... this to challenge the notion that there's "no time or room for error" in our modern educational system... on the internet, in a blog, there's a s***load of space to drop a load!!!
NOW AND THEN: MARIA MONTESSORI AND SPECIAL EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
There are several reasons why the subject of Maria Montessori kept insisting itself upon me as I considered topics to write about. First, and perhaps most important, was the fact that my two children attend a Montessori school (named, appropriately, “The Children’s House” after Montessori’s first school, the Casa dei Bambini). Prior to enrolling my elder daughter into the school, I had, like any harried but concerned parent, done some research on the Montessori philosophy during the school selection process, but it was, quite frankly, cursory. Ultimately, all my forays retained were a vague notion of “independent learning,” and a favorable and striking impression of a clean and orderly classroom environment stocked with interesting manipulative “toys.”
Second, during Professor Garnett Smith’s initial lecture concerning the “platypus-like” nature of Special Education, Montessori’s name was briefly mentioned. Basically, Smith explained that Special Education was the hybridized, bastard child of four “parents,” or perspectives: medical, legal, education and special education. The medical perspective was significant historically, because, as Smith stated, the first pioneers in Special Education were either medical doctors or had a generally medical outlook: Itard, for example, and Montessori. When I heard Montessori’s name come up in that lecture, in the context of special education, I idly wondered what possible tie could exist between the preschool my children were attending, and “idiot children” (as they were called back then).
Third, and more recently, was the fact that I started my class in “Classroom Organization and Behavioral Management.” I was struck by the overwhelming primacy and influence of “behavioral psychology” in the text for the class. Our textbook was, in fact, essentially a handbook on how to apply behavioral science in the classroom setting (Thomas J. Zirpoli’s “Behavioral Management: Applications for Teachers”). Where was the legacy of the cognitive theorists (Piaget, for example) whom I had so enjoyed in our initial readings for the class? As I began looking for traces of Itard and Piaget in contemporary learning theory and practice, I kept running into that most influential figure tying these two giants together: Montessori (Montessori was a student of Itar’d’s, and Piaget at one point in time studied children at a Montessori school). It was at this point that I decided to take a closer look at this monumental figure, and discern her ties to both special education and cognitive theories of learning.
Although she is most well known (particularly in this country) as the founding mother of a certain style of preschool education, it is important to note that: 1) her understandings of the nature of the minds of children originated in her studies of “special children”; and 2) her insights are extremely appropriate when considered in the context of contemporary special education, and, ironically, can be seen as anticipating many of the insights and “modern” approaches to teaching exceptional children today.
MONTESSORI’S STORY
Montessori’s life story is a fascinating one, worthy of the several biographies have been written about her. She was the first woman physician in Italy, itself a historical accomplishment. While she was an assistant doctor at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rome, where she intended to study children’s diseases, she visited several insane asylums across the city of Rome in order to find and select subjects for study. In this way, she became acquainted both with the “idiot children” (a diverse grouping of children who were deemed “unteachable” in the normal school system) and the current method of education for them, developed by Edouard Seguin. She thoroughly studied Seguin’s methods (she was to eventually translate his 600 page French volume into Italian!) and strove to put them into practice. It was at this time that Montessori underwent a natural but nonetheless dramatic shift in vocation, for she realized that “mental deficiency presented chiefly a pedagogical, rather than mainly a medical, problem.” (Orem, 1969, p. 15) In short, she began to teach.
