The Absorbent Mind

by Maria Montessori

The nerves become myelinized and the cranium ossified. It seems as though the human embryo were born incomplete because its final form and its functions must wait until the psyche has built itself.

It is then that the accumulation of impressions is made upon which intelligence builds itself afterwards.

The first year of life then appears to us as a period of the greatest activity leading to the absorption of everything that there is in the environment. In the second year the physical being nears completion, its movement begins to become determined. This shows how clearly nature has planned that the movements of man be determined by psychic life.

‘difficult adventure of birth,’ and conclude that the child at birth must undergo a great shock of fright. Today one of the scientific terms of psychology is ‘birth terror’ Certainly, it is not a conscious terror, but if his conscious psychic faculties were developed, he would express himself by bitter words: “Why have you thrown me into this terrible world? What can I do? How shall I be able to adapt myself to a life which is so different from my own?

The child must be helped in his first adaptation to our environment as his psyche must, through birth, receive a terrific shock. There is no doubt that the child can feel fright.

This attachment is not affection. It is something which has fear in it. The child is timid and always wants to remain near someone, the mother preferably. He is not happy to go out, but would always like to remain at home isolated from the world. Everything in the world that should make him happy frightens him, he feels repugnance from new experiences. The environment instead of proving attractive, as it should to a being in course of development, is repellent. And if a child, from the very first infancy feels repulsion towards this environment, which ought to be its means of development, certainly this child will not develop normally. He will not be the child who conquers, who is destined to take the whole of his environment and incarnate it in himself. He will do so, but with difficulty and incompletely. He is the very picture of the saying ‘To live is to suffer,’ To do something is, to him, to go against his own nature. Even respiration seems to be hard. People of this sort require much more sleep and rest; even digestion seems to be difficult. So you see what sort of life this type of child prepares for himself in the future, for these characters are things not only of the present, but also of the future.

Even when an adult, he will feel repulsion for the world, will fear to meet people and be always timid. It is evident that such beings are inferior to others in the struggle for existence in social life. It will not be the lot of these people to have joy, courage and happiness.

Therein lies the great danger to humanity. The child, not properly cared for, will take revenge on society through the individual that it forms. The treatment does not foment rebels as it would amongst adults, it forms individuals who are weaker, inferior to what they ought to be; it forms characters that will be an obstacle to the life of the individual, and individuals who will be an obstacle to the progress of civilization.

This is normal development: an ever growing and more powerful activity shown along the path that leads to independence.

The conquest of independence begins from the first commencement of life. As the being develops, it perfects itself and overcomes every obstacle that it finds on its way. A vital force is active in the individual and leads it towards its own evolution. This force has been called Home.

Horme is something which belongs to life in general, to what we might call a divine force which is the promoter of all evolution. This vital force of evolution is expressed in the child by a will to perform certain actions. This will cannot be broken by anything short of death. I call it ‘will’ because we possess no better word to describe it. It is not will, however, because will implies consciousness and reasoning. It is a subconscious vital force which urges the child to do certain things and in the normally growing child its unhindered activity is manifested in what we call ‘joy of life,’ The child is enthusiastic, always happy.

The new-born child is endowed with an urge, an impulse to face the environment and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with the ‘psychology of conquest of the world’ He absorbs it in himself and in absorbing it, he forms his psychic body.

At the age of 6 months the child undergoes certain physical transformations. Some of these are invisible and have been discovered only through experiments, e.g., the stomach begins to secrete chloric acid which is necessary for digestion. It is also at six months that the first tooth makes its appearance. This is a further perfection of the body which at birth is not finished and develops along a certain

the child is capable of living without the milk of his mother, or at least of supplementing milk with other substances. This is a further conquest of independence. If we consider that the child up to that age had been absolutely dependent upon his mother’s milk because if he were to take anything else he would not be able to digest it,

When the child acquires language, he can express himself and does not have to depend upon other people to guess his needs. Instead of somebody having to guess what he, the child, wants, he can express himself. He can tell everybody: “Do this. Do that” Thus he comes into communication with humanity, because without language how can one communicate? This conquest of language and this possibility of intelligent communication with others is a tremendous step towards independence.

Thus man develops gradually and by means of these successive steps of independence, he becomes free. It is not a question of will, it is, a phenomenon of independence. Really, it is nature that is giving to the child the opportunity of growing, gives him independence and at the same time leads him to freedom.

The ‘conquest of walking’ is very important, especially if one considers that, in spite of being very complex, it is achieved in the first year of life and is made together with all the other conquests of language, of orientation,

the development of the skeleton. The legs of the child are not completely ossified, as we have seen. They are cartilaginous and that is why they are so soft. If this is the case, how can they support the weight of the body? Therefore the skeleton has to be complete before the child can start to walk.

If by means of education we wished to teach the child how to walk before this time, we could not do it, because the fact of being able to walk is dependent on a series of physical developments, which take place simultaneously. If one tried one could not achieve anything without seriously damaging the child. Here it is nature which directs.

The child can only develop by means of experiences upon the environment, we call them ‘work.’

Nature first makes the instruments, and then develops them by means of functions, through experiences upon the environment.

