On the Pedagogical Theory
of Maria Montessori

1. The Pedagogical Principles of Montessori

If adults put children in a well-prepared environment and gently watch over their activity, children will discover what they need for their own development at an appropriate time by themselves and absorb it into their mind and body. The critical elements for the growth of children are the environment, teaching materials, and adults who watch over them.

Instead of adults teaching children unilaterally and giving them some kind of ability, the emphasis is on providing the environment in which children can learn by themselves, and making sure that children have some object to concentrate on, as well as time and place to concentrate on it for themselves. When and what to offer depends on the adults; for that purpose, adults have to observe the children patiently. If the environment is prepared to correspond to each individual child, every child can develop his or her ability. Often it is the interference of adults — in many cases with good intentions — that obstructs the development of children.

A child likes an orderly environment by his or her nature. Adults should try not to disturb the growth of the child; they should extend their generous hands only when the child is in trouble. As for the acquisition of knowledge and intelligence by children of different personalities in the process of becoming self-reliant, some general orders are known with scientific endorsements. However, the time and manner of acquisition depends on each child. Therefore, it is out of point to compare the promptness and depth of learning of one child to that of another — it is not a matter of competition.

2. Montessori and Her Pedagogical Thinking

After she was 40 years old, Montessori devoted her life to the popularisation of the teaching materials which she developed, as well as to her pedagogical thinking. She founded the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) and took patents for the teaching materials. Classrooms were set up featuring the Montessori Method of Education, in which teachers who had learned at certified AMI schools and obtained qualification taught with the aid of certified materials in facilities meeting the installation standard. The administration of the Association has been succeeded to her son, and then to her granddaughter.

Montessori's teaching materials embody the thinking of a woman who grew up in a quiet environment as an only daughter of an affluent home, and later completed her education in engineering, medical science and anthropology. The administration and management of the association reflects the perseverance of a woman who took a prominent and pioneering role in a society of 100 years ago — a society dominated by men — who became an unmarried mother and let her son be nurtured by other persons until he was fifteen, and kept moving from one country to another in order to survive the World Wars. Montessori's achievements were made possible by her mother, who always supported her behind the scenes, as well as by the women friends who walked with her in her late years.

3. Practice of the Montessori Method of Education

3.1 · Training in Actions of Daily Life

For Montessori, the first step of education was to let children experience the joy of doing things by themselves, which would promote their self-reliance in daily life. For that aim, she prepared educational materials of suitable sizes for each child to enable them to do actions and operations in daily life smoothly by themselves. These included practice kits for minute motions — pinching small materials, doing up buttons — as well as practice kits for actions like holding something, carrying it, and walking, which children would learn by themselves without special training.

The emphasis was on the importance of showing examples of motions which adults respect as beautiful, and getting children to imitate such motions faithfully. In this way children learn spontaneously to the point that they can perform these motions in the same way. Children develop ability through learning; they cannot learn unless adults consciously provide them with such environment.

On the basis of this understanding, the Montessori Method of Education includes the practice of decent behaviour in greeting, yawning, coughing, wording and appearance. Practice in simple operations in housekeeping — cleaning, cooking, needlework, shoe-polishing and the like — for small children is a unique aspect of the Montessori Method, which is not seen in other methods of early education. Although the importance of education on daily life has been increasing nowadays with the emphasis on consciousness about food, it is amazing that the importance of such education was pointed out as early as a hundred years ago. This was possible partly because Montessori was a woman.

This practice helps children to have their own role, even if it is quite small, in the family and to develop a consciousness about their role and position in the family. Rather than being children who assist adult members of the family, they could proceed to feel themselves as members of the family. In this way, the Montessori Method combined training and living in the family. Silence training is another aspect, which promotes adaptation to the rule of society as well as the rule of adults. While this helps the handing down of culture, it might include a tendency to impose the way of life of adults on children. For Montessori, recklessness, unpurposed motions and meaningless scurrying of children were a mere manifestation of disorder and poor education, which was not happy for adults or for children. This kind of approach reminds us of the quality of education in the upper-class Catholic families in Europe at her time.

3.2 · Promotion of Sensibility

Montessori assumed that sense was the base of all intellectual activities. When senses are stimulated, the brain is activated. When the brain develops, it can control the motions of the body at will. The development of the brain is the same thing as the advancement of mind, which eventually leads to the formation of personality.

Montessori devised educational materials which help children isolate and differentiate each of the five senses — tactile, gustatory, auditory, visual, and olfactory — from each other. For example, in the training of tactile, auditory, olfactory and gustatory senses, children are urged to touch certain materials with their eyes blindfolded and feel the heat, weight, textures, sounds, smells and tastes of them. In the training of visual sense, children are exposed to orderly changes of size, length, color and shape based on some mathematical rules, learning allocation of space, ranking and matching. The systematic training here to develop senses constitutes the foundation for developing intelligence. One of the most popular educational materials, developed by Montessori herself at the earliest stage, is the cylindrical blocks: ten blocks with different diameters and heights.

However, this approach of comparison and analysis is criticized — for example, by Henri Wallon — for trapping children's senses into "one novel abstract existence" and ignoring the importance of the children's sensitivity in its natural state.

3.3 · Arithmetic Education

Based on the sensibility education, Montessori added elements of precision to it and developed it into a method of arithmetic education. Instead of mere counting of numbers, Montessori's method emphasises teaching the concept of "quantity" and the words which represent quantity. In order to visualise the numbers up to one thousand, she used beads and wood chips. The aim was to make children understand quantity by their visual sense and perceive mathematics through physical experiences. Montessori understood that arithmetic education was more easily accepted by young children than language education, which had to deal with culture as the background.

3.4 · Language Education

Although Montessori's education started as the education for handicapped children and children of poor families, in the process of its popularisation in the entire world it had transformed into education for healthy children of upper-class families. Montessori began to be involved in language education because of the demands from parents. As her education had already been established as education for individuals within the framework of a group, educational materials were not provided for reading aloud, which would break the silence. The emphasis was on educational materials which would promote the ability to write.

As regards the ability to speak and hear, children learn the practice of greeting, how to ask someone to do something, how to express gratitude and how to listen to someone in the early stage of education through the daily life exercises for promoting self-reliance. However, the level of the development of materials for language education is not so high because of the strong link between language education and its cultural background. These materials can only let children learn to write alphabetic characters in the same way as they learn to write numbers.

4. Montessori's Education of Handicapped Children

Montessori began to educate intellectually disabled children, who had only been treated as the object of medical science in the past. She evidenced that children could change themselves through education. However, it is regrettable that at that time Montessori only addressed to children with IQ scores of 75–90, which was her definition of intellectually disabled children, and to children who did not have the opportunity for sufficient education because of poverty. Presently, Montessori's teaching aids for sensibility education, in their original forms, are only used for the education of vision-impaired children in Japan. For use in other areas of special education, it is thought that some additional features have to be devised.

Bibliography

Lillard, Paula Polk. Montessori: A Modern Approach. New York: Schocken Books, 1972.