DR. MARIA MONTESSORI AND HER METHOD

The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth." Maria Montessori Montessori was one of the most important early years educators of the 20th century, the innovator of classroom practices and ideas which have had a profound influence on the education of young children the world over.

She was the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome medical school and became interested in education through her work as a doctor, treating what today are known as children with special needs. When she went on to establish schools for the disadvantaged children of working parents in Rome she approached their education as a scientist, using the classroom as her laboratory for observing children and finding ways to help them to achieve their full potential.

It soon became apparent that Dr. Montessori had developed a highly effective method of teaching which could be used with great success with each and every child.  She began to travel the world, establishing schools, lecturing about her discoveries and writing many articles right up to her death in Holland in 1952 at the age of 82. She was a true pioneer of child-centered education. Her innovative classroom practices and ideas have had a profound influence on the education of young children all over the world.

Montessori saw that children learn best by doing and that happy self-motivated learners form positive images of themselves as confident, successful people.  She created specially designed resources to foster independence and a love for learning from an early age.

The Montessori approach is holistic and aims to develop the whole child. Fundamental to the approach is the belief that a child's early years from birth to six are the period when they have the greatest capacity to learn.

“The task of the child is to construct a man, orientated to his environment, adapted to his time, place, and culture”. (Montessori. xiv )

• The training of the teacher who is to help life is something far more than the learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit.
• The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.
• Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.
• It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.
• Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future.
• The teacher's task is no small or easy one! He has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child's mental hunger, and he is not, like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus.
• The first duty of an education is to stir up life, but leave it free to develop.
• It is necessary for the teacher to guide the child without letting him feel her presence too much, so that she may always be ready to supply the desired help, but may never be the obstacle between the child and his experience.
• Written language can be acquired more easily by children of four years than by those of six. While children of six usually need at least two years to learn how to write children of four years learn this second language within a few months.
• One who desires to be a teacher must have an interest in humanity that connects the observer more closely than that which joins the biologist or zoologist to nature.
• The most urgent task facing educators is to come to know this unknown child and to free it from all entanglements.
• These words reveal the child's inner needs: "Help me to do it alone."
• Sometimes very small children in a proper environment develop a skill and exactness in their work that can only surprise us.
• The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent or teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens.
• Any child who is self-sufficient, who can tie his shoes, dress or undress himself, reflects in his joy and sense of achievement the image of human dignity, which is derived from a sense of independence.
• The life of the spirit prepares the dynamic power for daily life, and, on its side, daily life encourages thought by means of ordinary work.
• Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.
• The most difficult thing to make clear to the new teacher is that because the child progresses, she must restrain herself and avoid giving directions, even if at first they are expected; all her faith must repose in his latent powers.
• The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child.
• We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction.
• A felicitous environment that guides the children and offers them the means to exercise their own faculties permits the teacher to absent herself temporarily. The creation of such an environment is already the realization of great progress.
• Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.
• We must help the child to liberate himself from his defects without making him feel his weakness.
• The child is much more spiritually elevated than is usually supposed. He often suffers, not from too much work, but from work that is unworthy of him.
• There is a part of a child's soul that has always been unknown but which must be known. With a spirit of sacrifice and enthusiasm we must go in search, like those who travel to foreign lands and tear up mountains in their search for hidden gold.
• The adult must find within himself the still unknown error that prevents him from seeing the child as he is.
• In their dealings with children adults do not become egotistic but egocentric. They look upon everything pertaining to a child's soul from their own point of view and, consequently, their misapprehensions increase.
• There is in the soul of a child an impenetrable secret that is gradually revealed as it develops.
• The first essential for the child's development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy. "There is a part of a child's soul that has always been unknown but which must be known. With a spirit of sacrifice and enthusiasm we must go in search like those who travel to foreign lands and tear up mountains in their search for hidden gold. This is what the adults must do who seeks the unknown factor that lies hidden in the depths of a child's soul. This is a labor in which all must share, without distinction of nation, race, or social standing since it means the bringing forth of an indispensable element for the moral progress of mankind." (The Secret of Childhood, Maria Montessori)
• If teaching is to be effective with young children, it must assist them to advance on the way to independence. It must initiate them into those kinds of activities which they can perform themselves and which keep them from being a burden to others because of their inabilities. We must help them to learn how to walk without assistance, to run, to go up and down the stairs, to pick up fallen objects, to dress and undress, to wash themselves, to express their needs in a way that is clearly understood, and to attempt to satisfy their desires through their own efforts. All this is part of an education for independence." (The Discovery of the Child, Maria Montessori)
• The ancient saying, "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses", and senses being explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge, says Maria Montessori.
• "This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They thus carry out an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations." (The Discovery of the Child, Maria Montessori)
• "Impressions pour into us and we store them in our minds; but we ourselves remain apart from them as a vase keeps separate from the water it contains. Instead, the child undergoes a transformation. Impressions do not merely enter the mind; they form it. They incarnate themselves in him... We have named this type of mentality The Absorbent Mind."
The Absorbent Mind p. 24, Chap 3
  
