Maria Montessori never defined a set of principles for the pedagogy she developed. He made lists of characteristics of the room, the materials, the teacher, the children who found their own balance… But he did not make a list of the principles of his pedagogical approach. The following list is for educational purposes. The idea is not to reduce the Montessori method to these principles, but to organize Montessori's ideas to clarify his discoveries and his educational perspective. This list was not created by me, but by Edimara de Lima. I use it with few modifications to this day, because it seems to me the most comprehensive and didactic organization of Montessori's ideas, but you will find other lists of principles on the internet and in books, and because Montessori did not establish such an organization for the ideas themselves, Different lists are not necessarily more or less certain, but different explanations for the same content.

self-education

Montessori, from observing the behavior of children in freedom, arrived at the radical idea that children are capable of learning on their own [15, 16]. All children learn some things on their own: walking, talking, eating, picking up, recognizing voice and appearance, receiving and petting… But in many cases, we don't realize this. At Montessori, we trust the child. We know that if she can count on the right context, she can develop almost anything independently and freely.

To learn on their own, a child needs the opportunity to (1) see other people, adults or children, doing things; (2) have the opportunity to try, try, test, unaided and uninterrupted; (3) having the chance to notice one's mistakes and correct them spontaneously; (4) overcoming small difficulties, one at a time, at a particular and different pace for each learning [17].

Because Self-Education happens this way, and because this is the best way to learn, the Montessori method includes specific materials, which are designed to (1) be manipulated by the child, (2) work one new challenge at a time, and (3) give the child the chance to realize their own mistakes [17]. With the freedom to choose what to work on at any given moment, and the freedom to repeat each exercise as many times as you want, the child is constantly self-educating.

Children with Montessori materials in schools in Tanzania and Kenya.
 

Cosmic Education

Children are born interested in everything around them, and there are many ways to keep that interest alive throughout childhood. One of the most beautiful is realizing that all things are connected and depend on each other to exist [27]. Having this view of the world allows the child to develop a sense of gratitude and union with everything in the world and to perceive the order that exists in nature and the universe.

To ensure that this happens, and that children's fascination with knowledge and the world is kept alive, the education of 6-12 year olds is based on questions, stories and research that follow the child's curiosity [7]. Even respecting the official curriculum, it is possible to allow the expansion of children's curiosity and interests, from a very early age, and feed the perception that everything can be discovered, understood, and that all things are interesting, if we look at them from the right angle.

Cosmic Education seeks to offer the child the Cosmic View of the world [14]. Cosmos, the opposite of chaos, is the order of the universe. A leading science popularizer said that “if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe”[28]. Giving apple pie a star flavor is the function of Cosmic Education.

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Education as Science

Most children's education is based on individual beliefs and experiences. I educate my children and my students as my parents and my teachers educated me. I do things the way I do because I think it works. I think the family and the school should be organized in one way and not another, because I believe in some things and not others.

In particular, the school structure that we have today derives from a set of beliefs and ways of acting from the middle of the 18th century, the time of the Industrial Revolution: rows of chairs, the same content, at the same time, for everyone, immobility and submission. of students, and rewards and punishments as a form of discipline.

When Montessori started working with the children of São Lourenço, he already knew that this approach was not the best. But instead of establishing a new pedagogy, according to her own beliefs, she chose to let a group of children go free, in a semi-structured environment, and observe their behavior, to then think about an education that did not start from the adult's beliefs, but of children's natural development [17].

That's how it is today: in Montessori homes and schools, before we decide to do anything important (from presenting new material, to stopping what appears to be a child's bad deed), we stop and observe, to try to understand what the real needs are. of the child and what is the best approach to take, with each child, at any given time [15].

This is what makes the Montessori method a pedagogical approach that gives children the chance to achieve excellent academic performance [18] and, at the same time, enjoy great pleasure while at school [19], including and especially during academic tasks. challenging.

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Prepared environment

For the Montessori method, freedom is very important. The child must have a freedom that is biological [20] because it lets life develop. Just as a tree is free when it is in fertile, moist and deep land, the child also needs a prepared, safe environment with nutrients (physical, emotional, mental and social) so that it can be free to live.

There are some conditions for the environment to give freedom to the child. The first is that everything important is accessible. First, the most basic: the child needs to have a way to drink water, eat, use the bathroom and sleep, without needing permission or help from an adult. Then the rest: the child has to live without the adult's help and authorization. So the world must be prepared for it. Or we put things down, as is done in Montessori school, where everything is at the height of the little ones, or we give the child a stool, so that he can access the things that cannot be adapted, such as the kitchen sink. home, for example.

The environment has other characteristics: it should not be hyper-stimulating. The whole world is stimulating for the child, so the environments that we can control should be calm, painted in light and neutral colors, and the child's furniture should be like that too. For the same reason, it is neither necessary nor positive for the child to have too many toys. She can have a few good ones and have access to everything else in the house, which greatly reduces the need for piles and piles of bad toys. Finally, everything in the environment must be suitable for the children's activity: not only the sheets of paper prepared by the teacher, but all the materials, all the furniture, all the decorative objects. Everything can be cared for, polished, polished, washed, cleaned, repaired, organized and protected by the child [17]. Thus, existing in the world, in freedom, children can finally live their full lives, and breathe freedom.

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prepared adult

All the other principles only work when the adult who interacts with the child makes an effort to transform himself inwardly. Montessori said that we needed to abandon the pride of being adults, and the anger against the child who does not behave in the ways that are most comfortable for us [23]. It is necessary for the adult to go through the constant humiliation of respecting the child in all his needs - and of course we gradually stop feeling humiliated, but we need to cross the swamp of respect for the child to discover the light on the other side. From the beginning, we need to have “a form of faith, that the child will reveal himself through work”[21].

