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

Now if intelligence in "comprehending" may actually prove our salvation when in danger of death, what a source of enjoyment it should prove to man!

When we talk of "the opening of the mind," we mean a creative phenomenon, which is not the weak result of an impression violently made from without. The opening of the mind is the active comprehension which accompanies great emotions, and which is therefore felt as a spiritual event.

I once knew a motherless girl, who was so much depressed by the arid teaching of her school, that she had become almost incapable of study and even of understanding the things which were taught her. Her life of solitude, lacking in natural affection, was a further aggravation of her mental fatigue. Her father decided that she should live for a year or two in the open country like a little savage; he then brought her back to town, and placed her under the private direction of a number of "professors." The girl studied and learned, but remained passive and weary. Every now and then her father would say: "Is your mind opening again?" and the girl always replied: "I do not know. What do you mean?" Owing to a curious coincidence in my life, this girl was confided to my sole care; and it was thus that I, when I was still a medical student, made my first pedagogic experiment, upon which I cannot linger now, though it would be worthy of interest. One day we were together and when she was at work on organic chemistry, she broke off, and looking at me with beaming eyes, said: "Here it is now! I do understand!" She then got up and went away, calling out aloud: "Father, father! My mind has opened!" I, not then knowing the girl's history, was astonished and agitated. She had taken her father's hand, and was saying: "Now I can tell you, yes, yes; I did not know what it meant before; my mind has opened." The joy of father and daughter and their union at that moment made me think of the joys and wellsprings of life which we destroy by enslaving the intelligence.

Indeed, every intellectual conquest is a wellspring of joy to our free children. This is the "pleasure" to which they are now most susceptible, and which makes them scorn lower pleasures; it is after having tasted of this that; our little ones despise sweetmeats, toys, and vanities.

It is this which makes them sublime to the eyes of those who contemplate them.

Their pleasure is that lofty pleasure which distinguish man from the brute, and can save us even from the desolation of grief and darkness.

When it is made a reproach to our method that it seeks to promote the "pleasure" of the child, and that this is immoral, it is the child and not the method which is insulted. For the essence of this reproach is the calumny against the child, who is considered by all as on a level with the beasts, and whose "pleasure" is supposed to lie solely in gluttony and idleness, and worse. But none of these could keep the child's "pleasure" alive for hours and days and years. It is only when he has laid hold on "humane pleasure" that he persists in it, and lives with a joy which is comparable to that of the young girl who ran to her father to proclaim the end of the darkness in which she had languished for years.

May it not perhaps be that those "crises," which are to-day but the intellectual illuminations of genius when it discovers a truth, represent a natural phenomenon of psychical life? May not the manifestation of the genius be but the manifestation of a "vigorous life," saved from perils by its exceptional individuality, and therefore itself alone capable of revealing the true nature of man? His type would then be the common one, and all men, in a greater or less degree, would seem to be of the same "species." The paths the child follows in the active "construction" of his individuality are indeed identical with those followed by the genius. His characteristics are absorbed attention, a profound concentration which isolates him from all the stimuli of his environment, and corresponds in intensity and duration to the development of spiritual activities. As in genius, this concentration is not without results, but is the source of intellectual crises, of rapid internal developments, and, above all, of an "external activity" which expresses itself in work.

We may say, then, that the genius is the man who has burst his bonds asunder, who has maintained his liberty, and who has upheld before the eyes of the multitude the standard of the humanity conquered by him.

Nearly all the manifestations of those men who liberated themselves from the external bondage of their times are to be noted in our children. Such, for instance, is that sublime "spiritual obedience," at present still unknown to the majority of mankind, with the exception of monks, who, however, often recognize it only in theory, and contemplate it only in the examples given by the saints; such again are those means necessary to the construction of a strong internal life which form part of the preparation for the cloistered life in the methodical "meditations" of those about to enter upon it. No persons, with the exception of monks, practise meditation. We can hardly distinguish meditation from methods for "learning" intellectually. We know, for example, that to read a great number of books consecutively, dissipates our powers and our capacity for thought; and that to learn a piece of poetry by heart means to repeat it until it is engraven on our minds: and that all this is not "meditation."

