A physiologist by education and a doctor by profession, Montessori came to her system of education after many years of studying the child’s body and long-term teaching practice with abnormal and retarded children. A student of Séguin and Itard, physician-educators who developed methods for educating handicapped children, Montessori, as she herself says, came up with the idea of applying these methods of education, which gave such brilliant results, to normal children. She pays absolutely exceptional attention to the hygiene of the child, makes the educator the duty of carefully monitoring the development of his psychophysical organism; an anthropometer (pedometer), scales and other devices for anthropological research of a child are a necessary accessory of the Children’s Home. Montessori calls her method the method of «scientific pedagogy» precisely because it is all based, in her opinion, on physiology and psychology. This is «experimental pedagogy». Montessori is even ready to call it medical pedagogy, as medicine, as the totality of the sciences about the life of the human body, is inextricably linked in her system with pedagogy. And in the second respect, Montessori strongly opposes orthodox Frebelism. If Froebel looked at the kindergarten mainly as a school for mothers, then Montessori, without rejecting this function of the «Children’s House», sees in it a definite replacement for family education.<...> Replacing the family, the «Children’s House» does not separate children from parents, but, as it were, «socializes» the family. Hence the vital-practical character on which Montessori insists in contrast to orthodox Frebelism. Montessori sees one of the main tasks of his upbringing in preparing children for life, they must learn to dress themselves, wash themselves, set the table, eat partly cook, wash dishes, clean the room, every child should be able to put away their toys, children should, if possible, do without adult help to become independent. The «House of the Child» should prepare children for school, equip them with the skills and abilities that are necessary for independent school work, in particular, teach them to read and write.
Already the atmosphere of the «House of the Child» corresponds to this worldly-practical bias of his. Montessori abolishes desks and benches. Instead, she ordered light small chairs, armchairs and tables, at which one to three children can work, and which the children themselves can carry. Material for classes «didactic material,» as Montessori calls it, is stored in long, low cabinets along the walls of the room so that the children themselves can open them and put teaching aids in them. The dishes that children use when eating are such that the children themselves can wash, serve and clean them in the order of duty. There are small washstands in the entrance hall, which the children use on their own when they come to the “House”. At the “House” there is a playground with a corner set aside for a garden and equipped with tools appropriate for the age of children. Homework and «everyday exercises» are included in the lesson program, and insofar as it is Montessori who speaks about child’s home, and not about the garden: in her opinion, this is in the full sense of the word an orphanage in which children should be masters and workers themselves.
However, this social and vital-practical moment is still in the background. “The goal of education,” as Montessori puts it, “is to develop strength,” and this goal determines the entire nature of that “didactic material” with which the children of “children’s homes” are predominantly occupied and which undoubtedly constitutes the center of the entire Montessori system. The description of this material is not included in our task, especially since it is possible to get acquainted with it only by seeing it in practice or at least by reading its detailed description in the books of Montessori herself. Here we confine ourselves only to understanding the general spirit of the «didactic material». Montessori sets the task of «didactic material» to be the development of individual human organs. predominantly the development of feeling. It extremely differentiates the various feelings, and for each of them individually selects the appropriate material, exercises with which are able to develop it to the maximum extent. Thus, sets of smooth and emery boards, cards and various materials serve to nurture a tactile sense. The thermal sense is exercised by a set of metal cups filled with water of various temperatures. Baric (sense of heaviness) — a set of wooden boards of the same size, but different in weight. To develop a stereognostic sense (feeling), Montessori uses the Froebel set of bricks and cubes. The eye and the sense of form and color are brought up accordingly. Hearing is developed with the help of a set consisting of two rows of 13 bells and 4 hammers (tone recognition), and a series of whistles (sound recognition). Proceeding from the idea that the task of education is the development of all human strengths, Montessori does not disregard the sense of taste and smell: sets of different powders and sweets and sets of various products, both fresh and spoiled, are used to exercise them. For each sense, special material is selected, and this isolated exercise of an individual sense is further aggravated by a special “method of isolation”: for example, auditory, tactile and thermal exercises are performed with a blindfold on the eyes, that is, when the sense of sight is turned off, etc.