Before we proceed further, we should put Seguin in the context of some of the influential figures we encountered in our readings. Seguin was a student of Itard, whom we know of as the teacher of the “Wild Boy of Aveyron.” It is significant to note that Itard began his “pedagogical work” with experiments to educate deaf-mutes; his treatments involved “re-educating” or recalibrating the dysfunctional sense of hearing. With the “Wild Boy of Aveyron,” Itard extended the treatment methodology he had employed with the deaf, but extended it to incorporate all of the senses (temperature, touch, etc.). This emphasis upon sensory education in Itard clearly influenced Montessori, for it remained a cornerstone of her pedagogical method. But above and beyond this was Itard’s attitude towards his “student,” which contrasted sharply with that of her contemporaries towards their students. Itard approached his students in the same way that a concerned physician approaches a sick patient. In Montessori’s own words, Itard was “the first educator to practise the observation of the pupil in the way in which the sick are observed in the hospitals, especially those suffering from diseases of the nervous system.” (Orem, 1969, p. 17)
Seguin essentially organized Itard’s insights into a working pedagogical methodology, which he developed and refined over ten years of working with children from insane asylums across France. He later emigrated to the United States, where he founded more institutes for “idiots.” Montessori credited Seguin with “having completed a genuine educational system for deficient children.” (Orem, 1969, p. 17)
After teaching several of her “idiot” children how to read and write, Montessori had them take a test at a public school together with other normal children, and, surprisingly, her children passed the examination successfully. This striking confirmation of her teaching methodology, however, only instilled in Montessori a desire to extend its application to “normal children.” As Orem writes: “While others were admiring the progress of her deficients, she searched for the reasons that kept the happy, healthy children of the regular schools on so low a plane that they could be equaled in tests of intelligence by retarded pupils.” (Orem, 1969, p. 18) It was at this point which she made a fateful decision, one which, ironically, may have served to obscure her contributions to the field of special education: she decided to apply her proven teaching methods to normal children. If she had been able to teach “idiot” children to compete with normal children, then what boundless heights could she achieve by using the same methods on the normal children? As she wrote, “the abyss between the inferior mentality of the idiot and that of the normal brain can never be bridged if the normal child has reached his full development.” (Orem, 1969, p. 18)
Montessori began her pedagogical “experiment” with normal children aged three to seven. She felt that such an age group would best parallel her previous work with “idiots,” because “the child who has not the force to develop and he who is not yet developed are in some ways alike.” (Orem, 1969, p. 19) This was the start of the Montessori preschool, a model that was so influential that, by conservative estimates, there are at least 4,000 Montessori schools nationwide, and 7,000 around the world (Unfortunately, Montessori is not a “trademark,” and any school can claim to be “Montessori” without adopting any true Montessori methods. Many schools in fact do this primarily for marketing purposes).
MONTESSORI’S THEORY: SEQUENCING OF DEVELOPMENT
Perhaps the most well-known and significant idea of Montessori’s theory (and one which is very reminiscent of Piaget) is her idea of the Four Planes of Development. Montessori divided the years from birth through age 24 into four six year periods. The first and third periods (0-6 years and 12-18 years) she considered to be active periods of much transformation and growth. The second and fourth periods (6-12 years and 18-24 years) she considered to be relatively calm or quiescent periods, during which the changes of the previous period were consolidated and stabilized. Like other stage theorists (Piaget), the actual ages were only approximations, but the sequencing of the stages was significant.
Montessori also believed that certain age ranges were “sensitive periods” in which the child was genetically programmed to be especially absorbent of certain kinds of information. She believed, for example, that there was a sensitive period for the perception of order in the environment, which began at or before age two; and, she felt that the period between ages 3 and 6 contained many sensitive periods, most notably sensitivity to language.
This sequencing of the development of the child is significant, because it informs several key dimensions of Montessori as practiced. First of all, the “lessons” given to a child must be appropriate to the developmental level of the child. The child, in other words, must be developmentally (in all dimensions: cognitive, sensorial, motor) ready to absorb the lesson. Montessori felt that it was not only ineffective, but potentially detrimental (to a child’s esteem, and to a child’s true understanding) to “force” a child to learn a lesson for which he was not prepared. Thus, Montessori’s commandment to “Follow the child.” This, by the way, is in direct opposition to both the general thrust of behavioral management and pedagogy (which essentially seeks to “motivate” the child to learn, without regard for whether he is ready for a lesson or not), and to the push (primarily by parents) for accelerated learning (i.e., “Why can’t my preschooler practice read an entire book or do long division?”).
