Anthropology by Maria Montessori (best novels of all time TXT) 📕

the most rigorous sense, for the spontaneous expansion of its personality, in an environment that is calm, and warm with a sentiment of affection and peace.

The results achieved were surprising: we were obliged to remodel our ideas regarding child psychology, because many of the so-called instincts of childhood did not develop at all, while in place of them unforeseen sentiments and intellectual passions made their appearance in the primordial consciousness of these children; true revelations of the sublime greatness of the human soul! The intellectual activity of these little children was like a spring of water gushing from beneath the rocks that had been erroneously piled upon their budding souls; we saw them accomplishing the incredible feat of despising playthings, through their insatiable thirst for knowledge; carefully preserving the most fragile objects of the lesson, the tenderest plants sprouting from the earth—these children that are reputed to be vandals by instinct! In short, they seemed to us to represent the childhood of a human race more highly evolved than our own; and yet they are really the same humanity, marvelously guided and stimulated through its own natural and free development!

But what is still more marvelous is the astonishing fact that all these children are so much improved in their general nutrition as to present a notably different appearance from their former state, and from the condition in which their brothers still remain. Many weakly ones have been organically strengthened; a great many who were lymphatic have been cured; and in general the children have gained flesh and become ruddy to such an extent that they look like the children of wealthy parents living in the country. No one seeing them would believe that these were the offspring of the illiterate lower classes!

Well, let us glance over the notes taken upon these children at the time when they first entered the school; for the great majority, the same note was made: need of tonics. Yet not one of them took medicine, not one of them had a change of diet; the renewed vigour of these children was due solely to the complete satisfaction of their psychic life. And yet they remain in school continually from nine till five through eleven months out of the year! One would say that this was an excessively long schedule; yet what is still more surprising is that during all this period the children are continually busy; and even more remarkable is the report made by many of the mothers to the effect that after their little ones have returned home they continue to busy themselves up to the hour of going to bed; and lastly—and this seems almost incredible—many of the little ones are back again at school by half past eight in the morning, tranquil, smiling, as though blissfully anticipating the enjoyment that awaits them during the long day! We have seen small boys become profoundly observant of their environment, finding a spontaneous delight in new sensations. Their stature, which we measure month by month, shows how vigorous the physiological growth is in every one of them, but particularly in certain ones, whose blood-supply has become excellent.

Such results of our experiments have amazed us as an unexpected revelation of nature, or, to phrase it differently, as a scientific discovery. Yet we might have foreseen some part of all this had we stopped to think how our own physical health depends far more upon happiness and a peaceful conscience than upon that material substance, bread!

Let us learn to know man, sublime in his true reality! let us learn to know him in the tenderest little child; we have shown by experiment that he develops through work, through liberty, and through love; hitherto, in place of these, we have stifled the splendid possibilities of his nature with irrational toys, with the slavery of discipline, with contempt for his spontaneous manifestations. Man lives for the purpose of learning, loving and producing, from his earliest years upward; it is from this that even his bones get their growth and from this that his blood draws its vitality!

Now, all such factors of physiological development are suffocated by our antiquated pedagogic methods. We prevent, more or less completely, the development of the separate personalities, in order to keep all the pupils within the selfsame limits. The perfectionment of each is impeded by the common level which it is expected that all shall attain and make their limit, while the pupils are forced to receive from us, instead of producing of their own accord; and they are obliged to sit motionless with their minds in bondage to an iron programme, as their bodies are to the iron benches.

We wish to look upon them as machines, to be driven and guided by us, when in reality they are the most sensitive and the most superb creation of nature.

We destroy divine forces by slavery. Rewards and punishments furnish us with the needed scourge to enforce submission from these marvelously active minds; we encourage them with rewards! to what end? to winning the prize! Well, by doing so we make the child lose sight of his real goal, which is knowledge, liberty and work, in order to dazzle him with a prize which, considered morally, is vanity, and considered materially is a few grains of metal. We inflict punishments in order to conquer nature, which is in rebellion, not against what is good and beautiful, not against the purpose of life, but against us, because we are tyrants instead of guides.

If only we did not also punish sickness, misfortune and poverty!

We are breakers-in of free human beings, not educators of men.