  
  • "There is an interchange between the individual, the spiritual embryo, and its environment. It is through the environment that the individual is molded and brought to perfection."
The Secret of Childhood p 35, Chap 6
  • "During this early period, education must be understood as a help to the unfolding of the child's unborn psychic powers."
The Absorbent Mind p 4, Chap 1
  • "Impressions do not merely enter his mind; they form it. They incarnate themselves in him. The child creates his own 'mental muscles' using for this what he finds in the world around him. We have named this type of mentality The Absorbent Mind."
Ibid p.24, Chap 3
  • "Adults admire their environment; they can remember it and think about it; but the child absorbs it. The things he see are not just remembered; they form part of his soul. He incarnates in himself all in the world about him that his eyes see and his ears hear. In us the same things produce no change, but the child is transformed by them."
Ibid p. 56, Chap 7
  • "This vital kind of memory, which does not consciously remember, but absorbs images into the individual's very life, has been given a special name by Sir Percy Nunn, who calls it the 'Mneme'."
Ibid p. 57, Chap 7
  • "Nothing has more importance for us than this absorbent kind of mind, which shapes the adult and adapts him to any kind of social order, climate or country. On this, the whole of our study is based."
Ibid p 58, Chap 7
  • "All the social and moral habits that shape a man's personality, the sentiments of caste, and all kinds of other feelings, that make him a typical Indian, a typical Italian, or a typical Englishman, are formed during infancy, in virtue of that mysterious mental power that psychologists have called 'Mneme',"
Ibid p 59, Chap 7
  • "This is the terrible revenge of the psychological unconscious. With our conscious memory we forget, but the unconscious, although it seems to feel nothing and not to remember, does something worse, for impressions made at this level are handed over to the mneme. They become graven on the personality itself... This is the great danger of mankind. The child who is not protected with a view to his normal formation will later avenge himself on society by means of the adult who is formed by him."
Ibid p 71, Chap 7
  • "...the child, it is clear, does not inherit a pre-established model for his language, but he inherits the power of constructing a language by an unconscious activity of absorption."
Ibid p 73, Chap 7
  • "Man possesses creative sensitivities instead of hereditary models of behaviour, and if it is due to these that adaptation occurs to his surroundings, then it is clear that the whole psychic life of the individual stands upon a foundation which is laid down by them in the earliest years."
Ibid p 75, Chap 7
  • "The baby is...endowed with an urge, or need, to face the outer world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest'."
Ibid p 77, Chap 8
  • "...it seems that the field on which we draw is extremely large, almost universal, and this is nature's way. We do not assimilate first this sound and then that, or the various noises, one at a time. But we begin by absorbing all of them at once, an undivided whole."
Ibid p 77, Chap 8
  • "This is the mark of his first period in the world. If the child feels an impulse to conquer his environment, it follows that this must have for him a certain attraction. So, let us say (using words that are not quite appropriate) that the child is 'in love' with his world."
Ibid p 77, Chap 8
  • "If what we have to do is to help man's mental life, then the first lesson we must learn is that the tiny child's absorbent mind finds all its nutrients in its surroundings."
Ibid p 88, Chap 9
  
  
  Quotations
  
  
  Sensitive periods
  
  "A sensitive period refers to a special sensibility which a creature acquires in its infantile state, while it is still in a process of evolution. It is a transient disposition and limited to the acquisition of a particular trait. Once this trait, or characteristic, has been acquired, the special sensibility disappears."
  