In a similar way, the upbringing of movements proceeds, which largely comes down to the exercise of the muscles involved in various motor processes: in addition to a system of specially designed gymnastics, exercises with buttoning and unbuttoning buttons (a special device), lacing, special gymnastics of breathing, lips, teeth and tongue. The education of mental activity, which for the sensationalist point of view defended by Montessori is nothing more than a combination of perception with motor processes, comes down to a combined exercise of the senses and motor processes: this includes the “lessons of nomenclature” associated with the exercise with geometric tabs (learning form and colors) and complicated by the observation of the environment under the guidance of a teacher, a game with cutting out geometric shapes, drawing according to the developed system (black shading, then color, etc.), modeling, games with the names of colors and their shades, etc. All this culminates in exercises aimed at introducing arithmetic (exercises with numbers, «lessons with zero», exercises for memorizing numbers), and finally culminates in a method of teaching reading and writing that has become especially famous.
This method is based on the psychophysiological study of writing, the analysis of those motor mechanisms that are involved in the process of writing. This analysis shows that children find it difficult to write not because they do not know letters, but because they have not yet developed enough those organs (for example, the corresponding muscles of the hand) that are involved in the writing process. Consequently, the initial task of teaching writing is to prepare the relevant organs for the process of writing by appropriate selection of exercises. This is what Montessori does: learning to write according to this method begins with drawing geometric shapes, from which the child proceeds to shading them (this establishes the muscular mechanism necessary to control the writing tool). Then only the child begins to trace with his finger the written letters cut out of sandpaper and pasted on cardboard, which establishes the association of the muscular-tactile sensation with the visual. Only after that the corresponding letters are called to the child, as a result of which visual and muscular-tactile sensations are associated with auditory ones. This is followed by detailed exercises in the formation of words from the letters made and in their writing. The process of learning to write is thus closely related to learning to read in the elementary sense of the word, understanding by reading a purely mechanical process of translating visual perception into sounds. Reading in the sense of perception of concepts with the help of written words follows later, completing the entire process of learning to read and write. The peculiarity of this method lies in the fact that children learn to write not by writing, but by exercising in preparatory actions for writing (in particular, by drawing and shading). They learn to write before they begin to write, and therefore they begin to write immediately, suddenly or spontaneously, or when the teacher, convinced by observing their exercises in hatching, that their muscular mechanism is sufficiently prepared for the writing process, invites them to write any letter. or word. The whole process of learning to write and read, from the preparatory exercises for it to the independent writing of a letter, takes an extremely short time. So, according to Montessori, two of her little ones, four years old, in less than a month and a half, learned to write in such a way that they each wrote on behalf of their comrades in a letter with good wishes to the engineer Talamo. And besides, as the reader of Montessori’s book can be convinced from the photographs attached to it, these letters were written almost in calligraphy — at the very time when elementary school students, studying according to the ordinary method, barely master the mechanism of reading and writing for a whole year.
It should be expected that the isolation of individual feelings, which characterizes the Montessori system, must necessarily continue within the children’s society, in the relations of children to each other. The Montessori method is to a large extent a method of gymnastics, which each of the students must do individually, and where a collective exercise is possible only in the form of the simultaneous repetition of the same movements by all, as we have in training in military service or in rhythmic gymnastics. Indeed, if Froebel’s kindergarten in its idea resembles a choir based on the contrapuntal harmony of the diverse, then the Montessori children’s home is more like a bunch of children gathered together, each doing their own special thing, then in unison producing the same movements. Montessori at the beginning of her book resolutely rejects any kind of collective lessons, she insists on individual education, understanding by it the isolated lessons of the teacher with each child individually. Therefore, she considers it possible to unite children of such different ages as two-year-olds and six-year-olds in a child’s home. Each child, in her opinion, does what he wants and how he wants, according to his inclinations and tastes. In this regard, children should be given complete freedom. In the strongest terms, Montessori rebels against the slavery of the ordinary school and ordinary kindergarten, in which the teacher imposes on all children the same certain classes. Desks, even the most sophisticated, pinning children to a certain place in the classroom, symbolize for her the slave spirit of the old school. In the Children’s House, children arrange themselves with their didactic material as they wish, arrange tables and chairs in their own way, arrange themselves on the floor at will, “work” either alone or in groups of two by three, move from place to place, approach the teacher (“ headmistress») when they need it, etc. n The ideal of a free upbringing dominates Montessori’s mind to such an extent that when you read it, it sometimes seems that you are reading Rousseau. Completely in the spirit of Rousseau, she rejects all punishments, and even more rewards. “To subordinate the will of a child to an extraneous will is unacceptable, like any kind of violence,” she says almost in the words of Tolstoy, expressing all these thoughts with the passion of a person who has discovered a new truth for the first time. Completely in the spirit of Rousseau, she ridicules the noisy and intrusive busyness of an ordinary teacher, exposing for her «principal» the ideal of doing nothing. “It’s easier to dress and feed a child than to have him dress and feed himself,” she says. But to do something for another is the duty of a servant. The educator should not be a servant. The teacher’s task is only to «throw a ray of light and go on.» His main virtue is not to show, not to tell, but to observe. The educator should be imbued, in her words, with the spirit of a naturalist who observes nature. It would be a good naturalist who would prescribe to nature its course and, dissatisfied with the slowness of its processes, would accelerate the pace of their development!
