[UPDATE] Bonus QotD: “It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.”
“It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.”
~ Dr Maria Montessori, from her 1949 book The Absorbent Mind 1948 book From Childhood to Adolescence (p. 20 of the Clio Edition)
[Hat tip the Maria Montessori Education Foundation (NZ)]
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5 comments:
Our 8 year experience with Montessori teachers is that loving the universe, and understanding the universe sufficiently are sometimes at odds. I have little doubt that Montessori herself held this integration, but not all her predecessors do. As a result I think our boys have missed certain valuable things they would have obtained from a good mainstream school. A lack of competitiveness, and failure to ensure certain skills (such as neat handwriting) are learnt at the appropriate age being the obvious ones for us. Ideally kids learn naturally without being forced, but sometimes certain core skills need to be forced. Kids thrive under freedom (within a prepared environment), but they also require structure - and their education sometimes lacks sufficient structure.
In the context of her time, too much structure and rigidity would have been the cultural bias that Montessori was fighting against. In our age of moral relativism, the tendency is towards not enough structure.
I'd still highly recommend Montessori education - especially in the 3-6 year age range without any qualifications. It's only in the 6+ age category my support comes with qualifications. Even then I believe the benefits have outweighed the disadvantages, and in many respects it's allowed our boys to be brilliant compared to their mainstream peers. But if I could turn back time I'd have gone into it more alert to the disadvantages from age 6 onwards, and ready to correct them.
Where in The Absorbent Mind is this quote?
I think it is in The Secret of Childhood. I have been looking for it too. Still can't find it.
Hmmm. We've just searched again in our library to see where we got it from. It *should* be in The Absorbent Mind -- either Chapter 27 'The Montessori Teacher,' or Chapter 28 'The Fountain Source of Love' -- and in re-reading the chapters it sounds like it *should* be there, yet it appears in neither of the two translations we have here.
I do see that other authors have referenced the quote to the 1949 Kalaktshera Press edition, so we have contacted our Montessori network (one of whom *will* have that edition) to hunt down a copy and check it out for us!
More soon ...
Success!! We have it!
She wrote in Italian of course, so it's not always possible to do a simple word search.
But turns out it's from the chapter 'The Passage to Abstraction' in her 1948 book 'From Childhood to Adolescence.' It's on page 20 of the Clio edition we have here, which is based on a 1976 translation, reading thus:
"[I]t does not suffice for the teacher to limit herself to loving and understanding the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must therefore prepare herself and work at it."
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