Montessori, Maria. The Montessori Method. Translated by Anne Everett George (1882-). New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1912.
Chapter I
This chapter introduces four essential Montessori concepts and provides detailed rationale for each: the liberty of the child, the nature of humanity as progressive, the essentialness of inner motivation, and the need for the fusion of scientific and “soulful” arts in the process of education. Most impressive is the direct relevance to the teaching of writing (see analogy: The Poem/Poet). It is clear where Berthoff gets a good deal of her inspiration; from this document.
Notes:
“Much has been said in the past decade concerning the tendency of pedagogy, following the footsteps of medicine, to pass beyond the purely speculative stage and base its conclusions on the positive results of experimentation…” (20).
*Is this evidence of some of a legacy of anti-positivism? From Montessori to Berthoff? Both women seem very comfortable thinking, forming, working in the gray. Resisting dichotomies and the falsehoods they produce.
Sergi “who for more than thirty years had earnestly laboured to spread among the teachers of Italy the principles of a new civilization based upon education” (21).
*Freire? Where has our talk of “civilization” gone?
“To sum up the situation briefly, anthropology and psychology have never devoted themselves to the question of educating children in the schools, nor have the scientifically trained teachers ever measured up to the standards of genuine scientists” (22).
“The truth is that the practical progress of the school demands a genuine fusion of these modern tendencies, in practice and thought; such a fusion as shall bring scientists directly into the important field of the school and at the same time raise teachers from the inferior intellectual level to which they are limited to-day” (22).
**Dobrin, this is what I meant by encouraging other disciplines to value teaching more instead of calling on Comp to devalue teaching. Though Montessori might have put it a differently way with more success: “such a fusion shall bring teachers directly into the important fields of the sciences and at the same time raise scientists from the inferior service to civilization to which they are limited to-day.”
Analogies:
St. Francis (22)
*Valuing only what the “materialistic and mechanical sciences” can offer us will lead to poor, destructive decision making; the yields of the study of the spirit must also be considered: “But the St. Francis who so ingenuously carried the stones, and the great reformer who so miraculously led the people to a triumph of the spirit, are one and the same person in different stages of development” (22).
The Self-Sacrificing Scientist
“We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself” (23).
“There exists, then, the ‘spirit’ of the scientist, a thing far above his mere ‘mechanical skill,’ and the scientist is at the height of his achievement when the spirit has triumphed over the mechanism. When he has reached this point, science will receive from him not only new revelations of nature, but philosophic syntheses of pure thought” (23).
***This is from where Berthoff fashions her Invention techniques—observation!!!
“It is my belief that the thing which we should cultivate in our teachers is more the spirit than the mechanical skill of the scientist; that is, the direction of the preparation should be toward the spirit rather than toward the mechanism” (23).
***TEACHER TRAINING!! It’s amazing to me the extent to which she honors the teacher in this chapter, the potential of the role of teacher. It’s not hokey! It is perhaps what is missing, what is wrong with corporatism and its persistent, insistent valuing of the material! Montessori is as generous towards teachers as she is towards children/pupils.
Language Analogy
***“Reading” as means to access nature’s “revelations” (24)
“He who is initiated solely into the making of the bare experiment, is like one who spells out the literal sense of the words in the spelling-book; it is on such a level that we leave the teachers if we limit their preparation to technique alone” (24).
***Teachers need context—knowledge of the whole life of the child via observation—for resonance of meaning and potential to access “revelations” (of the nature of the child/children/humanity)
The Scientific Watcher
We must prepare teachers in “long and patient exercises for the observation of nature” (25).
“…such a preparation is not enough…He is not to make a study of man in the manifestations of his daily physical habits as one studies some family of insects, following their movements…The master is to study man in the awakening of his intellectual life” (25).
***How is this NOT analogous to the position of a traditional (or even nontraditional) FYW student?
This section on page 25 hints at the falsehood of objectivity that Berthoff promotes and remains devoted to throughout her career. Though language specifically isn’t identified as the culprit here, the way she insists upon the distinction between a man/scientist observing an inhuman object of study and the man/scientist observing a human object of study implies that when man studies man objectivity is not possible. If we identify language as essentially human, then it is always subjective.
“But the love of man for man is a far more tender thing, and so simple that it is universal. To love in this way is not the privilege of any especially prepared intellectual class, but lies within the reach of all men” (25).
*How does this square with Freire? Current social-justice movements within C/R?
*What to make of this “love”?
“But let us seek to implant in the soul the self-sacrificing spirit of the scientist with the reverent love of the disciple of Christ, and we shall have prepared the spirit of the teacher. From the child itself he will learn how to perfect himself as an educator” (25).
***FUSION here: “self-sacrificing spirit of the scientist” and “reverent love of the disciple” = child as the teacher of the teacher….
The Butterfly
“…the children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place, the desk, spreading the useless wings of barren and meaningless knowledge which they have acquired” (26).
“The school must permit the free, natural manifestations of the child if in the school scientific pedagogy is to be born. This is the essential reform” (26).
*AGENCY? What does this say about agency? The nature of it? The necessity of it? This must have been terrifying to adults (who want/need/perceive such a need control).
“…some pedagogues, led by Rousseau, have given voice to…aspirations for the liberty of the child, but the true concept of liberty is practically unknown to educators” (26).
**** Liberty and Form (*standardized syllabus…. how does FORM encourage, cultivate “true liberty”?
** How does this resonate with Freire?
“He who would say that the principle of liberty informs the pedagogy of today, would make us smile as at a child who, before the box of mounted butterflies, should insist that they were alive and could fly. The principle of slavery still pervades pedagogy, and, therefore, the same principle pervades the school” (26).
