FREEDOM AND INDIVIDUALITY
The reader has undoubtedly been struck by the fact that in all of
the work described, pupils must have been allowed a greater amount
of freedom than is usually thought compatible with the necessary
discipline of a schoolroom. To the great majority of teachers and
parents the very word school is synonymous with “discipline,” with
quiet, with rows of children sitting still at desks and listening to
the teacher, speaking only when they are spoken to. Therefore a school
where these fundamental characteristics are lacking must of necessity
be a poor school; one where pupils do not learn anything, where they do
just as they please, quite regardless of what they please, even though
it be harmful to the child himself or disagreeable to his classmates
and the teacher.
There is a certain accumulation of facts that every child must acquire
or else grow up to be illiterate. These facts relate principally to
adult life; therefore it is not surprising that the pupil is not
interested in them, while it is the duty of the school to see that he
knows them nevertheless. How is this to be done? Obviously by seating
the children in rows, far enough apart so that they cannot easily talk
to each other, and hiring the most efficient person available to teach
the facts; to tell them to the child, and have him repeat them often
enough so that he can reasonably be expected to remember them, at least
until after he is “promoted.”
Again, children should be taught to obey; efficiency in doing as one
is told is a useful accomplishment, just as the doing of distasteful
and uninteresting tasks is a character builder. The pupil should be
taught to “respect” his teacher and learning in general; and how can
he be taught this lesson if he does not sit quietly and receptively in
the face of both? But if he will not be receptive, he must at least be
quiet, so that the teacher can teach him anyway. The very fact that
the pupil so often is lawless, destructive, rude and noisy as soon as
restraint is removed proves, according to the advocates of “discipline”
by authority, that this is the only way of dealing with the child,
since without such restraint the child would behave all day long as he
does when it is removed for a few uncertain minutes.
If this statement of the disciplinarian’s case sounds harsh and
unadorned, think for a moment of the things that visitors to “queer
schools” say after the visit is over; and consider whether they do
not force the unprejudiced observer to the conclusion that their
idea of schools and schooling is just such a harsh and unadorned
affair. The discussion of freedom versus authoritative discipline in
schools resolves itself after all into a question of the conception
of education which is entertained. Are we to believe, with the strict
disciplinarian, that education is the process of making a little
savage into a little man, that there are many virtues as well as facts
that have to be taught to all children so that they may as nearly
as possible approach the adult standard? Or are we to believe, with
Rousseau, that education is the process of making up the discrepancy
between the child at his birth and the man as he will need to be, “that
childhood has its own ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling,” and that
the method of training these ways to what a man will need is to let the
child test them upon the world about him?
The phrase, “authoritative discipline,” is used purposely, for
discipline and freedom are not contradictory ideas. The following
quotation from Rousseau shows very plainly what a heavy taskmaster
even his freedom was, a freedom so often taken to mean mere lawlessness
and license. “Give him [the pupil] no orders at all, absolutely none.
Do not even let him think that you claim any authority over him. Let
him know only that he is weak and you are strong, that his condition
and yours puts him at your mercy; let this be perceived, learned and
felt. Let him early find upon his proud neck the heavy yoke which
nature has imposed upon us, the heavy yoke of necessity, under which
every finite being must bow. Let him find the necessity in things, not
in the caprices of man; let the curb be the force of conditions, not
authority.”
Surely no discipline could be more severe, more apt to develop
character and reasonableness, nor less apt to develop disorder and
laziness. In fact the real reason for the feeling against freedom in
schools seems to come from a misunderstanding. The critic confuses
physical liberty with moral and intellectual liberty. Because the
pupils are moving about, or sitting on the floor, or have their chairs
scattered about instead of in a straight line, because they are using
their hands and tongues, the visitor thinks that their minds must
be relaxed as well; that they must be simply fooling, with no more
restraint for their minds and morals than appears for their bodies.
Learning in school has been so long associated with a docile or passive
mind that because that useful organ does not squirm or talk in its
operations, observers have come to think that none of the child should
do so, or it will interfere with learning.
Assuming that educational reformers are right in supposing that the
function of education is to help the growing of a helpless young animal
into a happy, moral, and efficient human being, a consistent plan of
education must allow enough liberty to promote that growth. The child’s
body must have room to move and stretch itself, to exercise the muscles
and to rest when tired. Every one agrees that swaddling clothes are a
bad thing for the baby, cramping and interfering with bodily functions.
