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

If they were, we should only need to imagine a society in which the economic problem had been solved, to behold men who have become "moral" solely in virtue of having been born in a different age. It is obvious that the moral question is a very different one; it is a question of life, a question of "nature," and one which cannot be solved by external eventualities. Men may be more or less fortunate, they may be born in more or less civilized surroundings, but they will always be men confronted by a "moral question," which goes down deeper than fortune or civilization.

It is very easy to be convinced that the so-called "naughtiness" of children is the expression of a "struggle for spiritual existence"; they want to make the men within them live, and we try to hinder them; we offer them the poisons of darkness and error. They fight for their spiritual bread as the poor fight for material bread; and degrade themselves by falling victims to our seductions just as the poor degrade themselves by succumbing to the fascination of alcohol; and in this struggle and this degradation children have revealed themselves as the "poor" and "needy," neglected and destitute. None has ever demonstrated more clearly than they that "man does not live by bread alone," and that the "question of bread" is not the real "question of man." All the suffering, all the struggles, all the claims of society in the past with regard to bodily needs are repeated here with amazing clarity in connection with spiritual needs. Children want to grow, to perfect themselves, to nourish their intelligence, to develop their internal energies, to form their characters and to these ends they need to be liberated from slavery, and to conquer "the means of life." It is not enough to nourish their bodies: they are hungry for intellectual food; the clothes which protect their limbs from the cold are not enough for children: they demand the garments of strength and the ornaments of grace to protect and adorn the spirit. Why have we adults stifled these wants till we have almost come to believe that the economic question is the true solution of the problem of human life? And why have we never imagined that, even after such a solution, strife, anger, despair, and degradation might reappear as a result of higher desires left unsatisfied? Such strife, anger, despair and degradation we encounter continually in the children of to-day, who are nevertheless well fed, well clothed and well warmed, in accordance with the standards of perfected physical hygiene.

To respond to the intellectual needs of man in such a manner as to satisfy them is to make an important contribution to morality. Indeed our children, when they have been able to occupy themselves freely with intelligent work, and have also been free to respond to their internal wants, to occupy themselves for a long time with chosen stimuli, to perform abstract operations when they were sufficiently mature, to concentrate their minds in meditation, have shown that order and serenity have been evolved within them; and after this, grace of movement, the capacity for enjoyment of the beautiful, sensibility to music, and finally, amenity in their relations to each other, have sprung up like a jet of water from an internal fount.

All this has been a work of "liberation." We have not made our children moral by any special means; we have not taught them to "overcome their caprices" and to sit quietly at work; we have not inculcated calm and order by exhorting them to follow the examples of others, and explaining how necessary order is to man; we have not lectured them on mutual courtesy, to instil the respect due to the work of others, and the patience with which they should wait in order not to infringe the rights of others. There has been none of all this; we have merely set the child free, and helped him to "live." It is he who has taught us "how" the child lives, and what other needs he has besides his material wants.

Thereupon an activity formerly unknown among little children, together with the virtues of industry, perseverance and patience, manifested themselves amidst crises of joy, in an atmosphere of habitual serenity. These children had entered upon the paths of peace. An obstacle hitherto opposed to nature had been removed.

And just as men satisfied by nourishing food and removed from the dangers of poisons, have grown calmer, and have shown themselves capable of preferring the higher pleasures to base and degrading indulgence, so the child, his internal needs satisfied, has entered the sphere of serenity and has shown his tendency to ascend.

All this, however, has not touched the roots of the moral question; but it has stripped and purged it of all the dross that encumbered it. The more fully a man's wants are satisfied, the happier he is; but he is not already "full of merit," as we divine that a man gifted with a lofty moral sense ought really to be. Rather have we deprived man of his merits; "goodness" has disappeared as well as "wickedness" at the advent of social reform. When we discovered that many forms of goodness were forms of good fortune, and many forms of evil-doing were forms of misfortune, we left man absolutely naked, stripped bare by truth. He must then take up his real life at its roots and "acquire merit." At this point he will begin to be born anew morally, emerging from the pure and essential chrysalis of the "hygienically" living man.

If the whole structure of our educative method starts from an act of concentrated attention to a sensory stimulus, and builds itself up on the education of the senses, limiting itself to this, it would evidently not take the whole man into consideration. For if man does not live by material bread alone, neither does he live solely by intellectual bread.

