August 21, 1870 marks the birthdate of a woman who would bring the scientific method to the world of education. Born into a middle class Italian family, Maria Montessori rejected the stereotype given to women of her time period and social status by pursuing one academic degree after another. Her early studies in engineering and then medicine made her into the first woman to achieve a physician’s degree from the University of Rome. The tenacity that helped her break into fields that typically excluded women was the same kind that helped her defy the traditional methods of education and reshape its possibilities. Her counter-cultural views on the roles of women as well as her emphasis on the possibility of social-political transformation through education seem to identify her as holding a radical/critical philosophy of education.

     However, her scientific methods of education seem to be cognitive and have at their heart a focus on developing the student as an individual – an attribute distinctly humanist. Under her guidance, “The individual child would become the focus, the center of education; and the teacher, a director, who unobtrusively guided the child’s own self-learning” (Montessori, p. 3).

     Learning, to Montessori, was not simply communicating an idea or method, but giving a child a skill and then helping him embrace the value for using it. This, Montessori believed would result in spontaneous expression and application of ideas. However, unlike the American progressive educator’s who adopted Rousseau’s idea that “children learn best by following their instincts and impulses in an unstructured environment,” Montessori believed that education existed to equip and guide the natural self directed process in a positive direction. The “art of the educator” is “in knowing how to measure the action by which we help the young child’s personality to develop” (pp. 11, 184).

     Believing that an inductive philosophical approach to designing the education experience was insufficient to account for its complexities, she developed her classrooms as if they were laboratories. Within those sacred walls, her teachers were trained not only in the use of teaching instruments, but also in the art of observing and designing new instruments or approaches to them that might be better suited to the individual child. Thus her teachers were prepared “to observe and experiment in the school” (p. 81).

     The most interesting observation Maria Montessori said she ever made was that her didactic tools used with deficient students made their learning possible, but with normal students, they provoked “auto-education,” or self-learning. It was this observation that children would learn on their own when provided with the proper stimulus that inspired Montessori to develop the “method of observation and liberty” (p. 154).

     Central to the Montessori method is the idea of liberty. However, in contrast to the chaos that erupted in progressive American schools, Montessori schools demonstrated a calm disciplined atmosphere that surprised most who visited. In his response to the progressive chaos, John Dewey proposed: “It may be a loss rather than a gain to escape from the control of another person only to find one’s conduct dictated by immediate whim and caprice; that is, at the mercy of impulses into whose formation intelligent judgment has not entered” (Dewey p. 65). From another angle, Montessori argued, “he who is served is limited in his independence” (Montessori, p. 118).  Neither the student who has no boundaries nor the student who is given everything he needs has learned the art of active liberty that expresses itself through the character of self-control.

To develop this control, students need accessible opportunities to expand their self-concept, not simply expand their knowledge base. It is not the acquisition of information, but the satisfaction of having learned it on one’s own which is the basis of satisfaction with learning (p. 253). Therefore, instead of replacing the didactic lecture with didactic relationships as suggested by the progressive educators like John Dewey, she replaced these with didactic tools through which a child could learn on his own initiative (p. 261).

     “The use of self-correcting educational materials was based on Montessori’s belief that children would acquire self-discipline and self-reliance by becoming aware of their own mistakes and repeating a particular task until they had mastered it” (p.17). She focused these materials on practical, observational, and communication skills. Such an emphasis was absolutely necessary with the mentally disabled children that made up her first experimental classroom.

     Because the learning tools provided auto-correcting experiences, the child was able to play with them on his own without the interference of the teacher. In this way failure became the basis of learning within a safe environment. Yet, because of the instructive materials, this failure led to a progression of experiences through which the child would develop his character as well as an understanding of the world around him. Primary to this understanding of the world was a development of the senses which included color, weight, size, order, smell, etc. broken down into their various aspects and made into objects that the child could understand through play.

     Montessori called this the anthropological method of teaching. Instead of analyzing the information in order to present it effectively, the teacher must analyze and create the process by which the child encounters this information. For example, in teaching students to write, Montessori observed the different skills needed to hold the writing object, to move the hand in the shape of the letter, and then eventually to understand what the written letters communicate. The role of the teacher was first to give students the terms with which to understand the names of the letters they trace, second to insure that the student progresses toward competent use of these letters, and third, to “lead the child from sensations to ideas” (p. 181).This last thought became especially important to Montessori when she noticed that her students could read books without understanding the ideas communicated by the words (p. 219). This intellectual understanding of reading came later than the observational and practical understanding.

     Although her didactic tools were first designed to teach children with mental disabilities, they proved to be so effective that she later applied them to normal students with equally astonishing results. For example, Montessori students from the children’s houses (part of a charitable housing project) in Rome could write at the same level as 3rd year public school students after only six months of self-directed practice (p. 217). Successes like these lended credibility to the Montessori method, and it began to spread through Italy, then across Europe, and even into North America.

     Though they were initially well received in America, the Montessori schools soon faced some scrutiny. Montessori saw education as a combination of “work and…liberty, which are the two paths to all civic progress” (p. 259). William Kilpatrick in his criticism of her methods suggested that she focused too much attention on this development of maturity in her children. As a better alternative, he thought schools should develop activities more suitable for their “child-life” that could help them make sense of the “social environment” (p. 277). He wanted a greater diversity of activities than those allowed by her didactic tools. Similar to Dewey, he thought that children would learn more through their interaction with each other than with didactic materials.

He soon made his opinions public with a book that fiercely criticizing the method titled “The Montessori System Examined.” In light of this and other struggles over legal control of her work, the initial reception to the method in the United States began to cool. Another part of this was the rise of American fascination with educators like Freud and Dewey. Nevertheless, Montessori schools were destined to return to popularity by the time of her death in 1952 when Americans were becoming more interested in early childhood education, and today it is possible to find a Montessori school in just about every major American city.

     In 1929 Maria Montessori founded the Association Montessori Internationale to control the training of Montessori teachers and the production of didactic materials. To promote her ideas, she began writing and going on speaking tours. Unfortunately, the open experimentation that had guided her early development as a directress was not offered to her trainees. In fact, she strongly disliked those teachers that attempted to experiment with the development of their own curriculum (p. 22). This strict oversight helped to give Montessori a reputation that did not reflect her earlier emphasis on liberty, observation, and experimentation. It is also the reason why some believe her ideas did not extend their influence beyond early childhood education.

     This is quite sad because aspects of her method could be applied to learners of all ages including adults. For example, designing education around the individual instead of around information might diminish reduce the disparity that is often seen in student performance. Second, learning experiences that encourage failure and repetition develop both character and an understanding of the subject. Thus, a student may develop both the knowledge of a subject and a knowledge of himself that empowers him to do something with the subject. Finally, giving students practical experience with a subject before trying to explain its intellectual significance can increase their depth of interaction with that subject and greatly enhance their retention.

     Although she is most remembered for her development of learning centers that emphasize didactic tools, I believe Maria Montessori’s greatest contribution to the field of education was her application of the scientific method to education. Even those who question the validity of her curriculum might find it profitable to examine the fundamental assumptions that guided its development and perhaps apply the scientific method to their own classrooms.

 

References

Dewey, John.  (1938).  Experience and education,.  New York :  The Macmillan company

Montessori, M. (2004).

The Montessori method: The origins of an educational innovation: Including an abridged and annotated edition of Maria Montessori's The Montessori method (G. Gutek, Ed.). Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.