The swaddling clothes of the straight-backed desk, head to the front
and hands folded, are just as cramping and even more nerve racking to
the school child. It is no wonder that pupils who have to sit in this
way for several hours a day break out in bursts of immoderate noise
and fooling as soon as restraining influences are removed. Since they
do not have a normal outlet for their physical energy to spend itself,
it is stored up, and when opportunity offers it breaks forth all the
more impetuously because of the nervous irritation previously suffered
in repressing the action of an imperfectly trained body. Give a child
liberty to move and stretch when he needs it, with opportunities for
real exercise all through the day and he will not become so nervously
overwrought that he is irritable or aimlessly boisterous when left to
himself. Trained in _doing_ things, he will be able to keep at work and
to think of other people when he is not under restraining supervision.
A truly scientific education can never develop so long as children
are treated in the lump, merely as a class. Each child has a strong
individuality, and any science must take stock of all the facts in its
material. Every pupil must have a chance to show what he truly is, so
that the teacher can find out what he needs to make him a complete
human being. Only as a teacher becomes acquainted with each one of her
pupils can she hope to understand childhood, and it is only as she
understands it that she can hope to evolve any scheme of education
which shall approach either the scientific or the artistic standard.
As long as educators do not know their individual facts they can never
know whether their hypotheses are of value. But how are they to know
their material if they impose themselves upon it to such an extent
that each portion is made to act just like every other portion? If the
pupils are marched into line, information presented to them which they
are then expected to give back in uniform fashion, nothing will ever be
found out about any of them. But if every pupil has an opportunity to
express himself, to show what are his particular qualities, the teacher
will have material on which to base her plans of instruction.
Since a child lives in a social world, where even the simplest act or
word is bound up with the words and acts of his neighbors, there is
no danger that this liberty will sacrifice the interests of others to
caprice. Liberty does not mean the removal of the checks which nature
and man impose on the life of every individual in the community, so
that one individual may indulge impulses which go against his own
welfare as a member of society. But liberty for the child is the chance
to test all impulses and tendencies on the world of things and people
in which he finds himself, sufficiently to discover their character so
that he may get rid of those which are harmful, and develop those which
are useful to himself and others. Education which treats all children
as if their impulses were those of the average of an adult society
(whose weaknesses and failures are moreover constantly deplored) is
sure to go on reproducing that same average society without even
finding out whether and how it might be better. Education which finds
out what children really are may be able to shape itself by this
knowledge so that the best can be kept and the bad eliminated. Meantime
much is lost by a mere external suppression of the bad which equally
prevents the expression of the better.
If education demands liberty before it can shape itself according to
facts, how is it to use this liberty for the benefit of the child?
Give a child freedom to find out what he can and can not do, both in
the way of what is physically possible and what his neighbors will
stand for, and he will not waste much time on impossibilities but will
bend his energies to the possibilities. The physical energy and mental
inquisitiveness of children can be turned into positive channels. The
teacher will find the spontaneity, the liveliness, and initiative of
the pupil aids in teaching, instead of being, as under the coercive
system, nuisances to be repressed. The very things which are now
interferences will become positive qualities that the teacher is
cultivating. Besides preserving qualities which will be of use to the
man and developing habits of independence and industry, allowing the
child this freedom is necessary if pupils are really to learn by doing.
Most doing will lead only to superficial muscle training if it is
dictated to the child and prescribed for him step by step. But when the
child’s natural curiosity and love of action are put to work on useful
problems, on finding out for himself how to adjust his environment to
his needs, the teacher finds that the pupils are not only doing their
lessons as well as ever, but are also learning how to control and put
to productive use those energies which are simply disturbing in the
average classroom. Unless the pupil has some real work on which to
exercise his mind by means of his senses and muscles, the teacher will
not be able to do away with the ordinary disciplinary methods. For in
a classroom where the teacher is doing all the work and the children
are listening and answering questions, it would be absurd to allow
the children to place themselves where they please, to move about,
or to talk. Where the teacher’s rôle has changed to that of helper
and observer, where the development of every child is the goal, such
freedom becomes as much a necessity of the work as is quiet where the
children are simply reciting.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: Learning to live through situations that are typical of
social life. (Teachers College, N. Y. City.)]