True, in the «special part» of his book, outlining his pedagogical experience, Montessori of necessity deviates from his original so harsh formulations. She admits that in society, and hence in the home of the child, freedom can only be “relative”: “the freedom of the child is limited by common interests.” “It is necessary to avoid suppressing the direct movements, aspirations of children, with the exception of actions that are useless and harmful, which must be suppressed and suppressed … One should fight and gradually destroy all the actions of children that cannot be allowed,” she says. In the very chapter where she talks about the abolition of punishment, she says that in her practice more than once Children were found «who disturbed others, not paying the slightest attention to our exhortations.» Such children, she continues, we isolated in the corner of the room. “Placing him in a comfortable armchair, we seated him so that he could see his comrades at work, gave him his favorite toys and games.” Such isolation, although associated with coercion, but devoid of a moment of threat and obvious condemnation, almost always had a calming effect on the child. “In this way, it was possible to discipline all the children, who at first seemed invincible.”<...>
Why is it that Montessori, who talks so much about social education, is herself in her orphanage able to realize only the lowest kind of social unity — the mechanical unity of unison? By answering this question, we will thereby reveal the main limitations of her entire method and the danger lurking in it, directly opposite to the shortcomings of the Frebel system. If Fröbel, who proceeded from the philosophical system of Schelling, was one-sidedly idealistic in his neglect of the psycho-physiological organism of the child, then the limitation of Montessori, on the contrary, consists precisely in the fact that she bases her system exclusively on physiology and psychology, neglecting the completely philosophical side of the issue. This affects her concept of development most sharply. The development of the child is reduced for her exclusively to the development of the forces of the organism’s abilities: the development of muscles, the chest, vision, touch, hearing, etc. The concept of education is completely determined by her. materialto be educated. What should be educated? — this is the question that she only poses, naturally answering it: it is necessary to educate in a person everything that physiology and psychology can find in him! Therefore, she quite consistently includes in her system of education and education, for example, taste and smell, without even asking herself the question: for what it is necessary to develop these feelings, which goal it may pursue. Question about goals education, as a purely philosophical question, is, of course, not touched upon by it. Meanwhile, does even the maximum development of the organs of perception and movement actually ensure what we call the ideal of a developed person? Isn’t virtuoso subtlety in distinguishing shades of colors and an eye that is not inferior to the eye of a savage often combined with a complete misunderstanding of painting and drawing, and the ability to catch the subtlest noises and the presence of even absolute pitch — with a banal musical taste that prefers vulgar sweetness to deep and serious music? After all, artistic perception is not the perception of matter, according to its pictorial or musical meaning, and therefore, for understanding painting or music, vision and a developed organ of hearing are far from being sufficiently developed. In this sense, Plato was deeply right when he said that we comprehend not by sight and hearing, but only through mediation vision and hearing. Just as you can hear words and not understand their meaning, so you can see and distinguish the colors of a picture and hear all the component chords of the tone — and yet not see the picture and not hear the sonatas or symphonies. But the same applies to the scientific development of man: the eye, pressure, thermal and tactile senses can be sharpened to the extreme, the sense of smell can compete with the scent of a good hunting dog — and for all that, a person can mentally (more precisely, in relation to the ability to knowledge of the surrounding nature) to be completely undeveloped. The artistic and scientific development of man clearly does not coincide with the development of his psychophysiological organism. A comprehensively developed person is not one who has developed vision, hearing, touch, smell, but, first of all, one who has become familiar with all the values of culture, i.e., owns the method of scientific thinking, understands art, feels right, has an economic warehouse of activity . In this regard, Fröbel understood the task of educating the child much deeper, it is remarkable that he speaks not about the development of the sense of sight, hearing and touch, but about the development of the feelings (or instincts) of labor, knowledge, beauty, religious feeling. He is presented with a cultural content that a person must actively assimilate, and he sees the task of educating a child in a uniform and holistic familiarization of him with the multifaceted totality of culture, which includes economy and science, art and religion. Already in this different use of the ambiguous word «feeling» the difference between Frebel’s idealism and Montessori’s naturalism is sharply revealed. For Fröbel, feeling is determined by the content to be digested, the cultural goal, and he talks about feelings. what — labor, knowledge, beauty. Montessori, ignoring the purpose of education, uses the word feeling in the sense of the material to be transformed, speaking of the senses of tactile, visual, auditory, baric, thermal, etc.