  The Secret of Childhood p 38, Chap 7
  
  "Growth is therefore not to be attributed to a vague inherited predetermination, but to efforts that are carefully guided by periodic, or transient instincts."
  
  Ibid p.38, Chap 7
  
  "If a child has not been able to act according to the directives of his sensitive period, the opportunity of a natural conquest is lost, and is lost for good."
  
  Ibid p.39, Chap 7
  
  "A child learns to adjust himself and make acquisitions in his sensitive periods. They are like a beam that lights interiorly or a battery that furnishes energy."
  
  Ibid p.39, Chap 7
  
  "At such a time everything is easy; all is life and enthusiasm. Every effort marks an increase in power. Only when the goal has been obtained does fatigue and the weight of indifference come on."
  
  Ibid p.40, Chap 7
  
  "When one of these psychic passions is exhausted, another is enkindled. Childhood thus passes from conquest to conquest in a constant rhythm that constitutes its joy and happiness."
  
  Ibid p.40, Chap 7
  
  "The tantrums of the sensitive periods are external manifestations of an unsatisfied need, expressions of alarm over a danger, or of something being out of place."
  
  Ibid p. 41, Chap 7
  
  "A child's psychic development does not take place by chance... it does not originate in external stimuli but is guided by transient sensibilities, that is, by temporary instincts intimately connected with the acquisition of specific traits."
  
  Ibid p.42, Chap 7
  
  A child's different inner sensibilities enable him to choose from his complex environment what is suitable and necessary for growth. They make the child sensitive to some things, but indifferent to others."
  
  Ibid p.42, Chap 7
  
  "When a particular sensitiveness is aroused in a child, it is like a light that shines on some objects but not on others, making of them his whole world."
  
  Ibid p.42, Chap 7
  
  "This inner drama of the child is a drama of love. It is a great reality unfolding within the secret areas of his soul and at times completely absorbing it."
  
  Ibid p.43, Chap 7
  
  "A very important and mysterious period is the one which makes a child extremely sensitive to order. This sensitiveness appears in the child’s first year and continues on through the second."
  
  Ibid p.49, Chap 8
  
  "The sight of something out of place seems to represent a kind of stimulus, a call to activity. But without doubt it is also something more. Order is one of the needs of life which, when it is satisfied, produces a real happiness."
  
  Ibid p.52, Chap 8
  
  "It is in childhood that man learns to guide and direct himself on the way of life. The first incentive is given by nature in the sensitive period that is connected with order."
  
  Ibid p.55, Chap 8
  
  "Man's intelligence does not come from nothing; rather, it is built upon the foundations laid by the child during his sensitive periods."
  
  Ibid p.55, Chap 8
  
  "The older theories were based upon the mechanism of the nervous system. The sensitive periods, on the other hand, are connected with psychic facts. They are the insights and impulses that lay the foundation for consciousness. They are spontaneous energies giving rise to fundamental principles that form the basis of psychic growth."
  
  Ibid p.56, Chap 8
  
  "A child has a sensitive period which lasts until he is almost five years old and which enables him to assimilate images from his environment in a truly prodigious fashion."
  
  Ibid p.60, Chap 8
  
  "A child starts from nothing and advances alone. It is the child's reason about which the sensitive periods revolve. The reasoning process, which is natural and creative, grows gradually like a living thing and gains strength at the expense of the images it receives from its surroundings."
  
  Ibid p.61, Chap 9
  
  "From the beginning of the second year a child is no longer carried away by gaudy objects and brilliant colors with that transport of joy so characteristic of the sensitive periods, but becomes interested in tiny objects that escape our notice."
  
  Ibid p. 64, Chap 9
  
  "Language... develops naturally, like a spontaneous creation. Also, its development follows fixed laws which are the same for all children... All children pass through a period in which they can only pronounce syllables; then they pronounce whole words, and finally, they use to perfection all the rules of syntax and grammar."
  
