Spontaneous Activity in EducationMontessori, Maria
Science
Spontaneous Activity in Education
Montessori, Maria
Montessori method of education
True, it would appear that to-day a way of escape may be offered by
the discovery of the anti-toxine for fatigue. "Just think!" exclaims
Claparede, "a serum against fatigue. How valuable this would be!" From
this point of view, I should say that the ponogenic co-efficients
might find a more practical and rational application than that of the
revelation of "programs"; indeed these co-efficients indicating the
production of toxines would appear destined to determine the dose of
anti-toxine necessary to nullify the evil effects resulting from each
different subject of instruction. In the not far distant future, when
these auxiliary sciences of the school and pedagogy shall have made
due progress, we shall perhaps see, side by side with the orthopaedic
ward, a physio-chemical clinic, where every evening the pupils, as
they leave the beneficent suspensory apparatus which counteracts
injury to their skeletons, may enter with a kind of ponogenic
prescription regulated by the teaching they have undergone, and
receive an injection which will deliver them from the poisonous
effects of fatigue!
This reads like an irony of the worst kind, perhaps; but this is not
the case. Where the orthopaedic institution is already an accomplished
fact, we may very soon see the chemical clinic established. If a
problem of liberty is to be solved with machines, and if a problem of
justice is to be regarded from the chemical point of view, similar
consequences will be the logical end of sciences developed upon such
errors.
It is obvious that a real experimental science, which shall guide
education and deliver the child from slavery, is not yet born; when it
appears, it will be to the so-called "sciences" that have sprung up in
connection with the diseases of martyred childhood as chemistry to
alchemy, and as positive medicine to the empirical medicine of bygone
centuries.
I think it will be of interest here to record the impressions of a
person who, leaving the field of mathematics, entered upon the study
of biology and experimental psychology.
It is an account of a young English engineer, who had evidently
mistaken his vocation, and who, after studying my method for two
years, returned to the universities of his own great country as a
student of biology.
This is his opinion of experimental psychology:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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