I started reading
the Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori yesterday. Her attention to the nature of life and human development as the basis for education is refreshingly impressive. I disagree with her statist views of government and her view of education as a servant of "society" (especially poignant having recently re-read Ayn Rand's
Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal).
From what I understand the primary idea of the Montessori Method (I haven't read that book yet) is that the education process derives from a child interacting with his environment. From Chapter 1, the Child's Part in World Reconstruction (p. 8, paragraph 1 in 1967 translation by Claude A. Claremont):
And so we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.
Reflecting back on my own education, it seems that most of what I learned was from interacting with books or my teachers or homework, not just listening to someone talk. I have little memory of those courses where I did mostly listening and little interacting.
I appreciate Montessori's view of the child as having great potential and only needing its energies directed. From Chapter 3, the Periods of Growth (p. 28, paragraph 1):
The discovery that the child has a mind able to absorb on its own account produces a revolution in education. We can now understand easily why the first period in human development, in which character is formed, is the most important. At no other age has the child greater need of an intelligent help, and any obstacle that impedes his creative work will lessen the chance he has of achieving perfection. We should help the child, therefore, no longer because we think of him as a creature, puny and weak, but because he is endowed with great creative energies, which are of their nature so fragile as to need a loving and intelligent defense. To these energies we want to bring help; not to the child, nor to his weakness. When we understand that the energies belong to an unconscious mind, which has to become conscious through work and through an experience of life gained in the world, we realize that the mind of the child in its infancy is different from ours, that we cannot reach it by verbal instruction, nor intervene directly in the process of its passing from the unconscious to the conscious -- the process of making human faculty -- then the whole concept of education changes. It becomes a matter of giving help to the child's life, to the psychological development of man. No longer is it just an enforced task of retaining our words and ideas.
Education is the task of "giving help to the child's life, to the psychological development of man," and, from Chapter 7, the Spiritual Embryo (p. 72, paragraph 1):
The most important side of human development is the mental side. For man's movements have to be organized according to the guidance and dictation of his mental life. Intelligence is what distinguishes man from the animals, and the building up of his intelligence is the first thing to occur. Everything else waits upon this.
The proper purpose of education is to cultivate the child's development of intelligence. This fact is dictated by the requirements of human nature. From Chapter 7, the Spiritual Embryo (p.75, paragraphs 5-7):
Only nature, which has established certain laws and determined the needs of the human being in course of development, can dictate the educational method to be followed; for this is settled by its aim -- to satisfy the needs and the laws of life.
These laws, and these needs, the child himself must indicate by his spontaneous manifestations, and by his progress. His tranquility and happiness, the intensity of his efforts and the constancy of his freely chosen responses, bear witness to them.
Our one duty is to learn from him on the spot, and to serve him, as best we can.