Does it follow from this that the education of the external senses, so perfected by Montessori, is an unnecessary and empty undertaking? Far from it. Even if we do not know by hearing and seeing, then nevertheless through hearing and seeing, and therefore the education of external senses is an absolutely necessary element of education. But it is far from being the whole of education, and, moreover, it must be subordinated to the true goals of education and take place to the extent necessary for these purposes, although, perhaps, in the initial education it will, of necessity, occupy a very large place. Vision, hearing, touch must undoubtedly be developed, but not to the extreme, not unlimited, but in moderation, since this is necessary for the activity of knowledge, art and economy, the tools and means of which they are, and most importantly also not self-sufficient, but in connection with cognitive, artistic and economic development of the child. As for the special development of taste and smell, we, perhaps, will give up in advance, and with a lighter heart than Montessori, who herself melancholy declares that her experiments in this respect did not lead to any satisfactory results. And to this extent, perhaps, we will be more faithful to psychology and physiology themselves (another example of the fact that naturalism, superstitiously related to natural science, contradicts its own data). After all, it is no coincidence, but due to the law of the threshold of sensations, we perceive sensations of only medium intensity: excessive sharpening of our organs of perception can turn out to be not only educationally useless, but also biologically harmful, meaning an excessive expenditure of our nervous and mental energy, and in other, extreme cases — so unbearable that it may even require medical intervention. <...> The Montessori system denies everything that can feed the imagination in one way or another. She rejects visual games, denies even fairy tales, as leading the child into the world of the unreal. Developing a purely sensationalistic theory of imagination, Montessori knows only one passive imagination, which is nothing but an imitative-arbitrary combination of perceived elements of reality. What psychology calls creative imagination is for it only a complicated passive imagination. Children’s creativity is resolutely rejected by her. In this denial of children’s creativity, Montessori is undoubtedly partly right: the theory and practice of preschool education do indeed abuse the term creativity. Creativity in the true sense of the word means the creation of something new in the world, something that has never been before. The act of creativity is an irreplaceable and, to that extent, individual act, which makes its creator, in turn, an irreplaceable and individual member of cultural humanity. So even a virtuoso or an actor who plays a play we have known for a long time, creates insofar as he, with his performance, reveals to us a completely new side, hidden from us until now, a certain new shade of a well-known image. Creativity presupposes the ability to independently set distant goals and the ability to work hard and steadily in pursuit of the goal once set by him. It presupposes a courageous willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the set goal all fleeting impressions, temptations, alluring opportunities that open up to us along the path of pursuing this goal. Only a person creates in the true sense of the word, while a child, having only a temperament, plays, carried away by his imagination. The autonomous activity of creativity, which even in the acts of art, apparently leading us into the world of unreal images, is always directed not at the transformation of reality, at the victory over matter, therefore cannot be confused with the anomous activity of play, which is always satisfied with a simple meaning and its approximate embodiment in reality.