Our faith in rewards and punishments as a necessary means to the progress of the children and to the maintenance of discipline, is a fallacy already exploded by experiment. It is not the material and vain reward, bestowed upon a few individual children, that constitutes the psychic stimulus which spurs on the multifold expansions of human life to greater heights; rewards degrade the grandeur of human consciousness into vanity and confine it within the limits of egotism, which means perdition. The stimulus worthy of man is the joy which he feels in the consciousness of his own growth; and he grows only through the conquest of his own spirit and the spread of universal brotherhood. It is not true that the child is incapable of feeling a spiritual stimulus far greater than the wretched prize that gives him an egotistical and illusory superiority over his companions; it is rather that we ourselves, because already degraded by egotism, judge these new forces of nascent human life after our own low standards.

The small boys and girls in our "Children's Houses" are of their own accord distrustful of rewards; they despise the little medals, intended to be pinned upon the breast as marks of distinction, and instead they actively search for objects of study through which, without any guidance from the teacher, they may model and judge and correct themselves, and thus work toward perfection.

As to punishments, they are depressing in effect, and they are inflicted upon children who are already depressed!

Even in the case of those who are adult and strong, we know that it is necessary to encourage those who have fallen, to aid the weak, to comfort those who are discouraged. And if this method serves for the strong, how much more necessary it is for lives in the course of evolution!

This is a great reform which the world awaits at our hands: we must shatter the iron chains with which we have kept the intelligence of the new generations in bondage![29]

Pathological Variations.—Among the factors that may have a notable influence upon the stature are the pathological causes. Aside from those very rare occurrences that produce gigantism, it may be affirmed that pathological variations result in general in an arrest of development. In such a case it may follow that an individual of a given age will show the various characteristics of an individual of a younger age; that is, he will seem younger or more childish.

In such a case the stature has remained on a lower level than that which is normal for the given age; and this in general is the most obvious characteristic, because it is the index of the whole inclusive arrest of the physical personality. But together with the diminution of stature, various other characteristics may exist that also suggest a younger age; that is, the entire personality has been arrested in its development.

It follows, in school for example, that such pathological cases may escape the master's attention; he sees among his scholars a type that is apparently not abnormal, because it does not deviate from the common type, in fact is quite like other children; but when we inquire into its age, then the anomaly becomes evident, because the actual age of this small child is greater than his apparent age.

A principle of this sort announced in these terms is perhaps too schematic; but it will serve to establish a clear general rule that will guide us in our separate observations of a great variety of individual cases.

This form of arrested development was for the first time explained by Lasegue, who introduced into the literature of medicine or rather into nosographism, the comparative term of infantilism.

Infantilism has been extensively studied in Italy by Professor Sante de Sanctis, who has written notable treatises upon it. I have taken from his work Gli Infantilismi, the following table of fundamental characteristics necessary to constitute the infantile type.

Stature and physical development in general below that required by the age of the patient. Retarded development or incomplete development of the sexual organs and of their functions. Incomplete development of intelligence and character.

In order to recognise infantilism, it is necessary to know the dimensions and morphology of the body in their relation to the various ages, and to bear in mind that in young children sexual development either has not begun or is still incomplete.

Dimensions and Morphology of the Body at the Various Ages.—What we have already learned regarding stature will give us one test in our diagnosis of infantilism: the increase of stature and the transformations of type of stature concur in establishing the dimensions and the morphology of the body (See Stature, Types of Stature, Diagrams).

A sufferer from infantilism will have, for example at the age of eleven, a stature of 113 centimetres and a statural index of 56, while the average figures give:

Age Stature Index 7 years 111 56 8 years 117 55 9 years 122 55 10 years 128 54 11 years 132 53

Consequently, in such a case the eleven-year-old patient would have the appearance of a child of seven, not only in stature but also in the relative proportions of his body. (And if we examined him psychically, we should probably find his speech was not yet perfected, that he showed a tendency toward childish games, a mental level corresponding to the age of seven or thereabouts; in school the child would be placed in the first or second elementary grade.)

Accordingly the anthropological verdict of infantilism must not be based upon limits of measurement alone, but also upon the proportions of the body. Every age has its own morphology.

Now, such changes are found not only in the reciprocal relations between the bust and the limbs, but also between the various parts of the bust, as we shall see when we come to an analytical study of the morphology of the head, the thorax and the abdomen; the detailed anthropological examination of the individual patient will furnish us with further accompanying symptoms helpful in establishing a diagnosis. Further on we shall give a summarised table of the morphology of the body from year to year (laws of growth); and of the most notable and fundamental psychological characteristics of the different years of childhood; so that a teacher may easily derive from it at a glance a comprehensive picture that will aid in a