Part 6: Reflections on the activity of independent discovery in the first two years of life

[This article is by Grazia Honegger Fresco, you can read the first five parts in previous blogs]
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5 

Conclusion

Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile 

nelle case dei bambini. Città di Castello, S. Lafi, 1909.

• In 1909 Maria Montessori wrote a book called The Method of the scientific pedagogy applied to the education of children in the Children's House. From the very beginning this book was spread around the world under the titleThe Montessori Method, thus leaving out the most important part, the scientific pedagogy.  “Scientific pedagogy” means an educational science based on observation and therefore, a scientific method. The change of the title and the misunderstanding that it is Montessori’s Method has slowly led to a rigid construction of an unchanging method that is not always congruent with the reality of who children are today.

• Maria Montessori had an extremely keen scientific mind  and was very attentive to new developments in science. She demanded precision and rigor, but not as an end in itself, but as regards the needs of children and adolescents.

• Maria Montessori said that we can never really teach anything to another person. She said this in many different ways, speaking about people who were studying to be future teachers, as well as referring to how children learn. Do we attempt to teach children how to live in the world? Or do we create the conditions in which they can express themselves and optimize their potential? How can we realize her most fundamental principle: Follow the child?

• Maria Montessori said “Every unnecessary help is an obstacle to development." Is this just a figure of speech or is it the most basic educational clause that goes all the way back to Socrates?

• Maria Montessori's positivist ideology* carried over into her work of observation of the child: first we must have practical and observable experiences and then we can apply a theory to our experiences. Nowadays, most everywhere, courses are organized under her name as conceptual learning experiences, mostly theoretical, in which students learn modalities and norms in an abstract sense, without the possibility to question or engage in discussion (see chapter III of the Advanced Method (1916) or The Montessori Elementary Material (1965).

• Galileo risked being burned alive when he declared that the earth revolved around the sun. If astronomy had stopped there, we would still be dealing with the Inquisition of four centuries ago. 

For this reason I hereby declare that we are at risk of a gradual transformation to a closed minded dogma or orthodoxy that could eventually become the end of a great revolutionary thought.

Maria Montessori, as I was able to know her in her last years, and as I found many many times reflected in some of her best students, offers us intelligent true heartedness, openness to innovation, and a continuous search, given that humanity is constantly changing. Every new child brings unique and absolute innovation, to the extent which we are not even able to imagine.

Grazia Honegger Fresco, Castellanza, Italy  June 2018 quadernomontessori@fimail.org

* Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that certain ("positive") knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations. Thus, information derived from sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all certain knowledge. Positivism holds that valid knowledge (certitude or truth) is found only in this a posteriori knowledge (wikipedia).