A Website By Rebekah Williams

I have a strong bias against the classroom settings found in many American schools. As a graduate of a Montessori elementary school and from a childhood amidst a community of Montessori educators, I’ve developed a passion for the freedom and spirit the Montessori method encourages. On the flip-side, my high school experience laid the grounds for a strong dislike and skepticism regarding traditional American education.

When Sandy suggested I study John Locke’s philosophies to get a better understanding of the American educational system, I was determined to dislike Locke and disagree with his philosophies. I thought that Locke’s philosophies would have a direct bearing on the formation of traditional classrooms.

Through writing this paper, I hoped to come to a better understanding of why many American classrooms use desks, textbooks, and tests to educate and grade children. I thought Locke’s philosophies would explain why traditional American education is based on grading systems and testing for reward and punishment, why traditional schools use desks to force children to sit straight and be passive recipients of information, and why teachers are employed to stand at the front of the classroom to fill a child’s minds with information from a text book.

At the completion of this paper, many of my questions are still unanswered, but I don’t dislike Locke or think his philosophies are completely off the mark. On the contrary, I believe that Locke’s philosophies on human understanding went hand-in-hand with Maria Montessori’s focus on sensory-based education, but that in Locke’s essay, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, we may find the foundation for the traditional American school setting I so disliked.

Locke was born in 1632, in Wrington, a village in Somerset, England.¹ He was well-known for several publications, including a book entitled, An Essay on Human Understanding, and his essay on education, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Both were widely read and deeply influential in the eighteenth century, especially in Protestant America, where his essay on education “became a principal guide on ‘how to breed’ children.”²

John Locke is commonly known as “the blank slate” philosopher. In Sophie’s World, a novel on the history of philosophy, Jostein Gaarder said, “Locke’s claim is that all our thoughts and ideas issue from that which we have taken in through the senses. Before we perceive anything, the mind is a ‘tabula rasa’ – or an empty slate.”³ Then the mind acts on ideas that arise from these sense experiences. Gaarder continued, “The mind is not merely a passive receiver. It classifies and processes all sensations as they come streaming in.⁴

Locke believed that humans can only perceive simple sensations. He said that through many experiences of the same thing, humans put together a series of simple sensations to form a complex idea. Gaarder explained:

“Locke emphasized that the only things we can perceive are simple sensations. When I eat an apple, for example, I do not sense the whole apple in one sensation. In actual fact I receive a whole series of simple sensations – such as that something is green, smells fresh, and tastes juicy and sharp. Only after I have eaten an apple many times do I think: Now I am eating an ‘apple.’ As Locke would say, we have formed a complex idea of an ‘apple.’ When we were infants, tasting an apple for the first time, we had no such complex idea. But we saw something green, we tasted something fresh and juicy… Little by little we bundle many similar sensations together and form concepts like ‘apple,’ ‘pear,’ ‘orange.’”⁵

Through simple sensory experiences, humans form ideas, but sense perception is only the beginning of understanding.

Locke talked about two types of “qualities” in things. Gaarder wrote:

“Locke distinguished between what he called ‘primary’ and ’secondary’ qualities… By primary qualities he meant extension, weight, motion and number, and so on. When it is a question of qualities such as these we can be certain that the senses reproduce them objectively. But we also sense other qualities in things. We say that something is sweet or sour, green or red, hot or cold. Locke calls these secondary qualities. Senses like these – color, smell, taste, sound – do not reproduce the real qualities that are inherent in the things themselves. They reproduce only the effect of the outer reality on our senses.”

Gaarder explained, “Everyone can agree on the primary qualities like size and weight because they lie within the objects themselves. But the secondary qualities like color and taste can vary from person to person and from animal to animal, depending on the nature of the individual’s sensations.”⁶

Locke would have said that our understanding of things gained through the senses or through secondary qualities (such as color, smell, taste, and sound), is not understanding based on reason, but rather based on perception. He would have said that humans should strive for an understanding based on reason.

Similar to Locke’s emphasis on simple sensations as the “only things we can perceive,” Montessori emphasizes an education through the senses as important to developing knowledge. In Rationale for Sensorial Area, Margaret Jacoby explained Montessori’s sentiment:

“An overall goal of Montessori’s was to develop intelligence. To her senses play an enormous role in this development. ‘We maintain, in brief, that the intelligence is frequently rendered useless through the lack of practice, and that this practice almost always consists in a training of the senses… Montessori’s sensorial materials were to be an exact scientific guide for the child so that he could enlarge the ‘field of perception’ and achieve ‘an ever more solid foundation for intellectual growth.’”⁷

Jacoby continued:

“In Discovery of the Child Montessori wrote that ‘The education of early childhood should be based entirely upon this principle: Assist the natural development of the child.’ According to her (Montessori) the natural mental development of a child encompasses several ’sensitive periods.’ In developing her educational method Montessori took these sensitive periods into account.”⁸

It’s at this point, where we see Montessori and Locke radically diverge in how they apply their philosophical foundations. Whereas Montessori speaks to the natural development of the child and emphasizes an educational method that encourages freedom to find one’s vocation, Locke’s approach is disciplinary in nature, with the pinnacle focus on reward and punishment.