If, therefore, Montessori is right in his denial of children’s creativity, does it also follow from this denial of the imagination that distinguishes the entire system? The essence of the game, we know, is that, powerless to transform reality, it is satisfied with the image of fantasy. Doesn’t the denial of fantasy lead to the destruction of play? Indeed, Montessori children are the least likely to be said to play. It is no coincidence that Montessori speaks of «didactic material», of individual lessons, about lessons silence, he calls the “headmistress” a teacher, and the very room where the children study with their didactic material, the room of “mental labor”. In contrast to orthodox Frebelism, which, as we have seen, is fraught with the danger of degenerating play into fun, the Montessori system hides the danger of prematurely turning play into a lesson, i.e. e. in the work, the goal of which is set by the working others. But a premature lesson inevitably means the triumph of the mechanism. In fact, living only in the present, not yet able to separate the goals of his activity from the activity itself, a child who has been given a lesson can only repeat what the teacher showed him, but not work independently, going his own way towards the goal set for him by others. His personality will not grow in this work imposed on him, and the feeling of monotony and boredom will be its inevitable companion. The growth of the child’s personality requires ever more complex material, which, being sufficiently versatile, would appeal to his soul as a whole. This is the profound correctness of the Fröbel system. Montessori, on the contrary, based on his sensationalist philosophy, looks at the soul of a child as a simple sum of individual senses. If Fröbel evaluated the material of children’s play primarily depending on how much it reflects the integrity of the world around the child, and how much it immediately makes all sides of the child’s soul sound as a whole, then Montessori’s didactic material, on the contrary, is strictly adapted to individual feelings: monotonous fastening and the unbuttoning of buttons is replaced by equally monotonous exercises with inlays, these latter by exercises with emery letters, etc. etc. Instead of a unified wholeness of the child’s nascent personality, we have a simple aggregate of separate muscles and organs of perception, exercised by monotonous gymnastics. The consequence of the same naturalism, for which the whole is always only a simple sum of parts, is the above-mentioned denial of collective activities and games. The unity of unison, in which the same thing is repeated monotonously by everyone, and generally speaking, the unity of only one room in which each child studies his material separately — how profoundly different this is from the choral principle that pervades Froebel’s kindergarten! But the integrity of a children’s society, like the integrity of an individual child, is possible only where children play, and the element of play is imagination. The development of the senses and motor apparatuses is valuable only when the senses and muscles do not suffice, but when they serve some purpose that is accessible and understandable to the child. But the child’s primary activity is imaginative play. The limitations of this concept of development, arising from naturalistic atomism and leading to mechanical passivity, are most clearly manifested in the results of the method of teaching writing known to us. Within a month and a half, four- and five-year-olds learn to write with amazing calligraphy. content written. What do Montessori children write? «We wish a good Easter to the Talamo engineer and Montessori’s boss.» “I wish well to Ms. Headmistress, my teacher Ms. Massa Silvia and also to Dr. Maria Montessori. Children’s House, Kamianyi Street, etc. We do not reject the possibility of teaching reading and writing at preschool age. We even consider it desirable that a child enter school already knowing how to read and write. But then the teaching should be arranged in such a way that the child needs reading and writing for something. If they are used only to write official congratulations to the authorities and the first words that come across, clearly prompted by the teacher, then it is obvious that doing them will be a purely mechanical occupation; which can not soon get bored with a child in which his activity will not be manifested and his nascent personality will not grow. Reading and writing should be necessary for the child. This means that they must be the subject of his imagination-driven play. As we have stated above, the imagination must also not suffice. The correct organization of the game is that, while playing, the child gradually gets used to work. This means that, being initially satisfied with the minimal embodiment of his image of fantasy, he must gradually become accustomed to a more complex and concrete embodiment of it in reality. Thus, the goals of his activity will become more and more stable and will gradually stand out from the activity itself, until, finally, the embodiment of the image of fantasy into reality will not bring him close to the transformation of reality, that is, to work. In this complication and strengthening of the goals pursued by the child, inevitably associated with the expansion of his cultural horizons, with his assimilation of an ever-expanding cultural content, will be the growth of his personality. But it is one thing to gradually bring play to work and imagination to reality, and another to deny them immediately and completely. We are ready to agree with Montessori that imagination is not creativity, that it contains moments of arbitrariness, passivity, that it is lower than a clear and accurate perception of reality. This is precisely the point of our disagreement with orthodox Frebelism with its symbolism, which gives the imagination a self-contained significance. Imagination must be abolished. Yes, but just as coercion in general can be destroyed not by simple abolition, but by the gradual struggle against it by the coerced person himself, in the same way, imagination can not be abolished, but overcome by the child himself. It must be «sublated» (aufgehoben) in the lesson, as a moment overcome by it, but also preserved in it. And for this it is necessary not to abolish the imagination, but to organize it in the direction indicated by us. The imaginative play of a child is not creativity. Yes, but this is the only activity available to him. Montessori’s mistake is that by denying the child’s creativity, she throws his activity overboard.
The tact of an experienced, thoughtful teacher, the readiness to admit one’s own mistakes, a deep knowledge of child psychology and the ability to observe a child, which distinguish Montessori herself, weaken in her hands the indicated danger of mechanizing the child’s activity. With choral singing, conversation that sometimes turns almost into a fairy tale, the cultivation of religious feelings and with all his captivating and captivating personality, Montessori smooths out the shortcomings of his method and prevents the danger lurking in it. Where, as in England, Switzerland, and America, there is a tradition of authentic and experienced Frebelism, the application of the Montessori method seems only to contribute to the renewal of preschool education. But for this it is necessary that this method be applied not dogmatically and accompanied by the same spirit of searching, which is characteristic of Montessori herself. Where this will not happen, where the new Montessorian orthodoxy will triumph, we will undoubtedly witness the triumph of the mechanism.<...>