At present, the most talked of schools in which freedom and liberty
are necessary for the children’s work are the schools of Madame Maria
Montessori in Italy and those of her pupils in this country. Madame
Montessori believes, with many educators in this country, that liberty
is necessary in the classroom if the teacher is to know the needs and
capabilities of each pupil, if the child is to receive in school a
well-rounded training making for the best development of his mind,
character, and physique. In general, her reasons for insisting upon
this liberty, which is the basis of her method, correspond with those
outlined above, with one exception. She holds that liberty is necessary
for the child if a scientific education is to be created, because
without it data on which to base principles can not be collected;
also that it is necessary for the physical welfare of the pupils and
for the best development of their characters in training them to be
independent. The point of difference between the Italian educator and
most reformers in this country lies in their respective views of the
value of liberty in the use of material, and this point will be taken
up later.
Madame Montessori believes that repressing children physically while
they are in school and teaching them habits of mental passivity and
docility is mistaking the function of the school and doing the children
real harm. Scientific education not only needs freedom for the child
in order to collect data, but liberty is its very basis; “liberty is
activity,” says Madame Montessori in her book called “The Montessori
Method.” Activity is the basis of life, consequently training children
to move and act is training them for life, which is the proper office
of the schoolroom. The object of liberty is the best interests of the
whole group; this becomes the end of the liberty allowed the children.
Everything which does not contribute to it must be suppressed, while
the greatest care is taken to foster every action with a useful scope.
In order to give the pupils the largest possible scope for such useful
activity, they are allowed a very large amount of freedom in the
classroom. They may move about, talk to each other, place their tables
and chairs where they please, and, what is of more significance, each
pupil may choose what work he will do, and may work at one thing as
long or as short a time as he wishes. She says, “A room in which all
the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily,
without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom
very well disciplined indeed.” Discipline, in short, is ability to do
things independently, not submission under restraint.
In order to bring about this active discipline, which allows free
scope for any useful work, and at the same time does not stifle the
spontaneous impulses of the child, the ordinary methods of discipline
are done away with, and a technique is developed to emphasize the
positive, not the negative, side of discipline. Montessori has
described it in this way: “As to punishments, we have many times come
in contact with children who disturbed the others, without paying any
attention to our corrections. Such children were at once examined by
the physician. When the case proved to be that of a normal child,
we placed one of the little tables in a corner of the room, and in
this way isolated the child, having him sit in a comfortable little
armchair, so placed that he might see his companions at work, and
giving him those games and toys to which he was most attracted. This
isolation almost always succeeded in calming the child; from his
position he could see the entire assembly of his companions, and the
way in which they carried on their work was an object-lesson much more
efficacious than any words of the teacher could possibly have been.
Little by little he would come to see the advantages of being one of
the company working so busily before his eyes, and he would really
wish to go back and do as the others did.” The corrections which the
teachers first offer never take the form of scoldings; the child is
quietly told that what he is doing is not polite or disturbs the other
children. Then he is told how he ought to behave to be a pleasant
companion, or his attention is diverted to a piece of work. Because
children are working on something of their own choice, and when they
want to, and because they may move and talk enough so that they do not
get nervously tired, there is very little need for any “punishment.”
Except for an isolated case of real lawlessness, such as Montessori
refers to in the quotation just cited, the visitor to one of her
schools sees very little need of negative discipline. The teachers’
corrections are practically all for small breaches of manners or for
carelessness.
Activity founded on liberty being the guiding principle of the
Montessori schools, activity is expended by the child on two sorts of
material. Montessori believes that the child needs practice in the
actions of daily life; that, for example, he should be taught how to
take care of and wait on himself. Part of the work is accordingly
directed to this end. She also believes that the child possesses
innate faculties which should be allowed to develop to their fullest;
consequently part of the work is designed to give adequate expression
to these faculties. These exercises for the culture of the inner
potentialities of the child she considers the more important of the
two. The child needs to know how to adjust himself to his environment
in order to be independent and happy; but an imperfect development
of the child’s faculties is an imperfect development of life itself;
so the real object of education consists in furnishing active help
to the normal expansion of the life of the child. These two lines of
development Madame Montessori considers to be so distinct one from the
other that the exercises of practical life cannot perform the function
of the exercises arranged to train the faculties and senses of the
child.