  The Absorbent Mind p.100, Chap 10
  
  "... the child's explosion into writing is closely connected with his special sensitivity for language, and this was operative at the time when he began to speak. By the age of five and a half or six, this sensitivity has ceased to exist; so it is clear that writing can be learned with joy and enthusiasm only before that age."
  
  
  
  Ibid p.157, Chap 17
  
  
  
  
  absorbent mind 
  
  "There is an interchange between the individual, the spiritual embryo, and its environment. It is through the environment that the individual is molded and brought to perfection."
  
  The Secret of Childhood p 35, Chap 6"During this early period, education must be understood as a help to the unfolding of the child's unborn psychic powers."
  
  The Absorbent Mind p 4, Chap 1
  
  "Impressions do not merely enter his mind; they form it. They incarnate themselves in him. The child creates his own 'mental muscles' using for this what he finds in the world around him. We have named this type of mentality The Absorbent Mind."
  
  Ibid p.24, Chap 3
  
  "Adults admire their environment; they can remember it and think about it; but the child absorbs it. The things he see are not just remembered; they form part of his soul. He incarnates in himself all in the world about him that his eyes see and his ears hear. In us the same things produce no change, but the child is transformed by them."
  
  Ibid p. 56, Chap 7
  
  "This vital kind of memory, which does not consciously remember, but absorbs images into the individual's very life, has been given a special name by Sir Percy Nunn, who calls it the 'Mneme'."
  
  Ibid p. 57, Chap 7
  
  "Nothing has more importance for us than this absorbent kind of mind, which shapes the adult and adapts him to any kind of social order, climate or country. On this, the whole of our study is based."
  
  Ibid p 58, Chap 7
  
  "All the social and moral habits that shape a man's personality, the sentiments of caste, and all kinds of other feelings, that make him a typical Indian, a typical Italian, or a typical Englishman, are formed during infancy, in virtue of that mysterious mental power that psychologists have called 'Mneme',"
  
  Ibid p 59, Chap 7
  
  "This is the terrible revenge of the psychological unconscious. With our conscious memory we forget, but the unconscious, although it seems to feel nothing and not to remember, does something worse, for impressions made at this level are handed over to the mneme. They become graven on the personality itself... This is the great danger of mankind. The child who is not protected with a view to his normal formation will later avenge himself on society by means of the adult who is formed by him."
  
  Ibid p 71, Chap 7
  
  "...the child, it is clear, does not inherit a pre-established model for his language, but he inherits the power of constructing a language by an unconscious activity of absorption."
  
  Ibid p 73, Chap 7
  
  "Man possesses creative sensitivities instead of hereditary models of behaviour, and if it is due to these that adaptation occurs to his surroundings, then it is clear that the whole psychic life of the individual stands upon a foundation which is laid down by them in the earliest years."
  
  Ibid p 75, Chap 7
  
  "The baby is...endowed with an urge, or need, to face the outer world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest'."
  
  Ibid p 77, Chap 8
  
  "...it seems that the field on which we draw is extremely large, almost universal, and this is nature's way. We do not assimilate first this sound and then that, or the various noises, one at a time. But we begin by absorbing all of them at once, an undivided whole."
  
  Ibid p 77, Chap 8
  
  "This is the mark of his first period in the world. If the child feels an impulse to conquer his environment, it follows that this must have for him a certain attraction. So, let us say (using words that are not quite appropriate) that the child is 'in love' with his world."
  
  Ibid p 77, Chap 8
  
  "If what we have to do is to help man's mental life, then the first lesson we must learn is that the tiny child's absorbent mind finds all its nutrients in its surroundings."
  
  
  
  Ibid p 88, Chap 9
  
  
  "Before a child reaches the age of three, the highest form of work and the most enobling that engages him is that of arranging furniture and putting things in order, and it is also the one that calls for the greatest activity."
  
  The Discovery of the Child, p 83, Chap 5"Anyone who spends time with these children notices that there is a special secret which enables the children to carry out their practical activities with success. It is the precision, the exactness with which the acts must be performed."
  
