Spontaneous Activity in EducationMontessori, Maria
Science
Spontaneous Activity in Education
Montessori, Maria
Montessori method of education
Hence it has been deemed more practical to establish a kind of
orthopaedic institution within the building itself in certain model
schools in Rome. It consists of a costly and elaborate apparatus, to
which the pupils come in turn to be suspended by the head after the
method adopted in medicine to combat spinal curvature in Pott's
disease (tuberculosis of the vertebral column) and rickets.
Healthy children, as well as the unsound, suffer by these
applications; but on the other hand, the results afford encouraging
statistics. If this hanging treatment be initiated regularly at the
age of six years it strikes a perfect balance with the injury caused
by prolonged deterioration induced by school desks, and children are
delivered from spinal disease.
* * * * *
=Discoveries of experimental psychology: overwork; nervous
exhaustion=.--Hygiene, making its way into the school, discovered
scholar's spinal curvature and scholar's myopia; experimental
psychology discovered the exhaustion due to overwork, and studied the
_fatigue_ of the scholar. It followed in the beaten track of
medicine--that is to say, it sought to alleviate the ills it had
diagnosed, and instituted a branch of science the title of which is
not very clearly defined as yet, for some call it experimental
psychology applied to the school, others Scientific Pedagogy.
It is necessary to remember that experimental psychology was
established in 1860 by Fechner, who was a physicist accustomed to
experiment on _things_, not on living creatures, and who merely
adapted the methods employed in physics to psychical measurements,
thus founding psycho-physics. The instruments specially invented for
esthesiometric measurements were of extreme precision; but the results
obtained showed such variations that by mathematical law they could
not be attributed to "errors of measurement," but were obviously due
to "errors of method." Indeed, for the measurement of liquids it is
necessary to have an instrument different from that which we use in
measuring solids, although we are still in the domain of physics; we
cannot measure a stuff by the quart, nor wine by the yard; how much
more then must the methods of measuring physical substances and
spiritual energy differ?
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