The mind of the child (translated)

PREFACE

This volume is based on the lectures given by Dr Maria Montessori during the first preparatory course she held in Ahmedabab after her internment in India, which lasted until the end of the world war.

In this book she deals with the child's mental energies, which enable him to build and consolidate in the space of a few years, alone, without teachers, without any of the usual educational aids, even if left almost to himself and often hindered, all the characteristics of the human personality. This achievement of a being, physically weak, born with great possibilities, but practically without even one of the factors of mental life being developed in him yet, of a being who can be called 'zero', but who, in the space of six years, already surpasses all other living beings, is truly one of the greatest mysteries of life.

In this volume, Dr. Montessori not only casts the light of her penetrating insight, which stems from a thorough observation and a just assessment of the phenomena of this first and most decisive period of human life, but also indicates the responsibilities of adult humanity towards the child. The author realistically sets out the now universally accepted need for 'education from birth'. It is clear that such an education cannot be achieved unless education itself becomes an 'aid to life' and transcends the narrow limits of teaching and the direct transmission of knowledge or ideas from one mind to another. One of the best-known principles of the Montessori Method is the 'preparation of the environment'; in that period of life, long before the child goes to school, the preparation of the environment offers the key to an 'education from birth' and to the true 'cultivation' of the human individual from his or her first entry into life.

This is a thesis based on scientific grounds but also validated by the experiences of those who have aided the manifestation of the infant nature throughout the world and can testify to the mental and spiritual grandeur of these manifestations, in singular contrast to the vision offered by humanity, which, abandoned during the formative period, becomes the greatest threat to its very survival.

Mario M. Montessori

Karachi, May 1949

I - THE CHILD IN THE

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE WORLD

This book is a link in the development of our thinking and work in defence of the great forces of childhood.

Today, as the world is divided, and plans for a future reconstruction are being considered, education is universally regarded as one of the most effective means to this reconstruction because there is no doubt that psychologically mankind is below the level that civilisation preaches it has reached.

I too think that mankind is far from the degree of preparedness necessary for that evolution to which it so ardently aspires: the building of a peaceful and united society, and the elimination of wars. Men are not yet able to control and direct the events of which they rather become the victims.

Although education is recognised as one of the means to uplift mankind, it is still only considered as education of the mind based on old concepts, without thinking of drawing a renewing and constructive force from it.

That philosophy and religion should make an immense contribution to renewal I do not doubt. But how many philosophers are there in today's ultra-civilised world, and how many have been before and will be in the future? Noble ideas and high sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted through education, but the wars have never ceased. And if education were always to be conceived according to the old patterns of knowledge transmission, there would be nothing left to hope for the future of the world. What does the transmission of knowledge matter if the general education of man himself is neglected? There exists, ignored, a psychic entity, a social personality, immense in its multitude of individuals, a power in the world that must be taken into consideration; if help and salvation can come, it will only come to us from the child; for the child is the builder of man.

The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can lead to a bright future. If one really wants to aim for reconstruction, the development of human potential must be the aim of education.

In modern times, the psychic life of the newborn has aroused great interest, and some psychologists have made infant development the subject of their observation from the first three hours after birth. Others, after careful study, have come to the conclusion that the first two years of life are the most important in human development.

The greatness of the human personality begins with the birth of man. This singularly mystical statement leads to a conclusion that might seem strange: education should begin at birth. But practically speaking, how can one educate a child as soon as it is born or in its first or second year of life? How to impart lessons to a little creature who does not understand our words or even know how to move? Perhaps we only refer to hygiene when we speak of educating young children? Certainly not.

During this period, education must be understood as aiding the development of the innate psychic powers in the human individual; that is to say, the common and well-known form of teaching that has the medium of speech could not be used.

Unused wealth

Recent observations have amply demonstrated that the little ones are endowed with a special psychic nature of their own, and this points us in a new direction for education; one that affects humanity itself and has never yet been taken into account. The true constructive, vital and dynamic energy of children remained ignored for millennia; just as men first trod the earth and later cultivated its surface, without knowing or caring for the immense riches that lie hidden in its depths, so modern man advances in civilisation without knowing the treasures that lie hidden in the psychic world of the child.

Since the earliest beginnings of mankind, man has continued to repress and annihilate these energies, the existence of which only today has begun to be perceived. Thus, for example, Carrel writes: 'The time of early childhood is undoubtedly the richest. It must be utilised in every possible and imaginable way through education. The loss of this period is irreparable. Instead of neglecting the first years of life, it is our duty to cultivate them with the greatest care'.¹

Humanity is beginning to realise the importance of this untapped wealth; something far more precious than gold: man's very spirit.

