The Montessori Method

Can a child held still at a desk be educated at all, or only kept quiet? Montessori stakes the whole method on the answer that order must come from free activity.

The school of her day, Montessori argues, still runs on the principle of slavery: fixed benches measured to hold the body motionless, prizes and punishments to hold the attention. A child silenced that way is annihilated, not disciplined. Discipline worth the name is active, the self-mastery of a child who moves, chooses and works. So the Children's Houses carry light furniture a child can upset, abolish prizes, and teach children to dress and wash themselves, because no one can be free who is not first independent.

• liberty
• discipline
• independence
• freedom
• rewards
• punishment
• school furniture
• movement
• self-control

Who does the teaching in a Children's House? Montessori moves it from the adult's voice into objects built so that a child can find its own mistakes.

Her apparatus grew from the methods Itard and Séguin had devised for children then called deficient, and from her discovery that such children could pass a public school examination. Graded cylinders, rods and colour tablets each isolate one quality and show a misplaced piece at once, so correction comes from the thing rather than the teacher. The directress is to be more passive than active: she gives short, plain lessons, never corrects a wrong answer, and observes with a scientist's patience.

• education of the senses
• didactic material
• observation
• teacher
• experimental method
• auto-education
• mental deficiency
• sense training

Must writing be drilled stroke by stroke, or can it arrive all at once? Montessori reports children who discovered one day that they could write.

Schools of her time began with vertical strokes, a custom she wanted put away because the letters are round. Her children instead traced sandpaper letters with their fingers, so that the hand learned each shape before it ever held a pen, and composed words with movable letters. When the preparation was complete, writing came as a spontaneous explosion, as with the five-year-old on the roof terrace. Against the accepted view, she concluded that writing comes before reading, which demands a further and separate effort.

• writing
• reading
• language
• alphabet
• hand
• muscular memory
• spontaneity
• learning

What can a school do for families living in poverty? Montessori's answer begins with a schoolroom placed inside the building where the children live.

The first Children's House opened in a model tenement in San Lorenzo, a quarter that struck her as a city after a disaster. The children left alone all day while their parents worked had been defacing walls and stairs. Montessori saw more than a remedy for damage: a school owned collectively by the tenants, with mothers bound by its rules to send their children clean and to work with the directress. She read it as a first step in transforming the home of the poor.

• poverty
• family
• mothers
• home
• social question
• housing
• community
• hygiene