Think of a three-story palace, my trainer said and call it mathematics. The first floor is counting and place value, the second the operations, and the third memorization of facts. There are many rooms, staircases and landings. In this palace the children can roam about freely and discover the beauty of numbers. This image burned into my mind and I envisioned an amazing Escher-like edifice, where students could explore at will, building their own mental math-scapes. These days as I watch children work, I see how freeing the materials are and how much fun they are.
Dr. Montessori understood the importance of freedom in education.
What one does with pleasure, without coercion, one does better. And what one learns with excitement, one remembers well. That is why the stories, charts and experiments of our Elementary classes are fundamental. They are intended to strike the children’s imaginations and set them on fire.
If you have watched children play make-believe roles, you know the intensity of their play. It is creative, but it is also serious business. They are learning how to conquer fear, how to negotiate and collaborate, how to be compassionate, resourceful and inventive. Children learn the same skills in our Elementary classes, and yet the Montessori curriculum is based not on fantasy but on reality.
The Universe as Playground
There is a largeness to the Montessori approach, an expansiveness.
The Elementary curriculum is the cosmos itself. Here we are, set free in the universe, ready to explore everything. Who doesn’t want to play here? It’s an endless attic of surprising treasures!
As the cosmic tales unfold, the children see that truth is often stranger, and certainly more compelling, than fiction. Stars are born and supernovas explode. The newly-created earth takes billions of years to cool off. Volcanoes erupt, the atmosphere forms, and it rains and rains. Continents drift apart.
If the entire history of the earth were compressed to the hours on a clock, say the 12 morning hours following midnight, then early life forms such as trilobites did not appear until around 10:00. Dinosaurs invaded the swamps at 11:12 and died out by 11:43. Humans appear just 14.5 seconds before noon! What about Ancient Egypt and Rome, the invention of the alphabet, the construction of Medieval castles? Less than the blink of an eye!
Yet the Romans ate and slept in houses and planned parties as we do.
Could we cook a meal as they did? What is the terrain of Italy like? How far did they travel? Did they multiply in Roman numerals? Did they sing? Who was Julius Caesar? What did he do to the calendar?
Elementary children can absorb an amazing amount from the stories and materials we present them. And then the real work begins! They do not play with the materials, but their work has elements of play. As they discover, their minds are at play. When children are joyfully absorbed , in their work, they are engaged in what Dr. Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, has called “flow experiences.” Dr. Montessori talked of spontaneous activities, intense interest and enthusiasm. The very active imaginations of Elementary children allow them to travel through time and space and virtually become dinosaurs or pharaohs!
Montessori Work as Team Sport
Because Elementary is a social age, group work energizes the class. Can we put on a play? A puppet show? When can we present our posters and reports? How about making a museum for other children to visit?
The Fundamental Needs of People chart was the spark for an exhibition on transportation and housing in our class last year. Animal classification studies led to an Ocean Life Museum this year. These exhibits were not merely about geography, history and biology. They were about learning to work together and reap the benefits of group effort. They were about inviting other children to come, enjoy, and perhaps get an idea for their own work.
Recently I asked a student what he liked about another boy in the class. He replied, “When he’s writing a book and I ask him if I can help, he says, ‘yes.’ He always lets me in.” This struck me as an interesting turn of phrase, one I myself might have heard as a child on the playground, but not in my classroom with its rows of solitary desks. It speaks to the sense of belonging that makes the struggle for knowledge not only possible, but fun. Both at recess and in the classroom, children begin to realize the pitfalls of a “ticktock, the game is locked” mentality, and the benefits of being inclusive.
As children explore together the palaces of history, grammar and other subjects, they absorb academics, while learning just as much about themselves as human beings. This is because teamwork is involved in creating a time line, analyzing a poem, or calculating the cube of a trinomial. Every time they succeed in their efforts, they gain the confidence of a winning sports team, and that spurs them on to other ventures.
Too Much Fun to be True? It all sounds great, but does this seemingly playful approach to academics really work? After all, aren’t we in the midst of an educational crisis which stems at least in part from the incredibly rapid increase in human knowledge? What should children be learning in the 21st century? What are the basics? Is American culture so focused on entertainment that our school are not sufficiently serious? Aren’t we falling behind because children are not working hard enough?
It is true that the rivers of human knowledge are swelling and producing ever more tributaries. No person can navigate them all. However, we can open children’s minds to the vastness of human knowledge by giving them key lessons with information that will set them wondering and wanting more, wanting to work. We can help them understand who they are as human beings and consider what responsibilities they have. Much contemporary educational practice underestimates the intellectual capacity and true motivation of children. Maria Montessori understood that children like challenges and seek self improvement. When presented with a huge math problem or a complex sentence to analyze, they readily accept the challenge, because they have discovered the spring-green fields and awesome palaces of the human mind.