The stimuli of the environment are not only the objects, but also the persons, with whom our relations are not merely sensory. In fact, we are not content to admire in them that beauty to which the Greeks were so sensitive, or to listen to their speech or their song. The true relations between man and man, though they are initiated by means of the senses, are established in sympathy.

The "moral sense" of which positive science speaks is to a great extent the sense of sympathy with our fellows, the comprehension of their sorrows, the sentiment of justice: the lack of these sentiments convulses normal life. We cannot become moral by committing codes and their applications to memory, for memory might fail us a thousand times, and the slightest passion might overcome us; criminals, in fact, even when they are most astute and wary students of codes, often violate them; while normal persons, although entirely ignorant of the laws, never transgress them, owing to "an internal sense which guides them."

Positive science includes in the term "moral sense" something complex which is, at the same time, sensibility to public opinion, to law, and to religion; and multiplying it thus, it does not clearly define in what "moral sense" consists. We talk of it intuitively; each one has within himself something that "responds" to the appellation; and by this internal response he must understand and decide in what this "moral sense" consists. But religion is simple and precise: it calls this internal sense which lies at the root of life, Love. Social laws do not enter into this any more than does the entire universe. Love is the contact between the soul and God; and when this exists, all the rest is vanity. Good springs therefrom naturally, as sunbeams radiate from the sun. Creation itself has been given in charge of this wellspring of love, and it is love which maintains it, as the contribution of the creature to the provident forces of nature.

Those biological studies which seek to probe the secrets of nature have also recognized love as the key of life. Scientists have at last perceived, after much research, this most evident fact: that it is love which preserves the animal species, and not the "struggle for existence." In fact, the struggle for existence tends to destroy; and as regards survival, this is not the exclusive privilege of the "fittest," as was at first supposed. But existence is indeed bound up with love. Indeed, the individuals who struggle and conquer are adults; but who is it that protects the new-born creature and infant life in process of formation? If a hard and horny covering is the natural protection of his species, he does not possess it; if it is strength of muscle, he is weak; if it is tusks, he is without them; if it is agility, he cannot yet move; if it is fecundity, he is not yet mature. Therefore, all species should have become extinct, for there is none so strong but that he once was weak; and there is no infancy which is not more feeble than any adult life. It is love which protects all this weakness, and explains "survival." Maternal love, indeed, is studied to-day with the deepest attention by our scientists as a natural phenomenon. If the struggle for existence presented to us a uniform picture of destruction, the phenomena of maternal love are to-day revealed to us in the richest and most fascinating forms, which almost represent the occult and sentimental aspect of the marvelous varieties of forms in nature. It is seen at last to be one of the "fundamental characteristics of the species," which should be recognized by all students.

Even insects, which Fabre has described with such a wealth of detail, small and remote as they are from ourselves, exhibit wonderful phenomena of maternal love. One of the first articles published by a naturalist on these phenomena, La Psychologie d'une Araignée (The Psychology of a Spider) might serve as the motive of a drama. The spider, as is well known, makes a bag of threads, which she generally attaches to the backs of leaves, and in it she deposits and preserves her eggs; she gets into it herself together with the eggs, to protect the treasure of the species. If the bag should be broken at any point, the spider promptly repairs it. By way of experiment, a spider was taken out of the bag, and kept at a distance for twenty days. What is a spider? A few cubic millimetres of a dark, flabby substance without brain or heart, whose life is so short that twenty days constitute a very long interval for it; but this small creature never relaxed her efforts to escape, and her agitation never abated; finally, when she was liberated at the end of the twenty days, she fled to the bag, hid herself in it, and repaired the walls. Where was all this love and memory concentrated? This mother-spider was then removed from the nest, and another spider was introduced, which at once adopted the offspring, acted the mother, defended the nest from attack, and repaired the walls if they were damaged. There must therefore be a maternal instinct in the species, independent of actual maternity. But when the real mother approached the adopted bag, not only did the foster-mother make no attempt to defend it, but she fled and gave up her place. By what phenomenon of telepathy did the visitor concealed in the bag feel the maternal power approaching? The following was the end of the experiment: the little spiders were hatched, and remained in the bag together with their