Maria Montessori, misunderstood genius

My daughter attends a Montessori school, but it is not Catholic. There are not many Catholics in our county.

I am watching my daughter progress through the program and seeing how the Montessori method sans Catholicism has its limitations. Dr. Maria Montessori encouraged the child to follow his interests and believed that educators should step out of the way and let children learn in a controlled but stimulating environment. Her results were almost miraculous, and so educators for three generations have tried to study her methods to imitate her success.

Dr. Montessori's success, however, stemmed from her tremendous talents, great intuition with children, and understanding of human nature now lacking in postmodern pedagogy. As a Catholic, she was keenly aware that children are drawn to sin. She never believed that humankind is basically good and only corrupted by parents, society, and culture. Although she understood the value and importance of letting the child pursue his own education, she never forgot that the Latin root of "education" is to lead. She led her students vigorously, if indirectly and subtly.

Secondly, she had a sacramental vision of human sanctification. She was the polar opposite in moral theology of the many Quakers, Rousseauians, and pacifists who admire her today and try to imitate her methods: Catholicism assumes that man is created in God's image, corrupted by his own choices, and sanctified by divine graces which take physical forms in the sacraments. Divine graces are administered by a sacramental (and of necessity, hierarchical) Church (not that God's graces do not also come from unknown directions such as Balaam's talking donkey). Our liberty, nonetheless, is dependent upon order we might call natural law. We are not mere atoms in a spinning and expanding universe.

A teacher who sees herself as part of this chain of being is truly following the Montessori method. The teacher must protect both the liberty and creativity of the next generation through a controlled environment that reflects the divine order of grace.

However, modern pedagogy teaches the teacher to see herself as an equal to the child in a democratic world in which man is master of his own destiny. Thus, the controlled environment might reflect some of the traditions and tools of Montessori, but the classroom will not deliberately model the divine order and sacramental economy of the universe. The child will not see himself as growing into a world governed by God and natural law, but as a biological entity in competition with other self-interested beings, even if the teachers themselves are pacifists.

If a teacher sees humankind in a Rousseauian sense of being inherently good but corrupted by social institutions, then the Montessori method becomes a vehicle for the preservation of human innocence. There is a big difference, however, between innocence and holiness. Innocence means we are ignorant of sin; holiness means we have faced sin and triumphed. As painful as it is, I would rather have a sanctified daughter than an innocent one.

Thus, ideally the Montessori method would be the perfection of a Catholic learning environment: nature, plants, insects, critters, books, manipulatives for the learning of numbers and mathematics, atlases of all sorts, compasses, sextants, astrolobes, abacuses, telescopes, microscopes, pens, paper, graphing paper, cloth, yarn, thread, needles, tools, crayons, paints, clay, carts, wagons, etc. with a chapel nearby for Mass. The children would build, develop, decorate, light, and modify a Grotto and keep a garden surrounding it. The children would make and modify vestments for the priests, altar furniture, stations of the cross, icons, and sacred art. They would grow food for the poor. They would intermingle their sacred activities with their work with their hands so that they would see the divine end of themselves within the unbought grace of life. The children would build their "City of God" around the seasons of the liturgy, the inheritance of the culture, and in the rhythms of nature.

They would learn implicitly that your body is a gift from God and that sanctification is a process one follows through his body. We can lie in bed praying to God, and that is a good thing to do, but ultimately we must live out our own salvation through the works of our bodies and hands: acts of mercy, construction of good works, care for others, tilling the earth, stewardship of our gifts, heroic sacrifices, and doing "little things with great love."

Most radical for the postmodern world is the Catholic view that our bodies do not belong to ourselves. One can give away his own body under the laws of God no more rightfully than he can give away his neighbor's house. (Yes, I know that possession is 9/10 of the law.) Our bodies belong to God for his service; they are vehicles of God's grace and Real Presence. Just as Jesus is Present in the Eucharistic Species and in the person of the priest while saying Mass or hearing Confessions, Jesus is Present in our bodies when we serve others, in particular, in the sacrament of Marriage. Marriage is how the average layperson takes on the Real Presence of Jesus in loving others through heroic and sacrificial love and in the creative act of having children.

The Montessori method should be the laboratory for a child to live out his salvation in a beautiful but fallen world. Ultimately, the Montessori method is about the nurturing of the human soul under a Catholic vision of sin and grace. Without the latter, the Montessori method, despite its origins in Christian humanism, will likely affirm the Id along with our narcissism, solipsism, neoterism, meliorism, and misguided faith in preserving human innocence. If innocence is preserved through the manipulation of a sheltered environment and no divine graces are presented, the child is more likely to slide towards suicide than humanitarianism.

There is a truth that sets us free and a truth that makes us cynical. The Montessori method, if used with a Catholic view of the soul, is going to point the child towards the former.

I cannot begin to summarize the literature about Maria Montessori and the Montessori method. I will say that a child "following his nose" to find his own genius and establish world peace is not something Dr. Montessori would have considered possible without a sacramental worldview:

'Maria Montessori was a devout Catholic, so a lot of her theories are steeped in her faith (Foss, 1998, p.1). She is sometimes referred to as the one who discovered and revealed the qualities of children different from and higher than those usually attributed to them.... When she began her work, large groups of children were supposed to do the same thing at the same time and in the same way. She knew there was a better way to teach children. She based most of her approach to teaching on truths about human nature. E. Mortimer Standing, a former associate of Montessori's wrote, "No one has so completely understood the soul of the child in its depth and greatness, in its immense potentialities, and in the mysterious law of its development." (1952, p. 1). O'Brien wrote that Montessori considered the child often at a disadvantage because adults fail to realize that children possess knowing and willing faculties, which are greater than their ability to express themselves; therefore, she emphasizes the importance of trying to understand the child (O'Brien, 1998, p.3). From the hands to the mind is an expression often used in Montessori training. "The materials used by the senses are a doorway to the mind." (O'Brien, 1998, p.5).

'Through giving children some freedom in a specially prepared environment that was rich in activities, children of 4-6 years learned to read on their own, chose to work rather than play most of the time, loved order and silence, and developed a real social life in which they worked together instead of competing against one another (Standing, 1952).'

More from Webster here and here.

Here is info from the Montessori Foundation.

Here is the North American Montessori Teachers' Association.

And a nice bio in Wikipedia.

I became a Catholic not because the Church convinced me that its understanding of the soul and human development was right, but because as an educator and historian I developed such a worldview and discovered mine was identical to the Church's. At that point I realized that the sacramental life of the Church was something I needed to embrace as well. Dr. Montessori's work is part of the great Catholic tradition of education and cannot be divorced from it.