Montessori\'s Philosophy Montessori\'s Spirituality Philosophy

Montessori's Philosophy

Montessori's Spirituality Philosophy

Humans are spiritual creatures by nature. Indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of humanity is the unswerving belief in things that are intangible, a belief that can only be rationalized and supported through faith. Despite enormous differences otherwise, throughout the ages, people have always been interested in the spiritual nature of the world around them in an effort to understand what was happening to them, and children are no exception of course. When it comes to the spiritual nature of children, though, there are some profound differences from their adult counterparts that may not be readily understood by those who have lost the wonder in their lives and who no longer believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. These are just two of the powerful spiritual characters in many children's lives today, together with various religious figures, cartoon characters and possibly a dead president or two. One early proponent of recognizing and using the spiritual aspect of children in educational settings was Dr. Maria Montessori. This paper provides a critical evaluation of Montessori's contribution to child's spirituality in general and how her recommendations from her book, the Secret of Childhood in particular, can be used to help educators today provide their students with superior learning opportunities and improved academic outcomes. A summary of the research and implications for educators today are provided in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

In spite of her predilection for using scientific methods and techniques in educational settings, Montessori was a firm believer in the spiritual nature of life as well and cited metaphysical reasons for her guidance. Her writings are sprinkled with references to the spiritual nature of some feature of the human condition supported by a scientific or biological example. For example, when she advocated a program for free lunches for schoolchildren, Montessori provided a rational reason in its support from a social problem-solving perspective, but she also employed a spiritual one as well: "The necessity of eating is itself a proof that the matter of which our body is composed does not endure but passes like the fleeing moment. And if the substance of our bodies passes in this manner, if life itself is only a continual passing away of matter, what greater symbol of its immateriality and its spirituality is there than the dinnertable?" (Montessori, 1913, p. 17). While adults cannot imitate children to good effect (Montessori, 1963, p. 223), they are in an excellent position to help them use their spiritual interpretations of the world around them to identify opportunities for learning because of the enormous influence they have in children's lives.

The term 'spirituality' can mean many things to many people, of course; however, in the instant case, when Montessori talked about nourishing the child's spirit, she was referring to the preservation of the inner core that holds the child's secret for a natural and spontaneous desire to learn as well as a meaningful life later when he/she grows into an adult. She aimed to achieve this through the use of intrinsic motivation in the learning process and insisted that children learn for the sake of learning rather than out of necessity or in order to attract adult approval, good grades, etc. In her book the Absorbent Mind, she states the following: "The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities." These "hidden possibilities," Montessori believed, could be discerned and nurtured if an adult tuned in to these potentials by understanding the spiritual nature of childhood.

This can be daunting endeavor for many adults, though, and helping children along the path to inner enlightenment requires more than a lecture or a film on personal hygiene. In fact, while Montessori recognized the importance of environmental factors on a child's development, it was the tabula rasa nature of the young person that made such guidance so important during this formative period in their lives, but adults must be sensitive to recognizing these tendencies. According to Montessori, "The spirit may be so profoundly latent that it will not be apparent... like the instinct of the animal. The absence of fixed and determined guiding instincts... is the sign of a fund of freedom of action demanding a special elaboration to be created and developed by each individual" (1963, p. 17).

From a child's perspective, spirituality can be related to any or all of these things, all of which may be rolled up in one giant ball of magic that requires no further confirmation beyond their own solid beliefs in their existence. In this regard, it is important to distinguish spirituality from religiosity. Although some people may consider them the same (and for these people, this definition is appropriate because these are inextricably interrelated), for others, spirituality may or may not involve elements of religion but rather involves establishing connections with the larger world around them in ways that make things understandable, and this is the essence of spirituality in children. For example, according to Montessori, "The child is full of fancies, and the adult seems to be an omnipotent being, who can fulfill the desires of his dreams in all their dazzling splendour. Such a feeling finds fall realisation in fairy stories, which, while they have often a profound spiritual significance, may often appear as romances of the child soul" (1963, p. 185). Teachers, then, may not measure up to Santa or even Barney in the great cosmic order of childhood spirituality, but they do represent an enormously powerful influence in young people's lives, and what they say and do may have a profound impact on what directions these lives ultimately take.

Even though many adults may not remember how these processes played out in real life, it is reasonable to maintain that many children understand the world in profoundly wrong ways, but these ways make sense to them because this is how the human mind works. As erroneous information is replaced with more accurate data throughout one's life, these understandings of how the world works and an individual's place in it become more refined, but the processes are essentially the same from birth to death. People use what they know to make sense of the world and this means that children may use some extraordinary approaches to interpreting their world but there will be a common spiritual theme that is used throughout.

From Montessori's perspective, it is possible for teachers to use this insight to understand what mental processes children are experiencing in their interpretations of the world around them and their attempts to work out their relationships with peers and adults. For example, in her book, the Secret of Childhood, Montessori advises, "[the child] must be observed rather than analysed, but observed from the psychic standpoint in an endeavour to ascertain the conflict through which he passes in his relations with grown-up persons and with his social environment" (emphasis added) (p. 7). When considering such observations today, it is important to keep in mind that Montessori was formulating her concepts "on the fly" as it were, notwithstanding her careful consideration of previous studies along these lines. In fact, her reforms were nothing short of revolutionary in real social terms in the manner in which they were expected to transform society into a more pluralistic environment that treated children on equal terms with adults, at least insofar as their individual developmental needs were concerned.