The first two years of life open up a new horizon; they reveal laws of psychic construction, hitherto unknown. The child itself has given us the gift of this revelation; it has introduced us to a type of psychology that is completely different from that of the adult. Here is the new way! It is not the teacher who applies psychology to children, but it is the children themselves who reveal their psychology to the scholar.

All this may appear obscure, but it will immediately become clear if we delve into the details: the child has a mind capable of absorbing knowledge and the power to educate itself; a superficial observation is enough to prove this. The child speaks the language of his parents; now, learning a language is a great intellectual achievement; no one has taught the child, yet he will know how to use the names of things, verbs, adjectives to perfection.

Following the development of language in children is a study of immense interest and all those who have dedicated themselves to it agree that the use of words and names, of the first elements of language, falls at a certain period of life as if a precise rule of time superintended this manifestation of infant activity. The child seems to faithfully follow a strict programme imposed by nature, and with such punctual exactitude that no school, however skilfully directed, would stand comparison. Always following this programme, the child learns the irregularities and syntactic constructions of language with impeccable diligence.

The Vital Years

Within every child there is, so to speak, a vigilant teacher who knows how to get the same results from every child, no matter where he or she is. The only language that man learns perfectly is undoubtedly that acquired in the first period of childhood, when no one can teach the child; not only that, but if later on the child, having grown up, has to learn a new language, no master's help will be worthwhile in getting him to speak the new language as exactly as he speaks the language acquired in early childhood. There is therefore a psychic force that aids the child's development. And this is not only with regard to language; at the age of two, he will be able to recognise all the people and things in his environment. If one reflects on this fact, it becomes increasingly clear that the construction work done by the child is impressive and that everything we possess was built by the child, by the child that we ourselves were in the first two years of life. It is not only a matter, for the child, of recognising what is around us or of understanding and adapting to our environment, but also, at a time when no one can be his teacher, of forming the complex of what will be our intelligence and the outline of our religious feeling, of our particular national and social sentiments. It is as if nature has safeguarded each child from the influence of human intelligence in order to give precedence to the inner teacher who inspires it; the possibility of building a complete psychic construction, before human intelligence can come into contact with the spirit and influence it.

At the age of three, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of school education. His achievements are such that one can say that the child, who enters school at the age of three, is already a man because of the achievements he has made. Psychologists say that, if we compare our ability as adults to that of the child, it would take us sixty years of hard work to achieve what the child has achieved in his first three years; and they express themselves with precisely the same words that I have used: 'at three years of age the child is already a man', even though this singular faculty of the child to absorb from the environment has not yet been completely exhausted in this early period.

In our first schools, children came at the age of three; no one could teach them, because they were not receptive; but they offered us astonishing revelations of the greatness of the human mind. Ours is a 'Children's Home' rather than a real school; that is, an environment specially prepared for the child, where he or she assimilates whatever culture the environment provides without the need for teaching. The children in our first schools belonged to the humblest classes of the people and their parents were illiterate. Yet those children knew how to read and write by the age of five, and no one had directly taught them. If visitors to the school asked, Who taught you to write?, the astonished children often replied, Taught? No one taught me.

It then seemed a miracle that children of four and a half years old could write, and that they had come this far without being taught.

The press began to speak of 'spontaneous acquisition of culture'; psychologists wondered whether these children were not different from others and we ourselves were puzzled for a long time. Only after repeated experiments did we reach the certainty that all children indiscriminately have this ability to 'absorb' culture. If this is the case,' we said to ourselves then, 'if culture can be acquired effortlessly, let us enable the child to 'absorb' other elements of culture. We then saw the child 'absorb' more than just reading and writing: botany, zoology, mathematics, geography, and with equal ease, spontaneously, effortlessly.

We thus discover that education is not what the teacher gives, but is a natural process that takes place spontaneously in the human individual; that it is not acquired by listening to words, but by virtue of experiences in the environment. The task of the teacher is not to speak, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a specially prepared environment.

My experiences in different countries lasted more than forty years, and as the children grew older, I was asked by their parents to continue the education of the older children. We thus discovered that individual activity is the faculty that alone stimulates and produces development, and that this applies to pre-school children as well as to children in primary and advanced schools.

The New Man rises

Before our eyes a new image appeared; it was not that of a school or an education. It was Man rising, Man revealing his true character in his free development; Man demonstrating his greatness when no mental oppression came to limit his inner workings and burden his soul.

I therefore argue that any educational reform must be based on the development of the human personality. Man himself should become the centre of education, and it must be borne in mind that man does not develop at university, but begins his mental development from birth and carries it out with the greatest intensity in the first three years of life; this period more than any other must be given vigilant care. If we act according to this imperative, the child, instead of imposing a burden on us, will reveal itself to us as the greatest and most comforting wonder of nature. We will then find ourselves before the child no longer considered a being without strength, almost an empty vessel to be filled with our wisdom; but his dignity will arise before our eyes to the extent that we will see him as the builder of our intelligence, as the being who, guided by an inner master, works tirelessly in joy and happiness, according to a precise programme, on the construction of that wonder of nature that is Man. We, teachers, can only help the work already accomplished as servants help the master. We will then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; to the rise of the New Man, who will not be a victim of events, but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will be able to direct and shape the future of human society.

