Spontaneous Activity in Education by Maria Montessori (best historical biographies txt) 📕

The little child of three years old carries within him a heavy chaos.

He is like a man who has accumulated an immense quantity of books, piled up without any order, and who asks himself "What shall I do with them?" When will he be able to arrange them in such fashion as to enable him to say: "I possess a library"?

By means of our so-called "sensory exercises" we make it possible for the child to distinguish and to classify. Our sensory material, in fact, analyses and represents the attributes of things: dimensions, forms, colors, smoothness or roughness of surface, weight, temperature, flavor, noise, sounds. It is the qualities of the objects, not the objects themselves which are important; although these qualities, isolated one from the other, are themselves represented by objects. For the attributes long, short, thick, thin, large, small, red, yellow, green, hot, cold, heavy, light, rough, smooth, scented, noisy, resonant, we have a like number of corresponding "objects" arranged in graduated series. This gradation is important for the establishment of order; indeed, the attributes of the objects differ not only in quality, but also in quantity. They may be more or less high or more or less low, more or less thick or more or less thin; the sounds have various tones; the colors have various degrees of intensity; the shapes may resemble each other in varying degrees; the states of roughness and smoothness are by no means absolute.

The material for the education of the senses lends itself to the purpose of distinguishing between these things. First of all it enables the child to ascertain the identity of two stimuli by means of numerous exercises in matching and fitting. Afterwards difference is appreciated when the lessons direct the child's attention to the external objects of a series: light, dark, long, short.

At last he begins to distinguish the degrees of the various attributes, arranging a series of objects in gradation, such as the tablets which show the various degrees of intensity of the same chromatic tone; the bells which produce the notes of an octave, the objects which represent length in decimal proportions, or thickness in centimetric proportions, etc.

These exercises, which are so attractive to children, are, as we have seen, repeated by them indefinitely. The teacher puts the seal upon each acquisition with a word; thus the classification is complete, and finally has its schedule: that is, it becomes possible to recall the attribute and its image by a name.

Now as we have no possible means of distinguishing things other than by their attributes, the classification of these entails a fundamental order of arrangement comprehending everything. Henceforth the world is no longer a chaos for the child; his mind bears some resemblance to the orderly shelves of a library or a rich museum; each object is in its place, in its proper category. And each acquisition he makes will be no longer merely "stored," but duly "allocated." This primitive order will never be disturbed, but only enriched by fresh material.

Thus the child, having acquired the power of distinguishing one thing from another, has laid the foundations of the intelligence. It is unnecessary to repeat what an internal impulse the acquired order contributes towards the seeking after objects in the environment; henceforth the child "recognizes" the objects which surround him. When he discovers with so much emotion that the sky is blue, that his hand is smooth, that the window is rectangular, he does not in reality discover sky, nor hand, nor window, but he discovers their position in the order of his mind by arrangement of his ideas. And this determines a stable equilibrium in the internal personality, which produces calm, strength, and the possibility of fresh conquests, just as the muscles which have coordinated their functions enable the body to maintain its equilibrium, and to acquire that stability and security which facilitate all movements. This order conduces to an economy of time and strength; like a well-arranged museum, it saves the time and strength of inquirers. The child can therefore perform a greater quantity of work without fatigue, and can react to stimuli in a briefer space of time.

To be able to distinguish, classify, and catalogue external things on the basis of a secure order already established in the mind—this is at once intelligence and culture. This is, indeed, the popular conception; when an educated person can recognize an author by his style, or the characteristics of the literary compositions of a period, he is pronounced "versed (intelligente) in literature." In the same way we say of one who can recognize a painter by the manner in which he lays his colors on the canvas, or fix the period of a sculptor from the fragment of a bas-relief, that he is "versed (intelligente) in art." The scientist is of the same type. He is able to observe things, and to give due value even to their minutest details; hence the differences between the characteristics of things are clearly perceived and classified. The scientist distinguishes objects in accordance with the orderly content of his mind. A seedling, a microbe, an animal or the remains of an animal, are not enigmas to him, though in themselves they may be strange to him. We may say the same of the chemist, the physicist, the geologist, the archæologist.