Following along the idea of stage-appropriate lessons is the idea that lessons need to be presented in a specific order or sequence. According to Montessori, any given concept requires the complete understanding and assimilation of certain other concepts (much like the prerequisites of college courses). Thus, Montessori charted in often intricate detail the sequencing of lessons. For example, the study of anthropology (the differences and similarities among cultures) required a prior study of physical geography (because a distinctive aspect of culture is that it is a specific adaptation of a group of people to the immediate environment).
MONTESSORI’S THEORY: TOPOGRAPHY OF THE MIND
Montessori believed, as many of us do today, that the mind consists of three layers: the Unconscious, the Subconscious, and the Conscious. To the Unconscious, Montessori attributed the influence of what she called the mneme (roughly translated as the “hereditary memory, an unconscious memory reproducing the past and preserving all experiences of the beings before us” [Chattin-McNichols, 1992, p. 223]) and horme (roughly translated as “The leading force of the great intelligence that is pushing all matter, living and nonliving, toward its final goal” [Chattin-McNichols, 1992, p. 222]). The picture painted of the Unconscious is not of some stable, quiescent “depth,” but one which actively informs development, in the manner that DNA informs development. This makes Montessori’s theory similar to Piaget’s in that both assume the mind as having a fundamentally active nature. It also provides a striking contrast to the behaviorist perspective of the mind, which either makes no assumptions of the workings “inside the skull” or assumes a blank slate, a tabula rasa.
The Subconscious layer, Montessori felt, was where all sense experiences were stored as “engrams” or “memory traces.” Again, as with the Unconscious, Montessori presumed that the Subconscious was also fundamentally active, constantly being sorted and processed, in order to better serves the needs of the Conscious mind. When information in the Subconscious eventually “put itself together,” a new idea could emerge into the Conscious mind.
This understanding of the Subconscious mind was what informed a few key ideas in Montessori methodology. First of all, because the Subconscious mind was filled with sensory experiences (engrams), and because these engrams were the source of new ideas in the Conscious mind, Montessori believed that it was vitally important that children manipulate and directly experience objects as much as possible. She further believed in accessing as many different senses as possible with her manipulative objects; thus, her objects utilized not only sight (color, size), but also sound (bells), touch (sandpaper letters), and even smell, temperature, and weight.
But it was not a haphazard exposure to sense experience that “taught a child.” Montessori believed that a sense experience would more efficiently “teach” a concept if it were ordered in some way. Thus, she developed her manipulatives in such a way that there would be what she called an “isolation of difficulty.” Her early manipulatives all varied in one dimension, and one dimension only (the dimension of focus for a child at his/her specific level of development). For example, if the teacher intended to teach length, then she would have the child seriate (sequence) wooden cylinders of varying length BUT EQUAL IN EVERY OTHER DIMENSION (thickness, color, etc.). By “isolating the difficulty” of the manipulative, she could focus the child’s sensory experiences to only one varying dimension, thus teaching the nature of that dimension (in our example, length).
Yet another Montessorian principle that arises out of the understanding of the Subconscious mind is that of “indirect preparation.” Montessori meticulously planned her lessons and structured her manipulatives in such a way that there would always be an overt lesson and a covert lesson (an indirect preparation). To continue with our example of the cylinders: 1) they were typically presented in groups of ten to indirectly prepare the child for the decimal system; 2) the order of seriation or sequencing, particularly if the child had to insert the cylinders into holes, was always from left to right, in order to prepare the child for the directionality of both reading and writing. These “indirect” lessons would escape the Conscious understanding of the child (and indeed, the awareness of most observers), but they would remain as powerful structuring elements in the child’s Subconscious mind, such that when more complex lessons in math or reading occurred, their Subconscious mind would already have been “prepared” and “primed” for the new concepts.
MONTESSORI’S THEORY: RESPECT FOR THE CHILD
A final principle of Montessori’s is much harder to articulate as a concrete concept, but is nevertheless present, influential, and indeed, a hallmark of the Montessori method. This principle is “respect for the child.” Montessori was often in awe of and thoroughly respected children. She saw children as children. This may seem like a quaint notion, but it is actually radically different from the view of children in her time, and in contemporary times. Usually, adults do not see or treat children as children. Children are, more often than not, either perceived as being little more than property or animals (ordered around like dogs), or (equally inappropriate) they are seen as “little adults” (sharing the same motivations that adults have, with the same capacities to understand concepts, and held accountable to the same expectations we have of other adults).
