Criminal behavior is caused by society, thus it is the responsibility of society, and therefore public education, to thwart the conditions that lead to those ills. This is the underlying concept that Maria Montessori took from the scientists of her time. This concept, combined with an inherited sense of responsibility and duty, serves as a foundation of Montessori’s educational theory.
In our first conversations in philosophy class, one of my classmates mentioned that Maria Montessori had a strong sense of purpose. In that first class, I recall Amy Cornfield, an elementary school teacher at a traditional public school and mother to several children at Bennett Park Montessori Center, saying, “ Maria had a strong sense of purpose. She believed we are here to serve each other.”
Amy’s statement was reasserted for me in Maria Montessori; A Biography, by Rita Kramer. Kramer writes, “One of the stories about Montessori’s childhood recounted by Anna Maccheroni, who was herself a very old woman when she told it, is of the ten-year-old Maria, seriously ill, telling her anxious mother, ‘Do not worry, Mother, I cannot die; I have too much to do.”1
Montessori’s strong roots and belief in duty and a personal responsibility to society, combined with certain developments in the social sciences during her lifetime, provided a foundation for what we now know as the Montessori Method.
During Montessori’s time, social scientists began to study “the degenerate man” to understand how criminal or insane behaviors developed. They determined that it was social and environmental ills that led to such behavior, and their conclusions provided a launch for Montessori’s educational method.
In Pedagogical Anthropology2, Montessori writes:
“Granting the social phenomenon of crime, we ought to ask ourselves: where does the fault lie? If we are to acquit the individual criminal of responsibility, it falls back necessarily upon the social community through which the causes of degeneration and disease have filtered. Accordingly, it is we, every one of us, who are at fault: or rather, we are beginning to awaken to a consciousness that it is a sin to foster or to tolerate such social conditions as make possible the suffering, the vices, the errors that lead to physiological pauperism, to pathology, to the degeneration of posterity.”
Montessori explains that it is only in the late 1800’s that the social scientific study of anthropology began to emerge as a reputable study; before then it was seen as an aristocratic study, reserved to the elite and wealthy classes.
In 1885, Cesare Lombroso applied a naturalistic method, similar to methods used in zoology, to the study of man and his social development. Lombroso’s anthropological method stressed the importance of studying the individual in terms of his personality and aspects of his physical and mental health, the responsiveness to his environment, and his habits. Then, Lombroso categorized types of individuals based on their dominant characteristics and investigated “degenerate” or “abnormal” types.
Applying this methodology to the study of men, Lombroso classified a variety of types and studies of the “delinquent man”. Montessori explains, “by deducing certain characteristics from these complex charts, he distinguished, in his classic work, Delinquent Man, a variety of types, such as the morally insane, the epileptic delinquent, the delinquent from impulse or passion (irresistible impulsion), the insane delinquent, and the occasional delinquent.”
Prior to the development of Lombroso’s anthropological method, another leading scientist in France, Morel, had already published his study on the roots of criminal behavior. Both of these social scientists “based their doctrine upon a naturalistic concept of man, and then proceeded to consider him, through all his anomalies and perversions, in relation to that extraneous factor, the environment.”3
Resulting from her sense of duty, Montessori took this scientific concept to develop an educational method with the intention of addressing the environmental issues that lead to the development of the “delinquent” or “degenerate” individual. She writes:
“What does interest us directly as educators is the necessity of laying our course in accordance with the standard of social morality which such a doctrine reveals and imposes upon us: since it is our duty to prepare the conscience of the rising generation. And, furthermore, to consider whether the organisation our schools and of their methods is in conformity with social progress.”4
So, at this point, Montessori had an inherent and personal sense of duty, she had a doctrine or ideology for how society produces criminal behavior and degeneration, now all she needed was a solution. To this end, Montessori turns to Achille De Giovanni and his doctrine of temperaments. Whereas Lombroso focused only on the delinquent man and his degeneration, De Giovanni started by looking at the whole, or healthy, individual and studying the development of certain physiological ailments. De Giovanni studied the development of specific ailments as it correlated to the development of other parts of the system. Montessori quotes De Giovanni a specific part of his theory. She quotes, “The individual is in a ceaseless state of transformation, and consequently at different periods of his life he may show a susceptibility to different diseases.” In her own words, she continues, “with this as a basis, a scientific system of observation could speak prophetically regarding the physio-pathological destiny of a child.” Thus we saw how she determined the importance of observation as part of her educational method.
A connection is found in the next paragraph explaining how these concepts are relevant to educators. Montessori writes, “From our point of view as educators, the doctrine of temperaments, and of their respective predispositions to disease, offers a deep interest, the nature of which is made evident by the author of the theory himself: for he points out that the period of childhood is the one best fitted in which to combat the abnormal predispositions of the organism, wisely guiding its development, to the final end of achieving an ideal health, which develops upon the harmony of form and consequently of functions, in other words, upon the full attainment of physical beauty.”5
In her biography and through her actions, we can see Montessori’s commitment and dedication to society and education. In the doctrines of these social scientists, we were introduced to the threads that became the tapestry we know as Montessori education. In Pedagogical Anthropology, Montessori laid the foundation for the ideological concepts and methods that served as the building blocks for the Montessori method and Montessori herself provided the conviction to follow-through.
