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Maria Montessori was an Italian physician, anthropologist and pedagogue, and at the same time the first woman in Italy to receive a university degree in medicine in 1896. She worked in the field of child neurology and psychiatry, she also studied in Paris.
In the following years, she deepened her education in the fields of psychology and biology, anthropology and pedagogy. The education of preschool and school-age children became her central life theme. For many years, she worked as a chief school inspector in Italy, and with her approach, she influenced educational methods in other countries of Europe, America and India, where she often gave lectures. Especially in these areas, Montessori schools or their educational elements are an integral part of the school system today. In 1949, 1950, 1951, Maria Montessori was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1950, she was named the most remarkable woman of the first half of the 20th century in a NewYork Times poll.
Maria Montessori started out as an assistant at the Neurological-Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rome, specializing in child psychology. She was particularly interested in mentally retarded children, their upbringing and development. Her work was greatly influenced by her internship at the neuropsychiatric clinic in Paris at the Séguin Institute for the Education of Neurologically Disabled Children. Here she also got acquainted with the method of the French doctor Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, who developed sensory training materials for the education of mentally retarded children. These became the inspiration for the creation of her own materials.
In 1898, at the Pedagogical Congress in Turin, Maria Montessori defended the position that the education of retarded children is just as useful as the education of children without mental disabilities. She was the first who managed to convince the lay and professional public about the effectiveness of educating backward children, because she was able to make many of them read and write even as intact children. Through observation, she realized that her method generally applies to all children. She returned to the University of Rome, where she studied pedagogy, philosophy and experimental psychology, while also doing research in anthropology. From 1904 she lectured anthropology at the University of Rome for four years – her lectures were published in 1913 under the title Pedagogical Anthropology.
Despite many successes, there were also many falls and losses in her life. Because of the Nazi regime, she was forced to leave her native Italy. Her kindergartens and schools were disrupted and closed, books, aids and materials were burned. The democratic system of education and its results – a self-confident, understanding and independent person did not suit any of the totalitarian regimes in the world. She died in the Netherlands on 6 May 1952.
This method of education has a high degree of integration of the curriculum, which in practice means that learning takes place in contexts that are interesting for the child, easy to understand and, above all, memorable. Knowledge about previous generations is presented as a result of searching and learning, and thus children understand their meaning, and their own activity in a historical context gives them meaning. All subjects are illustrated with a sufficiently large and comprehensible image (picture or model) or an activity with specific aids so that the child has the clearest possible idea of its meaning. Emphasis is placed on the essential ideas presented in their development, and unimportant details serve only to illustrate the main ideas, where memorization is not required, but comprehension and understanding. Learning content presented in contexts that are interesting and have their own logic are easy to remember. Such learning mediated by teaching aids and interpretation of the guide (teacher) is only the key to initiating the independent creative activity of the child. By working with specific aids, the child becomes active and understands the subject matter, awakens interest in learning and activity.
Montessori education is focused on process and quality. The child learns to learn.
Principles of Montessori pedagogy
A Montessori facility is characterized by an age-mixed group of children. This means that in one common space, there are children in the age range of three years. The age difference allows children to develop mutual relationships through free cooperation, which is not characterized by rivalry and competition.
The cause of psychological development lies in the child’s inner psychic powers. By awakening the child’s interest, external stimuli start his learning. If children’s internal motivation to work is replaced by external motivation (for example, rewards, punishments, competition, grades…), the natural desire to learn is disturbed. Therefore, in the Montessori school, the child is not evaluated either verbally or with grades.
Freedom in Montessori pedagogy is freedom with restrictions in the form of rules that are good for the child and that the child will voluntarily accept in the educational process because it understands them as beneficial.
Free choice of activity is a strong motivational factor.
The child is not exposed to the teacher’s critical assessment. All this leads to the fact that the results of the work satisfy the child, bring him joy and increase his self-confidence.
A prepared environment is an environment that is favourable for the child’s developmental needs. It is an environment that stimulates its natural interest and allows him plenty of movement, interesting and independent activity connected with discovery and the necessary feedback about success. The prepared environment includes rooms furnished in a certain way, special teaching aids, a mixed-age team of children and teachers with Montessori education.
Maria Montessori emphasized that the child learns with the help of hands. By moving and manipulating objects, the child develops its personality. Meaningful activity related to movement is a source of its great satisfaction, it charges the child with energy, accelerates its inner growth, helps to establish a psychological balance. A growing child should be allowed to use its motor organs for learning, not just for games. Working with the hands allows the child to focus on the activity.
Dr. Montessori discovered that the helplessness and impotence of a small child hides an amazing strength and a great deal of work that the child has to do on his own to adapt to the world it was born into. In no other period of one’s life does a person make such revolutionary changes to himself as a child who is building its personality. The quality of this work will affect its adult life. That’s why Maria Montessori perceives the child as a creator of itself and expresses respect and reverence to it. Maria Montessori was the first to draw attention to the immense difficulty of a child’s work in developing its psychological life during the first years of life. In a relatively short time, the child learns to walk and talk on its own, its memory, will, thinking and emotions develop. From this, she concluded that children must be endowed with exceptional psychological abilities of a subconscious nature that help them adapt to the environment.
These hidden psychic forces, which she called the absorbing mind, stimulate the child to spontaneous activity through which the brain develops.
Maria Montessori discovered that there are certain developmental periods in the child’s development when the child has extraordinary abilities to acquire some skill, gain some experience or knowledge.
If for some reason some skills cannot be developed at the time of increased sensitivity, they will never be developed later (speech) or the child must make a lot of endeavour and effort to achieve them.
Montessori observed that during the period of a certain inner sensitivity, children’s attention is strongly attracted to a particular activity, later this phenomenon was labelled as polarized attention. As long as the child is not disturbed, there is a deep concentration from which even concentrated effort cannot disturb him. A state of deep concentration is a manifestation of an awakening inner life.
Adults do not have a direct influence on the emergence of the focus of attention. They can only create the conditions for the child to choose an adequate activity at the time of the opening of a certain receptivity and to be able to devote itself to it undisturbed.
Maria Montessori called the process of returning from an unbalanced state of psychic development to a state of psychic equilibrium through deep concentration on an activity that satisfies inner needs the process of normalization.
Dr. Montessori considered children who are balanced, learn spontaneously, are self-sufficient, move independently from one developmental stage to another, voluntarily respect the rules, considerate of others, as normalized children. They are children who have developed self-discipline through free work.
Adults tend to help children more than is necessary or do activities for them. But the children do not need and do not want anyone to help them, they develope completely on their own. Their interest is not initially focused on the activity itself. Much more often, they are motivated by the desire to overcome the problem by themselves. If an adult starts helping them, the children may lose interest in the activity.
© 2023 Krištáľové deti
© 2023 Krištáľové deti
