Spontaneous Activity in EducationMontessori, Maria
Science
Spontaneous Activity in Education
Montessori, Maria
Montessori method of education
Turning to attention, the primitive fact of correspondence between
nature and stimulus which is the fundamental of life should prevail,
however modified, when dealing with older children, and should remain
the basis of education.
I am prepared for the objections of "experts." Children must be
accustomed to pay attention to everything, even to things which are
distasteful to them, because practical life demands such efforts.
The objection is based on a prejudice analogous to that which at one
time made good fathers of families say: "Children should be accustomed
to eat everything." In just the same way, moral training is put
outside its rightful sphere--a fatal confusion. When ideas of this
order, now happily obsolete, obtained, fathers would allow their
children to fast all day, if they refused a dish they disliked at the
mid-day meal, forbidding them anything but the rejected portion, which
became ever colder and more disgusting, until at last hunger weakened
the child's will and destroyed his caprice, and the plateful of cold
food was swallowed. Thus, argued such a father, in the various
circumstances in which he may be placed throughout his life, my son
will be ready to eat whatever comes to hand, and will not be greedy
and capricious. In those days also, sweets were forbidden to children
(whose organisms require sugar, because the muscles consume a great
deal of this during growth), in order to teach them to overcome
greediness, and an easy and convenient method of correcting naughty
children was to "send them to bed without any supper."
Very similar methods are now adopted by those who insist that children
should pay attention to things they dislike, in order to accustom them
to the necessities of life. But as in the case of psychical
nourishment hunger is never brought to bear upon the "cold and
distasteful viands," the indigestible and heavy food weakens and
poisons the unwilling recipient.
Not thus shall we prepare the robust spirit, ready for all the
difficult eventualities of life. The boy who swallowed the cold soup
and went fasting to bed was the one whose body developed badly, who
was too weak to resist infection when he encountered it, and fell ill;
and morally it was he who, having a store of unsatisfied appetites
within him, looked upon it as the greatest joy of his liberty, when he
became an adult, to eat and drink to excess. How unlike was he to the
boy of to-day, who, rationally fed and made robust of body, becomes
the _abstemious_ man, who eats to live in health, and combats
alcoholism and excessive and injurious feeding; the modern man, who
can defend himself by so many means against infectious diseases, and
who is so ready for effort that, without any compulsion, he braves the
arduous exertion of sport, and attempts and carries out great
enterprises, such as the discovery of the Poles and the ascent of
lofty mountains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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