  Ibid p 85, Chap 5
  
  "When children experience pleasure not only from an activity leading towards a special goal but also in carrying it out exactly in all its details, they open up a whole new area of education for themselves."
  
  Ibid p 85, Chap 5
  
  "Every complex action comprises a series of distinct movements; one act follows the other. The analysis of movements consists in trying to recognize and to carry out exactly these separate and distinct acts... Dressing and undressing oneself, for example, are highly complex acts which we adults, except on special occasions, carry out rather imperfectly."
  
  Ibid p 86, Chap 5
  
  "One single idea runs through every complex activity, and this single idea must be sought as the key to any general problem. There is also a secret key to the perfecting of the most varied types of movements. And this key is balance."
  
  Ibid p 89 Chap 5
  
  "A child who has become master of his acts through long and repeated exercises, and who has been encouraged by the pleasant and interesting activities in which he has been engaged, is a child filled with health and joy and remarkable for his calmness and discipline."
  
  Ibid p 91, Chap 5
  
  "These conquerors of themselves have also attained freedom since they have rid themselves of those many disorderly and unconscious tendencies that necessarily place children under the strict and continuous control of adults."
  
  Ibid p 92, Chap 5
  
  "Repetition is the secret of perfection, and this is why the exercises are connected with the common activities of daily life. If a child does not set a table for a group of people who are really going to eat, if he does not have real brushes for cleaning, and real carpets to sweep whenever they are used, if he does not himself have to wash and dry dishes and glasses he will never attain any real ability."
  
  Ibid p 92, Chap 5
  
  "One detail that is commonly misunderstood is the distinction between teaching a child how he should act, but leaving him free in the practical application of this freedom, and that which is followed in other systems of education, namely, of imposing the will and power of an adult upon the child and thus guiding him in all his actions."
  
  Ibid p 93, Chap 5
  
  "He must use, according to time and circumstances, the many things which he has learned perfectly. But it is he who makes the decision. How he is to use what he has learned is a task for his own conscience, an exercise of his own responsibility. He is thus freed from the greatest of all dangers, that of making an adult responsible for his actions, of condemning his own conscience to a kind of idle slumber."
  
  Ibid p 93, Chap 5
  
  "Through practical exercises of this sort the children develop a true 'social feeling', for they are working in the environment of the community in which they live, without concerning themselves as to whether it is for their own, or for the common good."
  
  Ibid p 95, Chap 5
  
  "Work not only identifies one as an individual, but it also unites him with society, which is bound together by men's labor."
  
  Ibid p 95, Chap 5
  
  "...in point of fact, no other occupations which could be undertaken by the children at this stage (3-5) could be more important for their whole development - physical, mental, and moral - than these 'exercises of practical life' as they are called."
  
  Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work p 213, Chap XIII
  
  "...many teachers still introduce these exercises of practical life to the children without any true understanding of their purpose or psychological significance. Consequently much of their value is lost through lack of proper technique."
  
  Ibid p 213, Chap XIII
  
  "The first thing to realize about these exercises of practical life is that their aim is not a practical one. Emphasis should be laid not on the word 'practical' but on the word 'life'. Their aim (as of all the other occupations presented to the children in their prepared environment) is to assist development."
  
  Ibid p 213, Chap XIII
  
  "It is important to notice... that these are real, not make-believe activities and that they are carried out in a real and not make-believe environment. The child who is washing dusters is washing real dusters because they are dirty; the children who are laying the table are laying a real table with real knives and forks and plates etc, for a real meal - not a doll's table in a doll's house for a doll's tea party. Where you see a child swabbing up water spilt on the floor there has been a real accident, and she is reestablishing order to a real world. This is a matter of great importance..."
  
  Ibid p214, Chap XIII
  
  "The particular exercises of practical life which we should present to the children will vary according to circumstances, local and national. Whatever they may be, however, we can classify them broadly speaking under two heads: (a) those which have to do with care of the child's own person; and (b) those which are concerned with the care of the environment."
  
  Ibid p 215, Chap XIII
  
  "When these exercises have been presented to the children, in the manner indicated... the directress should, after a while, wherever possible, introduce into the action what Montessori calls a 'motive of perfection'."
  
  Ibid p220, Chap XII

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