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March 22 - April 6, 2018
The mind was not ready-made at all. Education must help children to construct their own brains and to keep on constructing them until maturity was reached at twenty-four years of age.
Montessori stated that nothing should be given to the brain that is not first given to the hand.
The third grouping is the largest and involves the crucial transition from dream to reality: how can I carry out my abstract ideas? To make this leap, human beings are given five key behaviors: manipulation, exactness, repetition, control of error, and perfection.
The energy of our response to life is directly related, then, to how our environment encourages and allows for the human tendencies in our everyday life.
None, however, need the assistance of adults in their group for nearly a quarter of a century. This is the span of time Montessori identified as necessary for complete adult formation in the human being. Her conclusion is supported by recent scientific research demonstrating that the foundational neural structures in the frontal lobes of the human brain are not completed until approximately age twenty-four. It is in the frontal lobes that our most advanced reasoning and knowledge reside, including wisdom.
For the human child, independence, the ability to do things on one’s own, is most important for its psychological component; it is the path to confidence and self-assurance.
Adults cannot give children confidence and self-regard through external praise and evaluation; those come as the result of the child’s own efforts.
It is not to help adults, then, that we help children to become independent in daily acts; it is to help children.
One of the reasons we care so much about giving language to the young child is that this is a tool that the child is going to use to think and to build a mind. In a sense, then, our language is who we are.
In Montessori education, we focus instead on the development of the will as the positive force that enables us to learn from our environment and society and to make a contribution to them. How then do children develop this vital ability?
The child is a spiritual being who asks, why am I here? what is my task, my responsibility? Adults need to recognize this search for purpose in life as they seek to aid the child in her completion as a human being.
The adults’ role is to prepare an environment for the child, to guide her interaction with that environment and to give her freedom with responsibility. If they do so with knowledge, as well as love, the child is helped to grow to adulthood at twenty-four years as a lifelong learner who is ready to assume responsibility for others, to serve them, and, eventually, to become a parent herself. Thus, Montessori’s educational formula is a simple one consisting of but three elements: the prepared adult, the prepared environment, and freedom with responsibility.
When the child becomes deeply and constructively absorbed in a task, it is important to avoid drawing his attention to what the adults around him are thinking of what he is doing.
The goal is to create a home life that is not overly serious and is filled with joyfulness and spontaneity.
Overindulgence removes challenges; over-restriction inhibits activity and the opportunity to learn to control the self*
Research has shown that when parents become rigid and too goal-oriented, there is an imbalance between challenge and support: support is too low, challenge too high. Parents and children alike become high achievers in such settings but there is no joy in their accomplishments.
everything that adults give to the young child for sensorial exploration should represent the real world.
Nonsense songs, pictures, and stories that are the product of adult fantasy give no useful information about the world to the child under six years old.
The mobile is changed every two weeks or so to accommodate the infant’s habituation to that particular mobile and to match her progressive visual development.
Hence, the first mobile portrays flat, black-and-white geometric shapes and reflected light from a glass sphere. Subsequent ones are introduced in ordered sequence: three octahedrons of colored metallic paper, ideally each in a primary color; five Styrofoam balls covered with embroidery thread in gradations of the same color and hung in ascending order from darkest to lightest; stylized paper figures of light metallic colored paper that move with the slightest current of air; and, finally, stylized wooden figures painted in pastel colors.
As we mentioned in the previous chapter, it is at this point that the mobiles hung for the newborn to develop his visual system and ability to focus need to be changed. Because an infant of three to five months of age is able to reach and grasp, we are going to give him mobiles for batting, grasping, and holding. Again,
repetition is key to the learning process at all ages. Rotation, not substitution, is the answer to the process of habituation to objects.
It is not until he reaches seven or eight months of age that myelination finally makes possible the baby’s control of his fingers.
It should reflect the view that this infant is an individual who is going to grow and change and separate; this is not someone who will remain a baby forever, to be carried about and cared for by others. Our purpose then is to foster the child’s self-formation into an independent being.