It is not the accumulation of a direct knowledge of things which forms the man of letters, the scientist, and the connoisseur; it is the prepared order established in the mind which is to receive such knowledge. On the other hand, the uncultivated person has only the direct knowledge of objects; such a person may be a lady who spends a great part of the night reading books, or a gardener who spends his life making material distinctions between the plants in his garden. The knowledge of such uncultured minds is not only disorderly, but it is confined to the objects with which it comes into direct contact, whereas the knowledge of the scientist is infinite, because, possessing the power of classifying the attributes of things, he can recognize them all, and determine now the class, now the relationships, now the origins of each; facts much more profound than the actual things could of themselves reveal.

Now our children, after the manner of the connoisseur of art and the man of science, recognize objects in the external world by means of their attributes and classify them; hence they are sensitive to all objects; everything possesses a value for them. Uncultured children, on the other hand, pass blind and deaf close to things, just as an ignorant man passes by a work of art or listens to a performance of classical music without recognition or enjoyment.

The educational methods now in use proceed on lines exactly the reverse of ours; having first abolished spontaneous activity, they present objects with their accumulation of attributes directly to the child, calling attention to each attribute, and hoping that from all this mass the mind of the child will be able to abstract the attributes themselves, without any guidance or order. Thus they create in a passive being an artificial chaos, more limited than that which the natural world would offer.

The "objective" method now in use, which consists in presenting an object and noting all its attributes—that is, describing it, is nothing but a "sensory" variation on the customary mnemonic method; instead of describing an absent object, a present object is described; instead of the imagination alone working to effect its reconstruction, the senses intervene; this is done so that the distinctive qualities of the object itself should be better remembered. The passive mind receives images, which are limited to the objects presented; and which are "stored up" without any order. As a fact, every object may have infinite attributes; and if, as often happens in object-lessons, the origins and ultimate ends of the object itself are included among these attributes, the mind has literally to range throughout the universe. If, for instance, in an object lesson on coffee, which I heard given in a Kindergarten school, the object is described and the attention of the children directed to its size, its color, its shape, its aroma, its flavor, its temperature; and then if the teacher goes on to describe the plant and the manner in which the substance was brought to Europe across the ocean, and, finally, lighting a spirit-lamp, boils the water, grinds the berries and prepares the beverage, the mind has been led to wander in infinite spaces, but the subject has not been exhausted. For it would be possible to go on to describe the exciting effects of coffee, caffeine, which is extracted from the berry, and many other things. Such an analysis would spread like spilt oil until finally dispersed, and the outcome would be of no use in any way. If, indeed, we should ask a child so instructed: "What is coffee, then?" he might well reply: "It is such a long story that I cannot remember it." A notion so vague (I cannot certainly say so complete!) fatigues and encumbers the mind and can never transform itself into a dynamic excitation of similar associations. The efforts the child makes will be, at the most, efforts of memory to recall the history of coffee. If associations are formed in his mind, they will be inferior associations of contiguity: his mind will wander from the teacher who is speaking to the ocean that was traversed, to the dining-table at home on which coffee appears in cups every day; in other words, it will stray aimlessly as does the idle mind when it "allows itself" to wander from the continuity of its passive associations.

In this kind of reverie to which the minds of children give themselves up, there is no sign of internal activity, far less of any individual difference. Children subjected to the object-lesson system always remain purely receptive beings; or, if we prefer to put it so, storehouses in which new objects are continually deposited.

No activity is thus aroused and directed towards the object, in order to recognize its qualities in such a manner that the child himself forms an idea of it; nor can the possibility of connecting other objects with the first by their common characteristics arise in his mind. For in what particular does any object resemble the others? In its use?

When we associate the images of different objects by similarity, we should extract from the whole the qualities which the objects themselves have in common. If, for instance, we say that two rectangular tablets are alike, we have first extracted from the numerous qualities of these tablets such facts as that they are of wood, that they are polished, smooth, colored, of the same temperature, etc., the quality relating to their shape. They are alike in shape. This may suggest a long series of objects: the top of the table, the window, etc.; but before such a result as this can be achieved, it is necessary that the mind should first be capable of abstracting from the numerous attributes of these objects the quality of rectangular shape. The work of the mind in this quest must necessarily be active; it analyzes the object, extracts a determined attribute therefrom, and under the guidance of this determined attribute makes a synthesis associating many objects by the same medium of connection. If this capacity for the selecting of single attributes among