II - EDUCATION FOR LIFE

School and social life

It is necessary to have from the outset an idea of what we mean by education for life from birth, and it is necessary to go into the details of the problem. Recently, the leader of a people, Gandhi, enunciated the need not only to extend education to the entire life course, but also to make the 'defence of life' the centre of education. And it is the first time that such a statement has been made by a political and spiritual 'leader'. Science, on the other hand, has not only already expressed this need, but since the beginning of our century has shown that the idea of extending education to the whole of life has a chance of being implemented with certainty of success. However, this concept of education has not yet entered the field of action of any ministry of education.

Education today is rich in methods, social aims and purposes, but it can no less be said that it does not take life itself into consideration. Of the many official methods of education in different countries, none aim to assist the individual from birth and protect his or her development. Today, education, as it is conceived, disregards both biological and social life. Everyone who enters education comes to be isolated from society. Students are expected to follow the rules laid down by the institution of which they are pupils and to conform to the programmes recommended by the ministries of education. It can be said that even in the more recent past, the social and physical conditions of students were not taken into consideration as a fact that could affect the school in itself. Thus, if the student was undernourished, or if he had sight or hearing defects that diminished his chances of learning, he was certainly graded lower. Physical defects were considered, in later times, but only from the point of view of physical hygiene, while no one considered, even today, that the student's mind can be threatened and suffer harm from defective and unsuitable educational methods. The direction of the New Education in which Claparède was interested, considers rather the quantity of disciplines included in the programmes, aiming to reduce them to avoid mental fatigue. But it does not touch the problem of how pupils could enrich themselves with culture without fatigue. In most official state-run schools, what matters is that the syllabus is carried out. If the spirit of young university students is struck by social deficiencies and political issues that stir up passionate truths, the watchword is that the young person should not concern himself with politics, but that he should stick to his studies until he has completed them. It thus happens that the young man, having left university, will have such a limited and sacrificed intelligence that he will not be able to identify and evaluate the problems of the era in which he lives.

School mechanisms are as alien to contemporary social life as it seems to be excluded, with its problems, from the field of education. The world of education is a kind of island where individuals, detached from the world, prepare themselves for life by remaining alienated from it. It may happen, for example, that a university student is afflicted with tuberculosis and dies of it; is it not a sad thing that the university, the school where he lives, ignores him ill, while suddenly appearing, with an official representation, at his funeral?² There are extremely nervous individuals, who when they enter the world will be useless to themselves and a cause of grief to family and friends. However, the school authority is not obliged to concern itself with special cases of psychology, and such absenteeism has full justification in the regulations that assign the school the task of dealing only with studies and examinations. Those who pass them will receive a diploma or a degree. This is, for our times, the end of the school. Scholars of social problems point out that those dismissed from schools and universities are not prepared for life, not only that, but in most cases they are even diminished in their possibilities. Statistics reveal a staggering increase of the insane, of criminals, of individuals considered 'strange'. Sociologists invoke schools as a remedy to so much evil; but the school is a world unto itself, a world closed to social problems; it is not obliged to consider them and get to know them. It is a social institution of too old a tradition for its regulations to be altered ex officio; only a force acting from outside will be able to modify and renew and remedy the deficiencies that accompany education in all grades, just as they unfortunately accompany the lives of those who go to school.

The pre-school age

What happens to the child from birth to the age of six or seven? The school proper does not care about this, so that this age is called preschool, as if to say outside the field of official education. And what could the school do for infants? Where institutions for pre-school age children have sprung up, they are rarely dependent on the central school authority or the ministry of education. They are usually controlled by municipalities or private institutions, which often pursue charitable purposes. Interest in the protection of the mental life of the little ones, as a social problem, does not exist; society states, moreover, that the little ones belong to the family and not to the state.

The new importance given to the early years of life has not suggested any particular measures; it is only intended to change the life of the family, in the sense that the education of the mother is now considered necessary. But the family is not part of the school, it is part of society. The result is that the human personality, or the nurturing of the human personality, is split: on the one hand the family, which is part of society, but which lives isolated and neglected or ignored by society: on the other hand the school, which is also secluded from society, and then the university. There is no unitary conception, no social concern for life, but fragments that ignore each other and refer successively or alternately to the school, the family and the university conceived as a school, which affects the last part of the educational period. Even the new sciences, which reveal the evil of this isolation, such as social psychology and sociology, are isolated from school. There is therefore no real system that aids the development of life. The concept of education understood in this sense is not new, as I have already said, to science, but in the social field it has not yet been realised. And this is the step that civilisation will soon have to take: the way is marked out, critics have revealed the errors of the present conditions, others have clarified the remedy to be brought to the various stages of life, today everything is ready for construction. The contributions of science can be compared to the stones already squared, destined for this construction; it is necessary to find those who will take the stones and superimpose them to erect the new edifice necessary for civilisation.