Montessori’s theory of the Four Planes of Development led her to look at children (particularly very young children) as radically different beings from adults, with miraculous innate potentials and with (stage-appropriate) limitations in understanding and cognitive ability. She designed her schools to respect the child in a stage-appropriate way. Montessori planned sequenced and stage-appropriate lessons to respect the child’s cognitive abilities at any given time. She also developed school environments that catered to the child’s size (and not the other way around); all furniture was supposed to be child-sized, and even the toilets and bathroom stalls had to be short enough for the average toddler to easily sit upon it.
But Montessori’s respect extended beyond these accommodations. It even extended into the relationship between the “teacher” (she preferred the term “directress,” and modern Montessorians use the term “guide”) and the child. In Montessori schools, teachers are not the fount of knowledge that they are in traditional schools. Nor are they even a “guide” or “manager” in the traditional sense.
In Montessori schools, first of all, it is the child who chooses what s/he wants to work on for the day (of course the teacher gently “guides” the child to “choose” appropriate tasks in a balanced way). Second, the most crucial “education” occurs in the interaction between the child and the manipulated object (or other sensory/cognitive experience), and NOT between the teacher and the child. The manipulatives were designed to be “self-correcting,” that is, errors in manipulating the object would be obvious to the child, without necessitating recourse to the teacher. For example, if a child were attempting to sort cylinders of various lengths and insert them into the appropriate holes, and if any given cylinder did not fit perfectly into its hole, then the child would automatically know that s/he had placed the wrong cylinder in that hole.
The teacher in a Montessori classroom is an “observer” first; that is, she must consciously “stand apart” from the child in his busy interaction with the manipulative, and allow him to discover, on his own, the correct answer. Intervention is reserved only for those situations in which a child’s behavior threatens safety or disrupts, or if the use of the manipulative markedly deviates from its standard usage. (There is great debate among Montessorians to this day on what constitutes an “appropriate intervention.” Note Chattin-McNichols’s work in this regard).
This contrasts greatly with the fundamentally behaviorist approach applied in schools nowadays. While safety issues or classroom disruptions would lead to overt behavioral interventions in both Montessorian and traditional classrooms, in the latter, they would also typically occur for “cognitive” problems as well. For example, if a child were performing poorly on a spelling test, behavioral interventions might be employed (reward/punishment) to “motivate” the child to perform better. This would not occur in a Montessorian classroom (both because of the reluctance to intervene, and because traditional tests are not utilized in Montessorian classes).
Note that Montessorian classrooms and traditional classrooms (public education in particular) differ fundamentally. In Montessorian schools, there is no overt timeline; a child is supposed to progress through the curriculum at his/her own pace, following his/her own interests. In traditional classrooms, the pace is externally set (both external to the student, and, particularly under NCLB, external to the teacher) and must be imposed upon the student. This necessitates testing, which is assumed to determine whether a lesson is “learned,” and it necessitates interventions when children perform poorly on tests (when they “lag behind” the set pace).