The exercises of practical life are designed to teach the child to
be independent, to supply his own wants, and to perform the actions
of daily life with skill and grace. The pupils keep the schoolroom
in order, dusting and arranging the furniture, and putting away each
piece of material as soon as they are through with it. They wait
on themselves while they are working, getting out the things they
want, finding a convenient place to work, and then taking care of
the apparatus when they have worked with it as long as they like. In
schools where the children do not live in the building, a midday lunch
is served for the pupils; and, except for the cooking, the children do
all the work connected with the meal, setting tables, serving food, and
then clearing away and washing the dishes. All the pupils share alike
in this work, regardless of their age; children of three and four soon
learn to handle the plates and glasses, and to pass the food. Wherever
possible the schools have gardens, which the children care for, and
animal pets of a useful sort--hens and chickens or pigeons. Even the
youngest children put on their own wraps, button and unbutton their
aprons and slippers, and when they can not do it for themselves, they
help each other. The necessity of the pupils’ learning to take care of
themselves as early as possible is so much insisted upon that in order
to help the youngest in learning this lesson, Montessori has designed
several appliances to give them practice before they begin to wait upon
themselves. These are wooden frames, fitted with cloth which is opened
down the center. Then the edges are joined either with buttons, hooks
and eyes, or ribbons, and practice consists in opening and closing
these edges by buttoning, hooking, or tying as the case may be.
These appliances may be taken as a bridge between the two sorts of
exercises in use in the Montessori schools. They mark a transition
from the principles which are common to most educational reformers to
those associated particularly with the method worked out by Madame
Montessori. Another quotation from her first book gives the clew to
an understanding of this method: “In a pedagogical method which is
experimental the education of the senses must undoubtedly assume
the greatest importance.... The method used by me is that of making
a pedagogical experiment with a didactic object and awaiting the
spontaneous reaction of the child.... With little children, we must
proceed to the making of trials, and must select the didactic materials
in which they show themselves to be interested.... I believe, however,
that I have arrived at a selection of objects representing the minimum
necessary to a practical sense education.”
Madame Montessori started her career as a teacher among deficient
children in the hospitals where Seguin had worked. Naturally she
experimented with the material used with her subnormal pupils when she
began working with normal children. It is equally natural that many of
the objects which had proved useful with the former were also usable
with the average school child. Ordinary school methods succeed with
deficient children when used more slowly and with more patience; and in
the same way Madame Montessori found that many of the appliances which
had before been used only for deficients produced remarkably successful
results with ordinary children, when used with more rapidity and
liberty. Therefore her “didactic material” includes many things that
are used generally to develop sensory consciousness among deficients.
But instead of using the material in a fixed order and under the
guidance of a teacher, the normal child is allowed complete liberty in
its use; for the object is no longer to awaken powers that are nearly
lacking, but to exercise powers that the child is using constantly in
all his daily actions, so that he may have a more and more accurate and
skillful control over them.
The exercises to develop the faculties of the child are especially
so arranged as to train the power to discriminate and to compare.
His sensory organs are nearly all exercised with apparatus designed,
like the button frames, to allow the child to do one thing for one
purpose. The pupil does not have to use these objects in any fixed
order or work for any length of time on one thing. Except for the very
youngest children, who do only the very simplest exercises, pupils
are at liberty to work at any one they wish and for as long as they
wish. Montessori believes that the child will turn naturally to the
exercise he is ready for. The materials to develop the sense of touch
are among the simplest. There are small boards with strips of sandpaper
running from the roughest to the smoothest, and pieces of different
kinds of cloth; these the child rubs his hands over while his eyes are
blindfolded, distinguishing the differences. The appliances designed
to teach the child to distinguish differences of form and size use the
sense of touch as a strong aid to sight. There are blocks of wood with
holes of different diameters and depths, and cylinders to fit each
hole. The child takes all the cylinders out, rubs his fingers around
their edge and then around the rim of the holes and puts them back
in the proper hole. The ability to judge of size is also exercised
by giving the child a set of graduated wooden blocks with which he
builds a tower, and another set which he may use to make a stair. The
power to distinguish form is developed by wooden insets of all shapes
which fit into holes in a thin board. The child takes out the insets,
feels of them and then replaces them. Later the teacher tells him the
geometrical name of each form while he is touching it, and then has him
distinguish them by name.
There are sets of cardboard forms to correspond to the wooden ones,
and metal plaques where the form appears as a hole in the center of
the plaque. These are used in games which consist in matching the same
form in the different materials, and for drawing the form in outline on
paper to be filed in with colored pencils.
