The Montessori Method
Maria Montessori, 1909
Why does a child who was made to sit still never become truly disciplined? The physician Maria Montessori opened a “Children's House” in a poor Roman quarter and described what she saw when she gave the little ones freedom and purposeful work. You will learn how she prepared the room, why her teacher observed more than she taught, and how four-year-olds once began to write.
Who it is for
For parents and carers of children from three to six years old who want to understand how a child learns on his own, and where an adult helps him and where an adult gets in the way.
A person is what he is not because of the teachers he had, but because of what he has done.
Children who were left alone
Rome, late 1906. In the poor San Lorenzo quarter, the Roman Society for Good Building was renovating old apartment blocks, and the tenants themselves kept an eye on the cleanliness of the staircases and walls. Only the little ones were a problem: their parents went out to work, children below school age spent the whole day alone and, in Montessori's words, became little vandals who daubed the walls.
The society's director, Edoardo Talamo, proposed gathering children from three to seven years old in a large room right in the building, under the care of a teacher who lived there too. It was decided to pay for this out of money that would otherwise have gone on repairs. On 6 January 1907 the first Children's House opened, and it began to work under the direction of Maria Montessori.
Montessori was a physician. Even before the Children's House she had spent two years teaching children whom her contemporaries called feeble-minded and kept in psychiatric hospitals, and some of them she taught to read and write so well that they passed an examination in an ordinary school alongside healthy classmates. Another question occupied her: what keeps ordinary children so low that her pupils were able to catch up with them?
Her answer became this book. A child grows from within, through his own work, and the environment, in Montessori's view, can help or hinder but cannot create. So the adult does not mould the child to a plan, but prepares the surroundings, observes and removes the obstacles. You will see where order comes from among free children, how an object shows the mistake itself, and why four-year-olds once took up writing on the floor.
Part of the book belongs to its time: anthropometry, that is, regular measurement of height, weight and head, advice on diet, the medical language of that era. We will leave these aside.
Discipline that does not sit still
Montessori asks us to imagine a scientist who was called to study living insects and was shown a box of butterflies pinned to boards. There is no life left in such material. That, she says, was the ordinary school: children sat at their desks like butterflies on pins, smoothing the useless wings of learned knowledge.
The science of her day had even improved the desk. It was fitted to the child's height so that he would not stoop, and made so cramped that it was almost impossible to move. Montessori replies sharply: if the spine bends from many hours in one posture, it is the work that must change, not the bench. The school needs freedom, not the mechanism of a bench.
But how do you keep order among free children? Here lies the book's key distinction. Montessori does not call a child who has been made to be silent and motionless disciplined; she calls him destroyed. Discipline means self-control: being able to manage one's own conduct when the rule requires it. Such discipline is active. The child learns not to sit still, but to move in such a way that he does not disturb anyone.
Her freedom is not unlimited. It is bounded by the interests of others, and its form is set by what everyone regards as good manners. The adult stops everything rough, dangerous or hurtful to others. Everything else, any useful action, is not merely allowed but becomes an object of observation.
It is just as easy to err in the other direction. Teachers, tired of Montessori's remarks, once stopped intervening altogether: the children put their feet on the tables and shoved one another. She had to show how firmly the unacceptable must be stopped, so that a child learns to tell good from bad. The adult's task, she writes, is to make sure the child does not mistake good for stillness, or bad for movement.
A room in which all the children are busy with useful work and nobody is rude, Montessori considered very disciplined. If we carry this into the home, the question itself changes. That is already our own application, not her rule. The question is no longer “how do I make him sit quietly”, but “which activity will help him move with purpose”.
About the author
Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator. She worked in Rome with children who were slow in development, and in 1907 opened the first Children's House. The book appeared in Italian in 1909 and in English in 1912, with two new chapters.
All books by this author: Maria Montessori
Terms from the book
- discipline
- Holmes
- San Lorenzo: A poor working-class quarter of Rome, built up in 1884–1888. The first Children's House opened here in 1907.
- Roman Society for Good Building: An organisation that bought and rebuilt old apartment blocks in Rome. Its head invited Montessori to open schools for the children of the tenants.
- Talamo: Edoardo Talamo, an engineer and managing director of the Roman Society for Good Building. In his plan every rebuilt house was to have its own school for little children.
- Children's House: Casa dei Bambini in Italian: a school for children from three to seven, right inside a residential building. The first one opened in Rome on 6 January 1907.
- anthropometry: The measurement of the human body: height, weight, circumference of the head and chest. In Montessori's time it was regarded as the basis of scientific pedagogy; she gave measurements a modest place.
- directress: The name Montessori gave to the teacher in her schools: she teaches little, observes more and guides the children's independent work.
- independence: For Montessori, the ability to do for oneself what a child is able to do alone: walk, dress, wash, eat and clearly ask for what he needs.
- Pincio: A hill and public park in the centre of Rome, the Pincio Gardens.
- control of error: A property of Montessori's material: it shows the child the mistake himself, for example a cylinder that fits no remaining socket.
- didactic material: A set of teaching objects devised by Montessori: cylinders, cubes, bars, tablets, letters. Each object exercises one skill.
- self-education: Montessori's word: the child develops through his own exercises, while the adult prepares the conditions and does not intervene without need.
- Séguin: Édouard Séguin, a French educator and physician of the nineteenth century and the creator of a method for teaching children who were slow in development. Montessori regarded him as her chief predecessor.
- sandpaper letters: Letters of the written alphabet cut out of sandpaper and glued to smooth cards. The child traces them with a finger, and the roughness guides the finger along the line.
- movable alphabet: Letters cut out of cardboard and kept in a box with compartments. The child assembles words from them before he can write.
- explosion into writing: Montessori's phrase: a child whose movements have all been prepared in advance suddenly begins to write whole words at once.
- phonetic: Of writing: where words are spelt almost as they are pronounced. Italian writing is almost phonetic, unlike English.
- silence game: A game of Montessori's: the children achieve complete silence, and then one by one are called in a whisper from another room.
All terms
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