In Some Thoughts on Education, Locke wrote:

“A compliance, and suppleness of their wills, being by a steady hand introduced by parents, before children have memories to retain the beginnings of it, will seem natural to them, and work afterwards in them, as if it were so; preventing all occasions of struggling, or repining. The only care is, that it begun early, and inflexibly kept to, till awe and respect be grown familiar, and there appears not the least reluctancy in the submission and ready obedience of their minds. When this reverence is once thus established, (which it must be early, or else it will cost pains and blows to recover it, and the more, the longer it is deferred) it is by it, mixed still with as much indulgence as they made not an ill use of, and not by beating, chiding, or other servile punishments, they are for the future to be governed, as they grow up to more understanding.”⁹

Locke goes on to say that in education, beatings and rewards in the form of money, little gifts, or sweet treats are to be avoided, but “esteem and disgrace are… the most powerful incentives to the mind.” He wrote:

“Beating then, and all other sorts of slavish and corporal punishments, are not the discipline fit to be used in the education of those who would have wise, good, and ingenuous men; and therefore very rarely to be applied, and that only on great occasions, and cases of extremity. On the other side, to flatter children by rewards of things that are pleasant to them, is as carefully to be avoided… But if you take away the rod on one hand, and these little encouragements, which they are taken with, on the other; how then (will you say) shall children be governed? Remove hope and fear, and there is an end of all discipline. I grant, that good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature; these are the spur and reins, whereby all mankind are set to work and guided, and therefore they are to be made use of to children too. For I advise their parents and governors to carry this in their minds, that children are to be treated as rational creatures.

He continued:

The rewards and punishments then whereby we should keep children in order are quite of another kind; and of that force, that when we can get them once to work, the business, I think, is done, and the difficulty is over. Esteem and disgrace are, of all others, the most powerful incentives to the mind, when once it is brought to relish them. If you can once get into children a love of credit, and an apprehension of shame and disgrace, you have put into them the true principle, which will constantly work, and incline them to the right.¹⁰

Compare those sentiments of Locke’s, with a few key sentences from Maria Montessori’s book, The Montessori Method:

The school must permit the free, natural manifestations of the child… prizes and punishments are, if I may be allowed the expression, the bench of the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit… The prize and the punishment are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them… All human victories, all human progress, stand upon the inner force… Everyone has a special tendency, a special vocation, modest, perhaps, but certainly useful. The system of prizes may turn an individual aside from this vocation, may make him choose a false road, for him a vain one, and forced to follow it, the natural activity of a human being may be warped, lessened, even annihilated.”¹¹

As a Montessori child myself, and having a son that is transitioning from a Montessori school to a traditional school setting, I shudder at the thought of applying Locke’s philosophies to create an educational system. But I believe that may be what happened.

Although I would be interested in further research to more clearly test the link between John Locke and the roots of our traditional American educational system, one can certainly see how grades and testing facilitate esteem and disgrace. Why, a child need only look at his marks to see how he matches up with the expectations put on him by the school and his teacher. If he does not attain a certain grade, he is a disgrace to his family, to his teachers, and to his school. If he comes from a family where they don’t pay attention to his grades, then he simply falls from the system and fails to produce results. With a system based on the belief that esteem and disgrace is the only tool to produce results, then you simply rule out all children who for whatever reason do not respond to esteem and disgrace as a motivator for education.

I would love to gain a better understanding of the American educational system. How influential was John Locke on the founders of American educational institutions? Who thought up the materials that are used in a traditional classroom, namely the desk and textbook?

I believe that Locke’s philosophy on human understanding provides a foundation for Montessori’s focus on sensory-based education, but Locke’s emphasis on disciplinary reward and punishment is in direct opposition to base Montessori philosophies. Montessori insists that children have innate interests, and through reward and punishment we stifle their inclination to follow their interests. Montessori encourages an education where a child’s interests are nurtured and true understanding is scientifically guided to allow that child the chance to blossom in a vocation that is truly of his or her own calling.

As I was preparing to write this response paper on The Montessori Method, I came across this passage in a book called An Adult Child’s Guide to What’s “Normal”:

“…some of us who grew up in dysfunctional families, perhaps many of us, never learned any social intelligence.  We may have tested IQs of 150 but not know how to carry on a conversation for more than five minutes without boring the other person to death.  We may not know what to share, with whom, where or how much…  Why didn’t we learn how to talk to others…?  We didn’t learn because we didn’t have good role models or because Dad and Mom rarely had other adults around the house so we could see them all interacting or because every time we opened our mouths someone criticized or shamed us or because Dad and Mom babied us and did all of our talking for us…”

In this passage, I came across an important theme in Montessori’s educational method; Montessori believed that we need to speak with children in the same manner as we would speak with adults, but with even more care and attention given to those conversations with children.  Similar to the a-ha found in the passage above, Montessori writes:

“The prejudice that the educator must place himself on a level with the one to be educated, sinks the teacher or deficients into a species of apathy…  those who teach little children too often have the idea that they are educating babies and seek to place them on the child’s level by approaching him with games, and often with foolish stories.  Instead of all this, we must know how to call to the man which lies dormant within the soul of the child.  I… believed that not the didactic material, but my voice which called to them, awakened the children, and encouraged them to use the didactic material, and through it, to educate themselves.”

This theme of calling to and awakening that which lies dormant within the soul of the child, is found earlier in The Montessori Method, when she talks about prizes and rewards, and the importance of removing external stimuli.  She writes, “He to whom such stimuli are necessary, had far better never become a physician.  Everyone has a special tendency, a special vocation, modest, perhaps, but certainly useful.”

This passage reminds me of a series of meditations called Birth of a Poet, spoken allowed in Santa Cruz, California by Dominican monk and beat poet, William Everson.  During those meditations, Everson calls to his listeners to “shamanize”!  Everson claimed that every person has a unique, internal calling and we must shamanize or seek it out within ourselves to discover our true vocation.

To me all of this talk about an internal calling and speaking to the man “dormant within the soul of the child” points to Montessori’s belief that freedom and affirmation are of utmost importance in her educational method.  Freedom within a scientifically-designed educational environment will provide the proper structure to guide a child’s development towards a healthy role in society.