The method of teaching reading and writing uses the sense of touch to
reënforce the lesson the pupil gets through the eye and ear. Sandpaper
alphabets with each letter pasted on a square of cardboard are given a
child. He rubs his finger over these as if he were writing and makes
the sound of the letter as he rubs. Movable letters are used only after
the child is familiar with the letters by touch, and with them he makes
words. Writing usually precedes reading when children learn in this
way; when they take pencil or chalk, they are able to trace the letters
with very little difficulty because the muscles as well as the eye are
familiar with the forms.
The sense of hearing is exercised by means of two sets of bells, one
fixed to give the scale, the other movable, so that the child can make
his own scale by comparing with the fixed scale. The children play a
number of games where they are as quiet as possible, acting out simple,
whispered directions from the teacher. There is as well a series of
rattles filled with sand, gravel, and grains, and the game is to guess
which rattle is being shaken. The sense of color is developed in the
same way by means of specially arranged apparatus. This consists of
small tablets wound with colored silks in all colors and shades, which
are used in many different ways, according to the age and skill of the
pupil. The youngest learn to distinguish two or three colors and to
tell dark from light shades. The older pupils who are familiar with the
colors acquire enough skill in their manipulation to be able to glance
at one tablet and then go to the other side of the room and bring
either an exact match or the next shade lighter or darker, according to
what the teacher has asked for.
Muscular development is provided for by giving the children plenty of
time during the school day to run and play, and by means of apparatus
for free gymnastics, while the finer coördinating muscles are being
constantly exercised while the child is manipulating the appliances for
sense training. The faculty of speech is trained by having the children
practice the pronunciation of words and syllables. The fundamental
conceptions of number are taught much as are reading and writing.
Besides the sandpaper numbers and the plain cardboard ones, there is
a series of wooden bars varying in length from one to ten meters,
which the children use in connection with numbers in learning the
combinations up to ten.
The foregoing description of the didactic material is very brief
and general and omits many of the uses of the appliances as well
as reference to some of the less used material, but it serves to
illustrate the nature and purpose of the work done by the children.
Pupils acquire a marked skill in the handling of the material which
appeals especially to them, and children of four and five learn to
write with very little effort. In fact, Madame Montessori believes
that the average child is ready for many of the ideas which he usually
does not get until his sixth year at an earlier age, when they can be
acquired more easily; and that a system such as hers which allows the
child to perform one set of acts at the time when he is ready for it
saves him a great deal of time later on, besides giving a more perfect
result than could then be achieved.
Each piece of material is designed to train singly one specific sense
through the performance of one set of fixed acts. Consequently if
liberty is confounded with doing as one pleases, this method must
appear very strict. Liberty is found in the use the children make of
material. The amount of freedom the pupils are allowed in the classroom
has already been described, and the rôle of the teacher is made to
correspond with this liberty. She is trained not to interfere with any
spontaneous activity of the child and never to force his attention
where it is not given naturally. When a child has turned of his own
accord to a certain apparatus the teacher may show him the proper use
of it; or in rare cases she may try to direct the child’s attention to
a different type of work if he seems inclined to concentrate to excess
on one thing, but if she fails she never insists. In fact nothing is
done by the teacher to call the child’s attention to his weaknesses
and failures, or to arouse any negative associations in his mind.
Madame Montessori says, “If he [the child] makes a mistake, the teacher
must not correct him, but must suspend her lesson to take it up again
another day. Indeed, why correct him? If the child has not succeeded
in associating the name with the object, the only way in which to
succeed would be to repeat both the action of the sense stimuli and
the name; in other words, to repeat the lesson. But when the child has
failed, we should know that he was not at that instant ready for the
physic associations which we wished to provoke in him, and we must
therefore choose another moment. If we should say, in correcting the
child, ‘No, you have made a mistake,’ all these words, which, being
in the form of a reproof, would strike him more forcibly than others,
would remain in the mind of the child, retarding the learning of the
names. On the contrary, the silence which follows the error leaves the
field of consciousness clear, and the next lesson may successfully
follow the first.”