He who commits a verse of Dante to memory and he who meditates upon a verse of the gospel, performs a totally different task. The canto will "adorn" the mind on which it is impressed for a certain time, without leaving any lasting trace upon it. The verse which has been the subject of meditation will have a transforming and edifying effect. He who meditates clears his mind as far as possible of every other image, and tries to concentrate upon the subject of meditation in such a manner that all the internal activities will be polarised thereby: or, as the monks say, "all the powers of the mind."

The expected result of the meditation is "an internal fruit of strength"; the soul is strengthened and unified, it becomes active; it can then act upon the seed around which it has concentrated and cause it to become fruitful.

Now the method chosen by our children in following their natural development is "meditation," for in no other way would they be led to linger so long over each individual task, and so to derive a gradual internal maturation therefrom. The aim of the children who persevere in their work with an object, is certainly not to "learn"; they are drawn to it by the needs of their inner life, which must be organized and developed by its means. In this manner they imitate and carry on their "growth." This is the habit by which they gradually coordinate and enrich their intelligence. As they meditate, they enter upon that path of progress which will continue without end.

It is after an exercise of meditation on the objects that our children become capable of enjoying "the silence exercise"; and then, having been rendered delicately susceptible to impressions, they try to make no noise when they move, to refrain from awkward actions, because they are enjoying the fruit of the "concentration" of the spirit.

It is thus that their personality is unified and strengthened. The exercise which serves as the means to this end is designed gradually to perfect the accuracy with which they perceive the external world, observing, reasoning, and correcting the errors of the senses in a sustained and spontaneous activity. It is they who act, they who choose the objects, they who persevere in their work, they who seek to win from their environment the possibility of concentrating their minds upon it. Each one of them moves in obedience to the motor power within him. They are not disturbed by a teacher, by a being obviously superior to themselves, who intimidates the shrinking poverty of those who are beginning life by her lofty intellectual riches, who darkens rather than illuminates, who wearies rather than refreshes; but they live in peace with her who, almost a priestess, is yet a servant. As in some ideal convent, humility, simplicity, and work make up the environment where he who meditates will some day feel within himself the clearness of vision, the intuition, almost the sensibility, which make one ready to receive the truth.

To a different end, but by the same road, amidst the silence, the simplicity, and the humility of the monastery, the spirit prepares itself to receive the faith at the outset of life.

Many years ago, when I first received the impression that our children revealed general principles of life which in practise we are only privileged to encounter among the intellectual and spiritual élite of society, and that for this reason they were at the same time the revealers of a form of unconscious oppression which weighed down humanity, deforming the inner life, I spoke at length upon the matter to an intellectual lady, who was much interested in my "theories," and very anxious that I should make them the subject of an elaborate philosophical treatise; but she could not bring herself to accept the idea that it was a question of an experimental process. When I spoke of the children, she showed some impatience: "Oh, yes, I quite understand all about these children; in intelligence they are so many geniuses, and in goodness so many angels." But when, after some persuasion, I succeeded in making her come and see for herself, she took my hands and looked earnestly in my face: "Have you never thought," she asked, "that you may die at any moment?... Write at once, anyhow, in all haste, as you would write a will, a simple description of the facts, that you may not carry away this secret with you to the grave."

Nevertheless, I was in excellent health.

If we examine the mental labors of men of genius to whom we owe discoveries which have opened new paths to thought, and have given us new sources of well-being and social progress, we shall have to admit that in themselves they cannot be described as extraordinary processes, inaccessible to mediocrity. "Genius coincides with the possession in a very high degree of the power of association by similarity. This is the essential quality of genius," says Bain. Even at the "central point" of discovery, it is only by accurate observation and a very simple process of reasoning, of which most persons would consider themselves capable, that the discovery is made. At most it is due to a marshalling of "evidences" which, however, passed unnoticed by all but the discoverer.

We may say that genius has the faculty of isolating a fact in the consciousness, and of so distinguishing it from all others that it is as if a single ray of light should fall