The first problem of education is to furnish the child with an environment which will permit him to develop the functions that nature has given to him. This is not an indifferent question. It is not a question of merely pleasing the child, of allowing him to do as he likes. It is a question of co-operation with a command of nature, with one of her laws which decrees that development should take place by means of experiences upon the environment. With his first step the child enters a higher level of experiences.

such a vital impulse that our efforts are usually spent in restraining him from doing things. It is not the child that we fight when we do this, it is nature. It is not the child’s will that we fight, he merely collaborates with nature and obeys her laws and step by step,

fact. It is only through freedom and by experiences upon the environment that man can develop.

And by means of continuous work, one acquires not only freedom but strength and self-perfection.

If, as many of us think, the best idea of well-being is to sit down, do nothing and let other people work for us r then the ideal state would be that of the child before birth. The child might as well go back to the body of the mother, because the mother would do everything for the child.

The child seeks independence through work: independence of body and of mind. The child seems to say: “I do not mind how much you know, I want to know things for myself. I want to have experience in the world and to perceive it with my own effort; you keep your own knowledge and let me acquire mine.”

We must understand clearly that when we give freedom and independence to the child, we give freedom to a worker who is impelled to act and who cannot live except by his work and his activity.

The environment must be rendered pleasing, beautiful, because it is necessary,

The environment must be made as attractive as possible so as to overcome diffidence and disgust. We must give pleasant activity to the child, because we know that it is through activity that development takes place. The environment must contain plenty of motives for interesting activity which are an invitation for the child to carry out his experiences upon the environment.

The absorbent mind of the child orients itself in the environment; so it is necessary to prepare the environment with much care.

The child

should remain as much as possible in contact with his mother and the environment must not present obstacles, such as great differences of temperature from that to which the child has been accustomed before birth. Not too much light, not too much noise, for the child has come from a place of perfect silence and darkness.

The adaptation to the environment then takes place successfully and naturally for the child, since mother and child have a special connection with each other. It is considered as a kind of magnetism.

but only a few years ago the first thing that was done at birth, even in the best Nursing Homes, was to separate the mother from the child. The child was taken away and bathed and then brought back to his mother.

we find that while among the adults it is the poor who suffer, amongst the children it is often the rich who suffer most. It is among the rich that the mother gives the child to a nurse for care, while the poor mother follows the proper method of keeping her child with her. The children of working mothers also usually receive more substantial food from their mothers, because the mothers are healthy and produce more milk which is of a more substantial quality than that of rich mothers, who do not need to work and are often inert and so their milk is scarce and poor in quality. This is one of the main reasons why a child is given to a nurse. The mother does not feed the child owing to unsuitable milk, and in olden times the baby was given to a ‘wet nurse,’ who was a healthy peasant woman with plenty of good milk.

Then he begins traveling on the path of independence that we have described, on which the child, we might say, opens its arms to the environment, receives the environment and absorbs it to the extent of making

his own, the customs of the environment in which he lives. The first activity in this development, which we might call a conquest, is the activity of the senses.

His activity is purely that of the psyche taking in the impressions of the senses. The child’s eyes are very active, but we must have very clear in our minds that (as science has described in modern times) the child is not merely struck by the light on its eyes.

The individual, therefore, is not the victim of his senses, neither is it dragged by them; the senses are there and work in the service of their owner, following a guide.

a kind of psycho-chemical reaction takes place so that these impressions form an integral part of his psyche.

These insects can be quoted as analogies to what takes place in the psyche of the child. They live on sticks and leaves and resemble them so closely that they have become as one with their environment. Something like that happens in the child. He takes the environment in and transforms himself accordingly like leaf-insects or stick-insects. This is very interesting indeed! The impressions that the environment gives to them are so great that some biological or psycho -chemical transformation makes them resemble their environment. They become like the thing they love. This power of taking in the environment and transforming accordingly,

The child is in need of an environment in order to develop himself. Having accepted that, the next point is, what are we to do? What sort of environment must be prepared for the child so that it may be of assistance to

him?

If we were dealing with a child of three years, he might be able to tell us. We should have to put flowers and beauty in the environment; we should have to provide those motives of ...

what sort of environment can we prepare for him? There can be but one answer to this: the environment for the baby-child must be the world, the world that is around him, all of it!

Instead of staying with his mother, who loves him and with whom there is a special current of communication, the child has a nurse who does not speak much to the child because of the hygienic habit of covering her mouth. How then can he learn the language? He must be protected from the sun or cold so a hood is put up over his perambulator and he sees only the face of the nurse or the hood and is shut away from all other parts of the environment.

one should bring him along in the midst of one’s work and allow him to see as much as possible. Then the perambulator is built very high, because the higher the child the better he can see. The nursery also has undergone a transformation. It conforms as rigorously to the requirements of hygiene as a hospital room, but the walls are full of pictures and the child lies on a stand which is slightly sloping and fitted high up, so that he can command a view of the whole of the environment and not of the ceiling only. This is the first throne for the child. The idea has been understood that the child must be placed in a position to see everything.

If we want to aid the child we must put him in our midst so that he can see how we do things and can hear the conversation. He does not register it consciously, but if he sees the people round him talking, eating, etc., he receives a sub-conscious impression that he takes in and this will help his growth.

The adult world must realize that the child constructs a