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.
