The Montessori Method

In very good ways this reads as a scientific report as much as a philosophical treatise on children's education - debating with prior theories, presenting methods, and detailing findings, while openly pointing at areas still to research and where her results seem inconclusive or partial.

This is also scientific in nature as she is advocating for and demonstrating an observational experimental approach to early education, an evidence-based education. For educators, this means resisting the form of schooling as obedient collective arbitrary tasks to implant factual knowledge, instead acting as silent attentive observers of each child's development to support and introduce new exercises for self-formation when each individual is ready. And also for children, this experimenting approach means seeing kids as little scientists who spend the days and years building mental models and skills to seek to understand the world (both physically, intellectually, and socially/culturally). Reduction of skills to isolated motor/visual/intellectual exercises for practice and repeated self-verification of mastery by the kids themselves builds these skills of self-exploration and self-formation.

There are two great philosophies embedded throughout this book. The first is that of "discipline through activity", that respectful disciplined behavior in kids can ultimately only come from self-control/self-will by the individual. If school is to teach "right from wrong, good from evil", it is vitally important for society that the message be that useful, directed activity is good, rather than silent obedient immobility. The second view of humanity repeated throughout is a powerful alternate view of what community and communalized society require: schools, and specifically the tenement-house situated "Children's Houses" her study is focused on, involve community taking over parts of the family/maternal roles. But nonetheless the goal of schooling must be to produce complex varied individuals who have experienced a broad range of challenges and developed personal (self-formed) skills of adapting to all the changes of childhood, not a factory producing identical rational parts for society. "The perfection of collectivity cannot be that material and brutal solidarity that comes from mechanical organization alone."

It is really pleasantly surprising (and somewhat discouraging) to me how much of this material still rings true 100 years later, both in the positive and concrete elements and materials of her approach and in the critiques of prior educational fashion. She sarcastically asks at one point whether the point of school is to produce obedient-to-authority students or self-controlled curious adults, and I think she'd be disappointed to learn we were still focused on the former in most places today.