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WorkMaria Montessori

Spontaneous Activity in Education

Montessori's sequel carries her method past the nursery years and argues that imagination is built on an exact knowledge of the real world.

by Maria Montessori396 passages held

  • English, a translation held here, and your language
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Original title
L’autoeducazione nelle scuole elementari
First published
(aged 46)
Original language
Italian

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Overview

American critics had their objections ready within a few years of The Montessori Method. William Heard Kilpatrick, a progressive educator and follower of John Dewey, dismissed the system in 1914, and others charged that it was rigid, leaned too heavily on training the senses, and left too little room for imagination, play and children's life together. Maria Montessori recorded that she had been asked, in a critical tone, how social feeling could grow if each child worked alone. This book, published in Rome by Loescher in 1916 as the continuation of the 1909 volume, takes up those questions while carrying her method from the Children's Houses into the elementary school. Its argument is that attention, will, intelligence and imagination are not faculties a teacher can drill into a child but powers that grow when the child chooses a piece of work and returns to it. The teacher's part is to prepare the environment and observe. For her account of attention Montessori drew on William James, the American psychologist; she rejected the Binet–Simon intelligence tests as arbitrary. On imagination she gave no ground. Friedrich Froebel, the German founder of the kindergarten, had devised a game in which a child is handed a wooden brick and told it is a horse, and adults liked to keep children believing in fairy tales. Montessori saw in both a training in credulity and held that a sound imagination starts from exact observation of things as they are. Florence Simmonds's English translation appeared in New York in 1917 as the first volume of The Advanced Montessori Method, with a second volume on the elementary teaching material. In German it came out as Montessori-Erziehung für Schulkinder in 1926 and, newly translated, as Schule des Kindes in 1976.

Key concepts

What does 'spontaneous activity' mean in this book?

It is the child's own, unprompted effort to take things from its surroundings and build itself with them. Montessori sees two sides to every personality: this natural activity, by which the child gathers material from the world, and the inner work of shaping it into character. Education's task is to supply the right material and protect the activity, rather than replace it with instruction that arrives from outside.

What is the 'polarisation of attention'?

It is the moment when a child's scattered attention fixes wholly on one piece of work, and the child becomes calmer and more orderly as a result. Montessori compares it to a crystal forming in a cloudy solution: everything loose in the child's mind seems to organise itself round one point. Her model case is the three-year-old who repeated an exercise forty-four times and finished rested rather than tired.

Why does Montessori isolate one sense or quality at a time?

Because a child learns to tell things apart only when one difference stands out on its own. Ordinary lessons present an object with all its qualities at once and point out each in turn. Montessori first cuts off everything else, for example by blindfolding a child, then gives just two words such as hot and cold. The impression then enters the mind clearly, like an image projected onto a darkened screen.

How does she tell real imagination apart from illusion?

Real imagination combines things the mind has observed exactly; illusion takes fantastic things for real. The painter does not copy his figure, Montessori says, but creates it, and that creation grows from close observation of shapes and colours. Science imagines in the same way, reaching inventions no one could have pictured a century earlier. Make-believe that asks a child to accept falsehoods trains credulity instead.

How does the elementary school continue the Children's House?

By building on habits the younger children already have. In the Children's Houses good behaviour has become a habit fused with an earlier habit of work, so the elementary years need no new discipline. The teacher only presents fresh material for further study, and the child, exercising himself on it, moves from one stage of learning to the next at his own pace.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Attention and will that grow from work

Can a teacher put attention and willpower into a child, or only make room for them? Montessori argues that both appear when a child chooses work and keeps returning to it.

The scene that founded her method is told here: a little girl in San Lorenzo repeating an exercise with wooden cylinders forty-four times, then looking up rested and content. Montessori calls this the polarisation of attention and saw it calm and transform children. Against the old school, which sought to dominate the child and make it obedient, she holds that will is built from within by joining impulse and restraint. Tests like Binet and Simon's, which rank intelligence by age, she dismisses as arbitrary and superficial.

  • attention
  • will
  • concentration
  • intelligence
  • repetition
  • obedience
  • inhibition
  • character
  • work

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Imagination built on what is real

Is a child's imagination fed by make-believe or by knowing the world exactly? Montessori takes the unpopular side and calls much of what adults admire a training in credulity.

Froebel's brick that a child is told is a horse, the Befana who brings coal down the chimney, the fairy tales parents are glad to see outgrown: Montessori sees in them an education in believing what is false. A child riding a walking-stick shows an unsatisfied wish, not imagination. True creative imagination, in the artist and the scientist alike, grows from precise observation of things as they are, like a palace whose foundations are sunk in rock rather than a house of cards.

  • imagination
  • fantasy
  • reality
  • observation
  • credulity
  • fairy tales
  • play
  • creativity
  • truth
  • art

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Social feeling in a school of free workers

If every child works at a task of its own choosing, where does it learn to live with others? The question came from Montessori's critics, and this book answers it.

She had been asked, in a critical tone, how social feeling could develop if each child worked independently. Her reply turns the charge round: the class in which everyone does the same thing at the same moment, down to visiting the lavatory, is regimentation, not society. Real social life is a free exchange of courtesy and help, which children working in a shared household of their own learn by practice. Moral stories read at a child fail for the same reason, and obedience worth having grows out of freedom.

  • social sentiment
  • society
  • community
  • moral education
  • liberty
  • obedience
  • environment
  • school

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
396
distinct concepts
510
by passages held, corpus-wide
#186

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “child development” and “education”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
child developmenteducation50
attentionchild development19
child developmentfreedom16
educationfreedom14
educationimagination14
educationwill11
educationmoral education9
attentioneducation8
child developmentimagination8
child developmentobservation8
child developmentwill7
child developmentmoral education6
attentionfreedom4
attentionobservation4
educationobservation4
freedomwill4
imaginationobservation4
attentionwill3
attentionmoral education1
freedomimagination1
freedomobservation1
moral educationwill1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1909 The Montessori Method (Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile nelle Case dei Bambini)

    Her founding book, revised for the Italian editions of 1913, 1926 and 1935 and enlarged in 1948 into The Discovery of the Child.

     EN
  2. 1910 Pedagogical Anthropology (Antropologia pedagogica)

    Lecture notes from her years as a university anthropologist, printed in 1910 at her students' request, and the scientific groundwork she laid before turning wholly to the classroom.

     EN
  3. 1916 Spontaneous Activity in Education (L’autoeducazione nelle scuole elementari) you are here EN
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