**Does this “principle of slavery” pervade still?
**Agency vs Slavery
The Desk
*Science as repressor/oppressor (26)
“Every cult of the so-called scientific pedagogy has designed a model scientific desk. Not a few nations have become proud of their ‘national desk,’—and in the struggle of competition these various machines have been patented” (27).
*** “cult” could be Berthoff’s language
**TO what extent is the “cult of the so-called scientific pedgagogy” the “positivists” against whom Berthoff rails? Or am I getting that wrong?
***This passage is largely about The Rhetoric of Design!!!! Design (of desk) = Slavery (need for/of control)… and actually has nothing to do with the child or education. (27-28)
“All this is the logical consequence of a material application of the methods of science to the decadent school…It is a conquest of liberty which the school needs, not the mechanism of a bench” (28).
“It behooves us to think of what may happen to the spirit of the child who is condemned to grow in conditions so artificial that his very bones may become deformed” (28).
“…there exists that other wound from which the soul of the man who is subjected to any form of slavery must suffer” (28).
“The moral degradation of the slave is, above all things, the weight that opposes the progress of humanity—humanity striving to rise and hled back by this great burden. The cry of redemption speaks far more clearly for the souls of men than for their bodies” (28).
***Slavery… how is this still apparent today? Mainstream? Agency????
“We know only too well the sorry spectacle of the teacher who, in the ordinary schooolroom, must pour certain cut and dried facts into the heads of the scholars. In order to succeed in this barren task, she finds it necessary to discipline her pupils into immobility and to force their attention. Prizes and punishments are every-ready and efficient aids to the master who must force into a given attitude of mind and body those who are condemned to be his listeners” (28).
***AWESOME! Current-traditional blasting here!!!!
***Notice reference to the notion of self-satisfaction/internal feedback more valuable than external feedback/reward. I wonder how gamification works in light of page 28/29????
Jockey/Horse of the Plains
(29) Reward and punishment
(Maybe dubious logic here re: reward/punishment and progress of civilizations…. 29)
“The yoke of the slave yields to that of the servant and the yoke of the servant to that of the workman” (29).
***Socialism? What is meant by “workman” here, given context of Italy 1912?
“All forms of slavery tend little by little to weaken and disappear, even the sexual slavery of woman” (29).
**Women
The Government Worker
“The man who loses sight of the really big aim of his work is like a child who has been placed in a class below his real standing: like a slave, he is cheated of something which is his right. His dignity as a man is reduced to the limits of the dignity of a machine which must be oiled if it is to be kept going, because it does nt have within itself the impulse of life” (29).
****Could be “teacher”!!!! WPA
The TEACHER who loses sight of the really big aim of his work is like a child who has been placed in a class below his real standing: like a slave, he is cheated of something which is his right. His dignity as a TEACHER is reduced to the limits of the dignity of a machine which must be oiled if it is to be kept going, because it does not have within itself the impulse of life…
“The reproof of the superior is in every way similar to the scolding of the teacher. The correction of badly executed clerical work is equivalent of the bad mark placed by the teacher upon the scholar’s poor composition. The parallel is almost perfect” (29)
****CURRENT-TRADITIONAL SPECIFIC TO COMPOSITION!!!! SMACK DOWN! AWESOME
“Even as life in the social environment triumphs against every cause of poverty and death, and proceeds to new conquests, so the instinct of liberty conquers all obstacles, going from victory to victory.// It is this personal and yet universal force of life, a force often latent within the soul, that sends the world forward” (29).
**Such optimism. Yet… I see this in my garden. How life seems to want to exist and persists in spite of all of my laziness!!!
“All human victories, all human progress, stand upon the inner force” (30).
***Internal drive!!!! (not external)
The Young Medical Student
***Better not for “material advantage” (30)
The POEM/POET
“God forbid that poems should ever be born of the desire to be crowned in the Capitol! Such a vision need only come into the heart of the poet and the muse will vanish. The poem must spring from the soul of the poet, when he thinks neither of himself nor of the prize. And if he does win the laurel, he will feel the vanity of such a prize. The true reward lies in the revelation through the poem of his own triumphant inner force” (30).
***POETS (“There were not poets at Dartmouth!” ~Berthoff’s charge in that Comment/Response exchange with….???)
***Writing/composing as working only if originating from the poet’s “soul”—no writer-generated content, no working poetry/writing. Style alone won’t do it. THE GORGIAS! Socrates here, vs. Gorgias and the Sophists. This is a kind of charge against the focus on style/genre/audience manipulation…Teaching only this, skipping Invention and the notion of generating ideas (which can’t be “taught” but perhaps “guided” via “forms” i.e. “the prepared environment” which channels the writer’s natural tendencies…) leads to “empty rhetoric” and ineffective writing. It also leads to the downfall of civilizations, by the way…
“There does exist, however, an external prize for man; when, for example, the orator sees the faces of his listeners change with the emotions he has awakened, he experiences something so great that it can only be likened to the intense joy with which one discovers that he is loved. Our joy is to touch, and conquer souls, and this is the one prize which can bring us true compensation” (30).
****Oh My God!!!!! Really???? The only true satisfaction in life is to experience effectively delivering, rhetorically, one’s ideas? Why has our field ignored Maria Montessori? How can this not be attributed to the legacy of sexism????
***A complete reading of the end of this chapter makes me quite curious about the relationship between Montessori and Aristotle, particularly in terms of ethics.
“The real punishment of normal man is the loss of the consciousness of that individual power and greatness which are the sources of his inner life” (31).
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