We want to foster the baby’s self-concept from the beginning: “I am a capable person. I can do things for myself. I can affect my environment.”
“Leave the child alone and watch what she does. Do not abandon her but watch from a distance; you can go to her if she needs help.”
We habitually serve children; and this is not only an act of servility toward them, but it is dangerous, since it tends to suffocate their useful, spontaneous activity. We are inclined to believe that children are like puppets, and we wash them and feed them as if they were dolls. We do not stop to think that the child who does not “do” does not know how to do.
The mother who feeds her child without making the least effort to teach him how to hold a spoon for himself and to try to find his mouth with it, and who does not at least eat herself, inviting the child to look and see how she does it, is not a good mother She offends the fundamental human dignity of her child; she treats the child as if he or she were a doll, when instead, this is a human being confided by nature to her care.
Children over three years old should not typically sleep more than one hour in their afternoon nap. Doing so can interfere with their day-night sleep pattern. Five-year-olds usually do not need to nap, but it is important that they have an hour of quiet time at some point during the afternoon.
“What is important about you is not what is inside of you but what is outside of you.”
Young children can handle two options;
The intelligence of children is therefore intimately connected with the quality and extent of their exposure to language.
First, intelligence involves the creation of ideas and intentions, together with the capacity to study and understand such thoughts by reflecting on them and subsequently forming them into systematic relationships and logically organized patterns. Second, intelligence requires the ability to take these creations of analytic and synthetic thought and use them to better understand and transform the world.
However, researchers have determined that the capacity for reading is only fifty percent inheritable and for spelling, only twenty percent. Such statistics indicate that there is enormous opportunity for environmental influence in these areas.
Children vary enormously in their capacity for linguistic memory. Repetition over many days or weeks, even months, is the key to helping them develop in this area.
Again the number of books available should be limited: four is the maximum for a child two years old. The child’s favorite book of the moment can remain out, but rotate other books from a supply in the closet.
All parents need to remember that true happiness comes through having character and discipline, and living a life of meaningful contribution—not by having and doing whatever you wish.
As parents and grandparents, we think that we are showing children that we love them by giving them things. In fact such practice, in and of itself, may send them the wrong message. Children may conclude that if people give you things, they love you. If receiving things tells you that you are loved, the next logical step is to measure self-worth by what you have, not by what you are.
Thus the practical-life activities, although they involve real experiences with real materials in the real world, have a key role in developing the future imaginative play of the child.
Look for toys for the child under three years old that help him distinguish the real from the unreal, look for order in the world, and understand categories and process. A dollhouse, for example, provides hours of creative play for children over three years old. However, it is also intriguing to children at eighteen months, if you show them how to sort furniture by rooms: beds in the bedroom, table and chairs in the dining room, couch in the
Again your only purpose is to give a key to your child for discovering his world. Hence, you can say to your child, “Oh, look there is the tow truck,” not “What is this?” As we have mentioned, “What is this?” represents a test of knowledge, not a gift of knowledge from parent to child.
Give the Michael Olaf catalogue to your parents (or other family members) and tactfully mention that you hope they will use it for their gift selections.
As in other areas of self-construction, our ability to help the child in developing her will depends upon our understanding of the stages of the child’s formation.
Do whatever you can that will remind your child of a predictable pattern in her life.
“teach children limits with love or the world will teach them without it.”
Emotions reside in the area of the brain next to memory. This is why emotion attached to learning cements a memory so firmly.
The role of emotion in establishing memory is the reason we remember what is interesting to us during the process of learning in school and readily forget what is boring, no matter how thoroughly memorized for the moment the latter material might be.
Hence, we can think of obedience as coming in three stages. From twelve to eighteen months old, the child understands but cannot carry through without a good deal of adult help. From eighteen months to three years old, she can understand the adult’s request and can sometimes obey without help. At about three years old, the child reaches the level of development where she can consistently obey, but may still choose not to.
