Spontaneous Activity in EducationMontessori, Maria
Science
Spontaneous Activity in Education
Montessori, Maria
Montessori method of education
It is not surprising that there should be an internal sensation which
warns us of perils, and causes us to recognize the circumstances
favorable to life. If science in these days demonstrates that the
means for preserving even material life correspond to the moral
"virtues," we may conclude that we shall be able to divine what is
necessary to life by means of the internal sensibility. Have not the
biological sciences demonstrated an analogous fact? The biometer
applied to man has made it possible to reconstruct the absolutely
average man, that is to say, the man whose body gives average
measurements in every part; and these average measurements have been
found, by means of the statistical and morphological studies of
medicine, to correspond to "normality." Thus the average man would be
a man so perfectly constructed that he has no morphological
predisposition to disease of the organs. When the figure of a man was
reconstructed in accordance with average biometrical proportions, it
was found to correspond in a remarkable manner to the proportions of
Greek statues. This fact helped to give a new interpretation to
"aesthetic sentiment." It was evidently by means of aesthetic feeling
that the eye of the Greek artist was able to extract the average
measurement of every organ, and to construct a marvelous and exact
whole therewith. The "enjoyment" of the artist was his enjoyment of
the "beautiful"; but he felt even more profoundly that which contained
the triumph of life, and distinguished it from the errors of nature,
which predispose to illness. The triumph of creation can give an
intimate pleasure to him who can "feel it"; errors, even slight, will
then be perceived as discords. Aesthetic education is, in short, akin
to the mathematical approximation towards the absolute average; the
more it is possible to approach to the true measure in its extreme
limits, and the closer we can get to this, the more possible does it
become to have an absolute means of comparison for the consideration
of deviations. The great artist is thus able to recognize the
beautiful in a detail even in the midst of other discordant details;
and the more capable he is of possessing an absolute sense of the
beautiful, the more readily will he perceive any disproportion of
form.
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