Young people's worldviews might be as vast and certainly as colorful as their adult counterparts, but these worldviews are of course far more limited in the information they need to accurately interpret it and there will naturally be erroneous interpretations of what is known. For example, from a very young child's perspective, Santa, Moses, Barney and Jesus may be on equal footing in the great cosmic order, or they may be one and the same person. At this point in a young person's life, understanding the difference between these entities may not be as important as recognizing that this is what they believe and helping them along the developmental path to more insightful understandings of the world around them. In this regard, what is important to recognize is the fundamentally universal nature of such spirituality in humans, and how it emerges and develops during childhood so that it can be nurtured and guided in appropriate ways.

Because children love to learn, the spiritual component can be - and should be - incorporated into the pedagogy. Montessori, I believe, tried to maintain this natural love for learning and the absorption of new information, firstly, through her insistence on intrinsic motivation and, secondly, through giving children freedom in selecting their activity. Children, simply by seeing the results of their own educational efforts, will spontaneously strive to achieve higher levels of knowledge and skill. For instance, Montessori emphasizes that, "The child is driven forward by delicate sensibilities aglow with intellectual love, which urge him indefatigably towards the outer world and make him garner impressions of things as a spiritual milk on which he must feed to nourish his inner life. That is why the child's psychic manifestations are at once impulses of enthusiasm and efforts of meticulous, constant patience" (1963, p. 223).

Empirical observations suggest that children want and need guidelines and rules to help them understand what is expected of them in terms of behavior, but they desperately want to be able to learn on their own and achieve a sense of accomplishment through their own endeavors - this is how people grow and learn. In fact, this is one of the most important aspects of the Montessori approach to helping children develop: "In the special environment prepared for him in our schools, the children themselves found a sentence that expressed this inner need. 'Help me to do it by myself!' How eloquent is this paradoxical request! The adult must help the child, but help him in such a way that he may act for himself and perform his real work in the world" (Montessori, 1963, p. 224).

Such inner-driven desire to learn is assumed to be carried over to the adult life and will result in one's confidence in his/her abilities and a satisfaction with work and life in general. Spirituality so understood can then be defined as the development of the individual's self-concept. For example, in her book, the Secret of Childhood, Montessori writes: "The child strives to assimilate his environment and from such efforts springs the deep-seated unity of his personality. This prolonged and gradual labour is a continual process through which the spirit enters into possession of its instrument" (p. 33).

The traditional school method, of course, employs extrinsic type of motivation; one based on grades, credits, and rigid structure (with no room for spontaneous learning, rooted in memorization and recitation of facts). By nature, the traditional school ignores and, in fact hinders, the child's natural propensity for learning. Essentially, this discussion is about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation in the learning process. Finally, it is also similar to the lines of Maslow's self-actualizing individual or Piaget's concept of "inner equilibrium."

Like these human development theories, Montessori also concluded that while adults were in a good position to help children develop, they must "walk the walk" as well as "talking the talk" to achieve true development and self-actualization, to use Maslow's term. For example, Montessori emphasizes that the child "must carry out the work for his development alone and he must carry it out in its entirety. No one can take over his task and grow for him. To become a man of twenty he must take twenty years. It is indeed precisely the characteristic of growing childhood to follow just a programme and time-table unerringly, and unsparingly" (1963, p. 220).

To the extent that teachers "teach to the test," then, is the extent to which they will likely fail to take into account young people's natural tendency to want to learn and ignore the potentials that could be realized through a more sensitive approach to the delivery of educational services: "The child does not grow weary with work, but increases his strength. He grows through work and that is why work increases his energies. He never asks to be relieved of his labours, but on the contrary he asks to be allowed to perform them and to perform them alone. The task of growth is his life, he must truly either work or die" (Montesorri, 1963, p. 223). While a death by such an approach might take longer than the doctor suggests, a metaphorical educational death awaits those young learners that are confronted with classrooms that fail to provide them with such learning opportunities. As Montessori points out, her educational methods can help avoid this "death-by-lecture" eventuality. For example, in the Montessori Method, she emphasizes that, "Truly our social life is too often only the darkening and the death of the natural life that is in us. These methods tend to guard that spiritual fire within man, to keep his real nature unspoiled and to set it free from the oppressive and degrading yoke of society" (1964, p. 376).

As noted above, these are revolutionary - if not inflammatory - concepts, and it is little wonder that she has attracted both support and opposition to her ideas. If her methods were widely used, Montessori maintained, society's ills could be solved by children who would enter adulthood as spiritually enlightened and eager members of a new social order committed to freedom and equality. For example, she writes that her approach to the delivery of educational services "involves a conception of life more usual in religious fields than in those of academic pedagogy, in as much as it has recourse to the spiritual energies of mankind, but it is founded on work and on liberty which are the two paths to all civic progress" (Montessori, 1964, p. 369).

Unfortunately, most busy teachers in today's mainstream classrooms may not enjoy the luxury of such personalized attention to 25 to 50 young and eager learners from a wide range of sociocultural backgrounds, and the best that they believed can be hoped for in these situations is to help as many children as possible be promoted to the next grade level where their unique childhood developmental and difficult-to-discern-but-vitally-important spiritual problems will become someone else's concern. Nevertheless, the most effective leaders in any setting - educational, military, corporate or otherwise - recognize that careful attention to followers' needs and wants is an integral component of their jobs. It is reasonable to assume that most teachers would prefer to take the time required to achieve superior academic outcomes but resources are by definition scarce and providing individual attention to every student in a No Child Left Behind classroom can be tough.

To overcome these constraints, Montessori believed that a complete restructuring of the current emphasis on the adult world was going to be required, with more consideration given to what children needed and wanted to help them learn more effectively. Equating the young learner to a "spiritual embryo," Montessori emphasizes that in sharp contrast to mainstream classroom settings today, "Plainly, the environment must be a living one, directed by a higher intelligence, arranged by an adult who is prepared for his mission. It is in this that our conception differs both from that of the world in which the adult does everything for the child and from that of a passive environment in which the adult abandons the child to himself" (1963, p. 224).