The simplicity and passivity of the teachers’ rôle are increased by
the nature of the didactic material. Once the child has been taught
the nomenclature connected with the apparatus, the teacher ceases to
teach. She becomes merely an observer as far as that pupil is concerned
until he is ready to move on to another appliance. This is possible
because of what Montessori calls the “self-corrective” nature of her
material. That is, each thing is arranged so that the child can do
but one complete thing with it, so that if he makes a mistake the
apparatus does not work. Thus a child working with any one thing does
not have to be told when he makes a mistake how to correct it. He is
confronted with an obvious problem, which is solved by his own handling
of the material. The child is educating himself in that he sees his own
mistakes and corrects them, and the finished result is perfect; partial
success or failure is not possible.
Take the simplest piece of material, the block of wood in which solid
cylinders are set. There are ten of these cylinders, each varying,
say, in length about a quarter of an inch from the one next it. The
child takes all these cylinders from their proper holes and mixes
them up; then he puts them back in their right places again. If he
puts a cylinder in a hole too deep for it, it disappears; if the
hole is too shallow it sticks up too far, while if every cylinder is
put in its proper hole, the child has a solid block of wood again.
All the geometrical insets are self-corrective in exactly the same
way. Even the youngest child would know whether he had succeeded
with the button and lacing frames. The tower blocks will not pile up
into a tower unless the child piles them one on top of the other in
decreasing sizes, nor will the stair blocks make a stair unless they
are laid side by side according to the same principle. In using the
color tablets the child needs rather more preparation; but when he has
learned to distinguish the eight different shades of one of the eight
colors, he is ready to arrange them so that they blend from dark to
light, and if he makes a mistake the tablet placed in wrong sequence
will appear to him as an inharmonious blot. Once the pupil gets the
idea with one color he is able to work it out for himself for the
other seven. Since the pupils are never allowed merely to play with
an apparatus, it becomes associated in his mind with performing the
right set of actions, so a misstep appears to him as something to be
undone, something calling for another trial. The educational purpose
Montessori aims to serve in making her material self-corrective, is
that of leading the child to concentrate upon the differences in the
parts of the appliances he is working with; that is, in trying for the
fixed end he has to compare and discriminate between two colors, two
sounds, two dimensions, etc. It is in making these comparisons that the
intellectual value of training the senses lies. The particular faculty
or sense that the child is exercising in using any one apparatus is
sharpened by concentration upon the _relations_ between the things.
Sense-development of an intellectual character comes from the growth
of this power of the sense organ to compare and discriminate, not from
teaching the child to recognize dimensions, sounds, colors, etc., nor
yet from simply going through certain motions without making a mistake.
Montessori claims that intellectual result differentiates her work from
the appliances of the kindergarten.
As we said above, the difference between the Montessori method and the
views of American reformers lies not in a difference of opinion as to
the value of liberty, but rather in a different conception of the best
use to be made of it. Physically the pupils of a Montessori class are
freer than they are in the classes of most American educators with
whose views this book has been dealing; intellectually they are not
so free. They can come and go, work and be idle, talk and move about
quite voluntarily; getting information about things and acquiring skill
in movement are the ends secured. Each pupil works independently on
material that is self-corrective. But there is no freedom allowed the
child to create. He is free to choose which apparatus he will use, but
never to choose his own ends, never to bend a material to his own
plans. For the material is limited to a fixed number of things which
must be handled in a certain way. Most American educators think that
the training of the pupil to habits of right thinking and judgment
is best accomplished by means of material which presents to him real
problems, and they think that the measure of reality is found in
connection with the experiences of life out of school. The big thing
that children have to learn is twofold; for their adjustment to the
world in which they find themselves involves relations to people and
to things. Adjustment means not simply the ability to control their
bodies, but an intellectual adjustment as well, an ability to see the
relations between things, to look behind their surface and perceive
their meaning not alone to the individual, but to the community as
well. “The best way of making sure that children learn this double
adjustment is,” says the American school-teacher, “to give them work
which represents truly the conditions they have to deal with out of
school.”
[Illustration: Solving problems in school as they would have to be met
out of school.
(Francis Parker School, Chicago.)]
Outside the classroom the child is constantly having to bend material
things to his own needs, and to satisfy the demands that are made
upon him because he lives with other people. If he is to accomplish
this successfully for himself and others it is important that he
learn to see things as they are; that he be able to use his senses
accurately to understand the meaning that things and people have to and
for him as a member of society. Hence the need of freedom to meet and
solve these problems in school, much as one has to do out of school.