If, on the one hand, adult preparation is profound, psychological, almost spiritual, on the other hand, it is also demanding in terms of technique. The prepared adult is an observer who trusts the child and looks for indications of his needs in his actions [15]. With the observation carried out, through the configuration of the environment and through the interactions, this same adult tries to offer the means for the child to satisfy what is important and overcome what is still a challenge or an obstacle.

This adult never helps more than the minimum necessary, refrains from collaborating whenever the child believes he can act alone and ensures, at all times, that his presence can be felt if necessary [22]. This adult's joy is twofold: to be less and less necessary, and to have the chance to watch life unfold.

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Balanced Child

When children are very young, their thinking and their actions go together. Mind and body, or, in Montessori's words [5], will and action. When a baby shakes a rattle, he doesn't do it thinking about the afternoon walk, he is whole with the rattle, mind and body, will and action. But when kids grow up and try to do things more complex than using a rattle, we get scared. We stop them from climbing stairs, we help when they go to open a drawer, we interrupt when they spend too much time washing their hands. This, little by little, produces a separation between the will, which is on the stairs, wanting to go up, and the action, which is in front of the television, watching a cartoon, because that was where we thought it was safe to put the child.

This separation of will and action produces instabilities of all kinds in the child's development. She can be disorderly, irritable, agitated, or on the contrary, lethargic, disinterested in everything, submissive. Both are deviations from the development that would occur if the child had the biological freedom to fully develop [23]. But there are ways to return to a more balanced course of development, and the child does this when he or she engages, with concentration and joy, in interesting and challenging activities that require movement of the body and intelligent improvement of the actions performed.

In Montessori, we call this type of activity “work” [23]. The first function of work is to help the child achieve concentration. When the mind and body (will and action) return to one center, all imbalances diminish, and many disappear, leading the child to a state of mind that involves concentration and joy, and leads to independence, initiative, self-discipline, generosity, pleasure from effort and self-confidence [23, 29]. There are at least two or three names for this process in Maria Montessori's work, such as normalization and conversion [2].  

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References

[1] Lillard, L. Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius. Oxford Univ. Press, 2018.

[2] Trabalzini, P. Maria Montessori: Through the Seasons of the Method, The NAMTA Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring 2011.

[3] Kramer, R. Maria Montessori: A Biography. DeCapo Press, 1988.

[4] Montessori, M. Formation of Man. Kirion, 2019

[5] Montessori, M. Absorbing Mind. Portugal/Nordic.

[6] Shields, J. “Help Me to Help Myself”: Independence and the Montessori Philosophy. Montessori Guide, AMI/USA, 2014. Available at:  https://montessoriguide.org/help-me-to-help-myself

[7] Lillard, P. Montessori Today: A Comprehensive Approach to Education from Birth to Adulthood. Schocken Books Inc, 1996

[8] Montessori, M. To Educate Human Potential. Papirus, 2014.

[9] Goertz, D. Children Who Are Not Yet Peaceful: Preventing Exclusion in the Early Elementary Classroom. Frog in Well, 2001.

[10] Kahn, David. Montessori Erdkinder: The Social Evolution of the Little Community. 25th International Montessori Congress Papers, 2005.

[11] Donahoe, Martha. Where is Everybody: Valorization in a World that Could Be. Montessori Life, volume 20, number 3, 2008.

[12] Brown, B. Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. Random House, 2017.

[13] Montessori, M. Erdkinder and the Functions of the University. Published as an appendix to the book MONTESSORI, M. From childhood to adolescence. Rio de Janeiro: ZTG, 2005.

[14] Grazzini, C. The Cosmic Vision: The Cosmic Plan, and Maria Montessori's Cosmic Education. The NAMTA Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1, Winter 2013. Available in Portuguese at:  http://omb.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/A-visa–o-co–smica-o-plano-co–smico-ea-educac–a–om-co–smica- second-Montessori.pdf

[15] Montessori, M. Spontaneous Activity in Education – Advanced Montessori Method, V.1. Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1917.

[16] Montessori, M. Creative Development in the Child. Kalakshetra, 1994.

[17] Montessori, M. The Discovery of the Child: Scientific Pedagogy. Kirion, 2017.

[18] Lillard, A. Evaluating Montessori Education. Science 29 Sep 2006, Vol. 313, Issue 5795, pp. 1893-1894 DOI: 10.1126/science.1132362

[19] Lillard, A. Montessori Preschool Elevates and Equalizes Child Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study. Front Psychol., 30 October 2017 |  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01783

[20] Montessori, M. The 1913 Rome Lectures. Montessori-Pierson Publishing Company, 2013.

[21] Montessori, M. Education for a New World. Comenius, 2014.

[22] Montessori, M. A Decalogue. AMI Journal 1992/1.

[23] Montessori, M. The Secret of Childhood. Kirion, 2019.

[24] MPPI. Montessori Essentials. Montessori Public Policy Initiative, 2015. Available here:  https://www.montessoripublicpolicy.org/resources

[25] Donahoe, M. Liberty and Hope for the Adolescent: Valorization of the Personality. Clark Montessori Newsletter, Spring 2009. Available at:  https://cmstep.com/articles/

[26] Donahoe, M. Widening the Circle. Montessori Life, volume 18, number 2, 2006.

[27] Haines, A. Strategies to Support Concentration. The NAMTA Journal, Vol. 42, No. 2, Spring 2017.

[28] Sagan, C. Cosmos – Episode 9 – The Lives of The Stars. Available in:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PHO2DZN30k

[29] Standing, EM. Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work. Signet, 1962.

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Source: Gabriel Salomão - Lar Montessori

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