The task of education and society

The concept of an education that takes life as the centre of its function alters all previous educational ideas. Education is no longer to be based on a set programme, but on knowledge of human life. In the light of this conviction, the education of the newborn child suddenly acquires great importance. It is true that the infant can do nothing, that nothing can be taught to it in the ordinary sense of the word, and that it can only be the object of observation and study designed to bring out its vital needs; but we have made such observations in order to find out what the laws of life are, for if we wish to help it, the first condition is knowledge of the laws that govern it; and not only knowledge, for if we had only this, we would remain in the field of psychology and would not enter the field of education.

But this knowledge of the child's psychic development must be widely disseminated: then only education will be able to acquire new authority and say to society: 'These are the laws of life; you cannot ignore them and you must act in accordance with them; for they point to human rights that are extensive and common to all mankind.

If society deems it necessary to provide compulsory education, this means that education must be given in a practical manner, and when it is admitted that education must begin at birth, it is necessary for society to be familiar with the laws of child development. Education instead of being ignored by society must acquire authority over it, and the social mechanism will have to adapt to the needs inherent in the new conception: that life must be protected. Everyone is called upon to co-operate, fathers and mothers must assume their responsibility; but when the family does not have sufficient possibilities, society is obliged not only to impart education, but also to provide the necessary means to bring up children. If education means caring for the individual, if society recognises means necessary for the child's development that the family cannot provide, it is up to society to provide, it is up to the state not to abandon the child.

Education will thus undertake to impose itself with authority on the society from which it had remained secluded. While it is clear that society must exercise beneficial control over the human individual, and while it is true that education is to be regarded as an aid to life, this control must never be coercion and oppression, but must provide physical and psychic help. That is to say, the first step society will have to take is to devote wider means to education.

The needs of the child during the growing years have been studied, and the results of these studies have been made known to society; society must now conscientiously assume responsibility for education, while education for its part will extend to society the goods acquired in its progress. Education thus conceived no longer concerns only the child and the parents, but the state and international finance; it becomes a stimulus to every member of the social body, a stimulus to the greatest of society's renewals. Is there anything more immobile, stagnant and indifferent than education today? When a country has to economise, education is undoubtedly the first casualty. If you ask a statesman what his views are on education, he will answer that education is not his business, that he has entrusted the education of his children to his wife so that she in turn would entrust it to the school. Well: in the future, it will become absolutely impossible for a statesman to formulate such an answer and show such indifference.

The man-made child

Let us consider the reports of several psychologists who have studied the child from the first year of life. What can be deduced from them? That the growth of the individual, instead of being left to chance, must be scientifically directed with better care; which will lead to a better development of the individual. The idea in which everyone agrees is that the better cared for and assisted individual is bound to grow stronger, more mentally balanced and with a more energetic character. In other words, the concluding concept is that in addition to physical hygiene, the child must be protected by mental hygiene. Science has made further discoveries around the first period of life: far greater energies have been manifested in the child than is generally imagined. At his birth, psychically speaking, the child is nothing; and not only psychically, since at his birth he is incapable of coordinated movements and the almost immobility of his limbs does not allow him to do anything; nor can he speak, although he sees what is going on around him. After a given period of time, the child speaks, walks, and goes from one achievement to another until he builds man in all his greatness and intelligence. And here a truth comes into view; the child is not an empty being, who owes us everything he knows and with which we have filled him. No, the child is the constructor of man, and there is no man who has not been formed by the child he once was. The great constructive energies of the child, of which we have already spoken many times, and which have attracted the attention of scientists, have hitherto remained hidden under a complex of ideas formed around motherhood; it was said: the mother formed the child, she teaches it to speak, to walk, etc. Now all this is not the mother's work at all, but the child's achievement. What the mother creates is the infant, but it is the infant that produces the man. If the mother dies, the infant still grows and completes the construction of man. An Indian child brought to America and entrusted to the care of Americans will learn English, not Indian. It is not from the mother, therefore, that knowledge of language comes, but it is the child that appropriates language as it appropriates the habits and customs of the people among whom it lives. There is therefore nothing hereditary in these acquisitions, and the child, absorbing from his surroundings, shapes the future man from himself.

Recognising this great work of the child does not mean that the parents' authority is diminished; when they are persuaded that they are not the builders, but simply the helpers in the construction, the better they will be able to fulfil their duty and help the child with a broader vision. Only if this help