Madame Montessori, on the other hand, believes that the technique of
living can best be learned by the child through situations that are
not typical of social life, but which have been arranged in order
to exercise some special sense so as to develop the faculties of
discrimination and comparison.
The difference of opinion resolves itself into the acceptance of
different views of the nature of the human intelligence. Montessori,
in common with the older psychologists, believes that people have
ready-made faculties which can be trained and developed for general
purposes, regardless of whether the acts by which they are exercised
have any meaning other than the training they afford. The child is born
with undeveloped faculties which can be made to blossom by suitable
appliances, and then devoted at will to other uses. Most educators in
this country agree with the newer psychological theories that skill
can not be achieved independently of the tools used and the object
fashioned in the accomplishment of a special end. Exercises which
distinguish for the child the abstract qualities like length and color,
regardless of the things of which they are qualities, may give the
child great skill in performing the special exercise, but will not
necessarily result in making him more successful in dealing with these
qualities as they appear as factors in the situations of life. Much
less will they train powers of comparing and discriminating at large
so that they may be transferred to any use. A child is not born with
faculties to be unfolded, but with special impulses of action to be
developed through their use in preserving and perfecting life in the
social and physical conditions under which it goes on.
If, accordingly, the child in an American progressive school does
not usually have as much freedom of moving about and of choice of
his time for doing work, the explanation does not consist in a less
degree of belief in the value of liberty. The emphasis falls on the
larger freedom of using and testing senses and judgment in situations
typical of life. Because these situations are social, they require
that children work more together in common pursuits; because they are
social they permit and often require the teacher’s aid, just as one
gains assistance from others in the ordinary affairs of life. Help from
others is not to be feared as an encroachment upon liberty, but that
kind of help which restricts the use of the children’s own intelligence
in forming ends and using ingenuity, initiative and inventiveness in
the selection and adaption of materials. The limitation of material to
performing exercises calculated to train an isolated sense--a situation
that never presents itself in life--seems to the American teacher a
greater limitation of freedom than that which arises from the need of
coöperation with others in the performance of common activities. It
is desirable not merely that the child should learn not to interfere
with others as they execute their own ends, but also that he should
learn to work with them in an intelligent way. Hence the scope of the
material should not be limited to training the discriminations and
comparisons of a single sense (however valuable this may be with very
young children who are incapable of coöperative activity and whose
main business is to master the use of their organs),[A] but should
be varied enough to offer typical problems calling for the kind of
comparison and discrimination used in ordinary life-situations. And
when pupils are making real things for real uses, or finding out
about the activities and materials of out-of-school life, several
children need to work at the same thing and keep at one thing with some
consecutiveness.
[A] It is significant that many who have experimented with
the apparatus hold that its value is greatest with quite
young children--three and four years old.
But if the educators of this country differ with Montessori as to
the existence of innate faculties which can be trained for general
application by special exercises designed only for training and not
for the accomplishment of results in which training is incidental,
they welcome her efforts to secure that degree of freedom in the
schoolroom which will enable teachers to become acquainted with the
real powers and interests of the child and thus secure the data for
a scientific method in education. They appreciate the force of her
point that artificial conditions of restraint prevent teachers from
getting true knowledge of the material with which they are dealing, so
that instruction is limited to repetition of traditional processes.
They perceive that her insistence upon touch associated with muscular
movement as a factor in learning to write and read, is a real
contribution to the technique of elementary instruction. She has become
a most important factor in the popularizing of the gospel of liberty
as indispensable to any true education.
With a wider understanding of the meaning of intellectual and moral
freedom, and the accompanying breakdown of the negative and coercive
ideas of discipline, the chief obstacle to the use of the teacher’s
own powers of observation and experimentation will disappear. The
scientific interest which requires personal observation, reflection,
and experimental activity, will be added to the teacher’s sympathetic
interest in the welfare of children. Education that associates learning
with doing will replace the passive education of imparting the learning
of others. However well the latter is adapted to feudal societies, in
which most individuals are expected to submit constantly and docilely
to the authority of superiors, an education which proceeds on this
basis is inconsistent with a democratic society where initiative and
independence are the rule and where every citizen is supposed to take
part in the conduct of affairs of common interest. It is significant of
the wide-reaching development of the democratic spirit that the voice
most influentially identified at the present time with the ideal of
liberty in education should sound forth from Italy.