Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Dr. Maria Montessori’s Education for a New World (re-printed 1989 by Clio Press). Please note that there are some nuances and terms that might, today, be considered ‘politically incorrect.’ However, the spirit behind her words is clearly as relevant today as it was when she wrote it so many years ago.
Superficial judgment of the Montessori Method is too often that it requires little of the teacher, who has to refrain from interference and leave the children to their own activity. But when the didactic material is considered, its quantity and the order and details of its presentation, the task of the teacher becomes both active and complex. It is not that the Montessori teacher is inactive where the usual teacher is active; rather all the activities we have described are due to active preparation and guidance of the teacher, and her later inactivity is a sign of her success, representing the task successfully accomplished. Blessed are the teachers who have brought their class to the stage where they can say, “ Whether I am present or not, the class carries on. The group has achieved independence.” To arrive at this mark of success, there is a path to follow for the teacher’s development.
An ordinary teacher cannot be transformed into a Montessori teacher but must be created anew, having rid herself of pedagogical prejudices. The first step is self-preparation of the imagination, for the Montessori teacher has to visualize a child who is not yet there. She must have faith in the child who will reveal himself through work. The different types of deviated children do not shake the faith of this teacher, who sees a different type of child in the spiritual field and looks confidently for this self to show when attracted by work that interests. She waits for the children to show signs of concentration.
In this work there are three stages of development:
1. As guardian and custodian of the environment, the teacher concentrates on this, instead of being preoccupied with the difficulties of the problem child, knowing that from the environment the cure will come. Here lies the attraction that will polarize the will of the child.
The didactic material must always be beautiful, shining, and in good repair, with nothing missing, so that it looks new to the child, and is complete and ready for use.
The teacher, as part of the environment, must herself be attractive, preferably young and beautiful, charmingly dressed, scented with cleanliness, happy and graciously dignified. This is the ideal, and cannot always be perfectly reached, but the teacher who presents herself to the children should remember that they are great people, to whom she owes understanding and respect.
She should study her movements, making them as gentle and graceful as possible, that the child may unconsciously pay her the compliment of thinking her as beautiful as his mother, who is naturally his ideal of beauty.
2. In the second stage, the teacher has to deal with the children who are still disorderly, with those aimlessly wandering minds which have to be attracted to concentration on some work.
The teacher needs to be seductive and can use any device (except, of course, the stick) to win the children’s attention.
She can do what she likes more or less because as yet she upsets by her intervention nothing very important. A bright manner in suggesting activities is the chief necessity.
Children who persist in molesting others must be stopped, as such activity is not of the nature that needs completion of its cycle.
3. Once the children’s interest has been aroused, usually by some exercise of practical life, the teacher withdraws into the background and must be very careful not to interfere—absolutely not, in any way.
Mistakes are often made here, as for instance by uttering an encouraging “Good,” in passing a hitherto naughty child, who (at last) is concentrating on some work.
Such well-meant praise is enough to do damage; the child will not look at work again for weeks.
Again, if the child is in some difficulty, the teacher must not show him how to get over it, or the child loses interest, for the point to him is just conquest of that difficulty, not the task in itself. A child who is lifting something too heavy for him does not want help; even for him to see the teacher looking at him is often enough to stop him working.
As soon as concentration appears, the teacher should pay no attention, as if that child did not exist. At least, he must be quite unaware of the teacher’s attention.
Even if two children want the same material, they should be left to settle the problem for themselves unless they call for the teacher’s aid.
Her duty is only to present new material as the child exhausts the possibilities of the old.
The child who has done some concentrated work may choose to show it to the teacher, to get approbation, and then he should have it ungrudgingly and sincerely: “How beautiful!” The teacher rejoices with the child over the flower of accomplishment.
Montessori teachers are not servants of the child’s body, to wash, dress and feed him; they know that he needs to do these things for himself in developing independence.
We must help the child to act for himself, will for himself, think for himself; this is the art of those who aspire to serve the spirit. It is the teacher’s joy to welcome the manifestations of the spirit, answering her faith. Here is the child as he should be: the worker who never tires, the calm child who seeks the maximum of effort, who tries to help the weak, while knowing how to respect the independence of others, in reality, the true child.
Our teachers, thus, penetrate the secret of childhood and have a knowledge far superior to that of the ordinary teacher who becomes acquainted only with the superficial facts of the children’s lives. Knowing the child’s secret, she has a deep love for him, perhaps for the first time understanding what love really is, on a different level from the personal love. The difference has been brought about by the children, who by their revelations of spirit, have profoundly moved their teacher, bringing her to a level of which she had not known the existence; now she is there and she is happy.
Her happiness before was perhaps to draw as high a salary as she could get and do as little as she needs for it; some satisfaction there was for her in her exercise of power and influence, and her hope was to become a headmistress or an inspectress. But there is no real happiness in this, and one would readily leave it all to feel the greater spiritual happiness which the child can give.
Montessori Leadership / June 2015 / p 11