Let me summarize this discussion on Montessori’s theory by using her own words:
“We may say that the great difference lies in the life, vivacity, interest, and joy which the child shows in doing the work and also in the facility and precocity with which he learns. To enable us to follow the development of the child we try to find and follow the impulse of the child. We are trying to cultivate and give exercises which strengthen these inner energies. For this reason, instead of logically teaching certain things, we expose in the adapted environment certain stimuli and allow the child to choose.” (Chattin-McNichols, 1992, p. 47)
THE HISTORY OF THE MONTESSORI MOVEMENT IN AMERICA
The history of Montessori’s rise and fall (and rise again?) in America is a complex story with many interpretations. Chattin-McNichols puzzled over the present (as of 1992) ignorance or “pooh-poohing” of Montessori as a serious educational theory and model. He urged readers to perform the following test to demonstrate this:
“Choose a university, either a famous one, or a local college that offers Masters or Doctoral level programs in Early Childhood Education. … When you actually get a faculty member on the telephone, ask … if the University offers any courses on Montessori education, or what the professor thinks of the Montessori method in general. When you have noted the reply, ask about the professor’s own knowledge in that area: has she or he read any books by Montessori? Ever observed in a Montessori school?” Chattin-McNichols predicted that such an interrogation would reveal both a “lack of detailed familiarity with the Montessori method, but [that the professor] will also recommend against it in favor of ‘more modern’ programs, or ‘programs that allow for more creativity.’” (Chattin-McNichols, 1992, p. 25)
Why the general disfavorable impression?
And yet, paradoxically, Chattin-McNichols (1992) (based upon a rough survey of Washington State generalized to the entire nation) that roughly 43% of all private preschools had someone on staff with Montessori teacher preparation. That is a fairly sizable number of preschools, for a methodology that seems to have fallen into disfavor.
Why the discrepancy?
To answer this question, Chattin-McNichols attempts to untangle the complex history of Montessori in America. When Montessori was preparing for her first school (1907), the United States was experiencing a surge of interest in early childhood education, largely due to the influence of the kindergarten movement from Germany. Although overt support for this movement faded with anti-German sentiment during and after World War I, the number and quality of nursery schools continued to increase in America. In response to this, interest in Montessori was sparked in America from as early as 1909; five articles in Kindergarten-Primary Magazine, while highlighting the differences between Montessori classrooms and the kindergartens in America, generally encouraged more observation of her method. One of the most significant differences noted, whether it was appropriate or not, was the impression that Montessori’s program emphasized reading and writing from an early age (recall Montessori’s dramatic results with the “idiot children”). Another article by one Miss Josephine Tozier served to reinforce the impression in America that Montessori was a reading and writing program; it contained a photograph of a child writing on a blackboard, with the following caption: “One of Maria Montessori’s pupils writing from dictation at the blackboard. The average child of four learns to write in six weeks by the Montessori method.” (Chattin-McNichols, 1992, p. 28)
By 1911, the first American Montessori school was opened in Tarrytown, New York. This school (in contrast to Montessori’s Casa dei Bambini) was a private school that drew its students primarily from “cultured families, whose greatest ambition it was to give their children everything possible in the way of education and rational enjoyment” (Chattin-McNichols, 1992, p. 28). This was so largely because of the not entirely accurate impression that Montessori was an academically oriented program focusing on reading and writing, and at that time in America, such things were reserved for the middle to upper classes.
By 1912, the Montessori American Committee was founded. Despite the fact that it would have great influence in promoting the Montessori method, and indeed would help to organize the first International Training Course in Rome, the foundress did not hide her anger towards the organization, and its associated American schools, because she felt they were contrary to her intents.
Chattin-McNichols attributes the source of the split (and the general fall of Montessori in America) to three main reasons. First of all, the educational establishment, vested in the kindergarten movement (and their own reputations), freely criticized Montessori’s methods without investing the time to understand her. This was true of many, including perhaps her most famous critique, W. H. Kilpatrick. His 71 page manuscript, “The Montessori System Examined,” was filled with attacks, not just on the method, but the woman herself. For example, Kilpatrick wrote: “While Madam Montessori’s interest in the scientific attitude is entirely praiseworthy, her actual science cannot be so highly commended. Her biology is not always above reproach … she generalizes unscientifically as to the condition of contemporary educational thought and practice from observation limited …” (Kilpatrick, 1914, p. 4) Interestingly enough, Kilpatrick had no background in biology (while Montessori was a physician), and his observations of the Montessori were brief exposures compared to the years the woman herself spent studying the then current educational methods.
