The Absorbent Mind

by Maria Montessori

After this begins the exercise of the hand, it begins to change the places of objects’ There is a vision of the environment, there is a desire and the hand begins to do something in the environment.

Before one year of age the child carries out many actions with his hand that are ever so many types of work. He opens and closes doors, drawers, puts stoppers in bottles, puts objects on one side and then puts them back, etc. i...

After a little while he can walk alone. The tendency now is to say: “Goodbye; I have my two legs, and off I go!” Another stage of independence is attained, for the acquisition of independence is the beginning of doing things by oneself.

To be able to do without other people’s help is independence, it is not comfort. If independence is there the child progresses very rapidly;

We are taught not to help him, whereas we always fall on him to help him.

When a child of even three

years is carried, as I have often seen, his development is not helped, but hindered.

Immediately the child has acquired independence the adult who should continue to help him becom...

It has been noticed that there is a very important and visible factor at one and a half years of age in both the development of the hands and of the feet, this fact is strength.

His first urge in doing anything is to use the maximum effort; not merely to exercise, but to make the maximum effort (so different from the adult).

Having learnt to walk, why not be satisfied to walk? No! He must climb and to do so must grasp something with his hand and pull himself up.

This is no longer a grasping to possess, but grasping with a desire to go up. It is an exercise of strength, and there is a whole period of this exercise of strength.

So there is an imitative period in which the child imitates the actions of his surroundings not because someone tells him to imitate them, but because of an inner urge. This imitation is only seen if the child is free to act. We then see the logic of nature: 1 . To make man stand erect. 2. To make him go around and acquire strength. 3. To make him take in the actions of the people around him.

He can’t walk, we carry him; he can’t work; we do it for him: on the threshold of life we give him an inferiority complex.

In the last chapter we left the child at the age of one and a half years;

the child at that epoch is on the eve of the disclosure of his fullness of manhood for at two years he reaches a point of completion with the explosion of language. On the eve of that event, at 1 2/2 years, he is already making efforts to express what is within him. It is an epoch of effort and an epoch of construction.

1 ½ to 2 years of age. This is an epoch of development in which special care must be taken not to destroy the tendencies of life.

The old idea was that we only had to act and the children would follow, there was hardly any further responsibility for the adult.

The adult therefore stressed that he had set a good example for his children to imitate and the real responsibility was thrown on the heads of the children surrounding him, it was their fault if they

did not profit by the good example the adults so generously gave to them. The result was unhappiness everywhere, for although children ought to become models of perfection, they were far from it. We wanted a perfect humanity and thought humanity was to be perfect by imitating us, but we were imperfect; what a confusion!

Nature has not reasoned like we, she has reasoned another way; she does not bother ab...

Some people think: “If I want my child to be a pianist, let me (or a teacher) be a pianist and the child will imitate,” But it is not as simple as that and many of us know that a child has to prepare his hands in order to gain the necessary agility enabling him to do anything on the pianoforte.

An example may furnish inspiration and interest, the instinct of imitation spur the effort, but even then one must have a preparation to carry this out and, in education, nature has shown that without preparation no imitation is possible.

Nature does not merely give the power of imitation, but that of transforming oneself to become what the example demonstrates.

Children of this age show many interesting forms of carrying out this cycle of activity; one sees children below two years of age carrying big heavy weights far beyond their strength, and for no apparent reason.

The adult’s usual reaction is to have sympathy for the child’s effort, they go to help him and take the weight from him, but psychologists have recognized that such ‘help,’ which is an interruption of the child’s own chosen cycle of activity, is one of the greatest repressions of this age.

Having accomplished the climbing he is not satisfied, he must come back to the starting point to complete the cycle and this too they repeat many times.

The wooden or concrete slides we see in children’s playgrounds offer opportunities for these activities; it is not the coming down that is important, it is the joy of going up, the joy of effort.

It is so difficult to find people who do not interrupt that all the psychologists ask for places where children can work uninterruptedly, and hence the schools for very little children are very important and the most i...

All sorts of things are created in those schools: small houses in trees with ladders to climb up and go down. The house is not to live in or rest in, but a point to reach so that you can go up there and come down again: effo...

Let us consider the child of two years and this need for walking which most psychologists do not consider. It is natural that the child should show the tendency to walk, he is preparing man and all essential human faculties are being built. A child of two years can walk for a mile or two miles and, if he likes to climb, so much the better. The difficult points in a walk are the interesting ones. We must