A second reason for the split was the privatization of the Montessori method in America. While Montessori had intended her method to be used for all children, and particularly the underprivileged, the misperception of the academic nature of her system seemed to make it more appropriate for the upper classes. Interestingly enough, this is still both the draw towards and the stigma against Montessori in many middle class parents today; while they initially “hear” that Montessori develops good learning foundations in preschool age children, some parents eventually withdraw their children from Montessori programs when they realize that their children are not literate by age 4.
A third reason lay in the fact that America’s naturally eclectic tendencies (it was and is an immigrant nation, after all) led to the tendency to borrow piecemeal elements from her system, when it was intended to be applied in its entirety, with all parts integrated. Some American schools claimed to be Montessori simply because they used Montessori manipulatives, while retaining notions of “play” and “fantasy” (something somewhat contrary to Montessori philosophy) that were then popular in kindergarten schools.
According to J. McVicker Hunt, this split resulted from a fundamental mismatch between the educational leaders of the day (John Dewey’s progressive education, the behaviorist movement) and Montessori. Among the areas of disagreement he noted between the two were: the belief in a fixed level of intelligence, unchangeable by experiences; a belief that all behavior had to be motivated; a focus on the response, not the child’s experience; and the unwillingness of teachers to relinquish control of the classroom and move out of center stage. (Chattin-McNichols, 1992, p. 30)
MONTESSORI TODAY… AND TOMORROW?
Arguably, the tendencies resulting from the original fall of Montessori’s popularity in America resound to this day. Montessori is not taken seriously in most colleges and universities on early childhood education, and is usually not even mentioned in the lineage of educational theorists covered in a survey course. Her legacy, however, is strong in her preschool movement. Again, the initial American Montessori schools were private, and carried the perception that they were ideal environments to prepare children to read and write. Whether parents’ expectations were met or not, there must have been some degree of satisfaction with the method, or it would not have survived, and indeed, thrived, to this day.
What is interesting, however, is the slight resurgence of interest in Montessori’s insights, particularly with regards to children in the special education population. This relatively recent development has occurred primarily because, I hypothesize, the equally recent legislation mandating public school education for exceptional children (Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975). As has been frequently noted, the drive for public school education for handicapped children resulted, not from any “top-down” concern for this population, but from advocacy groups (parents) who were largely inspired by the 1954 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education case. As a result, the educational institutions of America were mandated by law to confront various “special” populations of students. Teachers soon discovered that the standard interventions (primarily based upon a didactic model of teaching, employing behavioral interventions) did not seem to work on these types of students. New interventions, based on new models of cognitive functioning, needed to be found.
It thus strikes me as ironic that the American educational establishment only recently discovered the insights of Montessori in this regard. Just as Montessori first cued into the workings of the mind through her work with the “idiot children,” modern education theorists are only now confirming many of her ideas through their recent mandated exposure to “special education” populations. Fundamental Montessori principles, such as orderly child-friendly environments, stimulation of all senses, and the “isolation of difficulty” for example, are employed to assist many special education populations, such as the Learning Disabled or the Autistic or the Mentally Retarded.
Nevertheless, it is my opinion that Montessori’s method will never be employed wholesale in public schools. For one thing, as evidenced by the class text on “Classroom Organization” (Zirpoli’s “Behavioral Management and Assessment”), the behavioral model is firmly entrenched as the theory of choice for educators. Sure, it has been modified to accommodate new theories (cognitive, social), but the bent remains: children are measured solely by their external behaviors (their results on “objective” tests), and interventions are meted out when problems exist, so that everyone can live up to a target behavior. Arguably, this bent exists not only in the educational establishment, but in our culture as a whole. We are “results driven”; the call for NCLB serves as evidence of this. Parents of toddlers, feeling this pressure, urge their children to learn to read and know the geography of the world from earlier and earlier ages, without regard for whether such “knowledge” is developmentally appropriate, and without concern for the emotional consequences of such overt “pushing.” Unfortunately, the primary and central principles of Montessori’s method, a fundamental respect for the child, and the entreaty to “follow” him through all of his repetitious behavior and wondrous mistakes, can only be given passing acknowledgment (if at all) in a modern society that has neither room nor time for error, or for a child to figure out his world for himself.
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