The Findings of Maria Montessori
Fifty years of watching children, and what she concluded from it.
What did she find? the question
I wrote over 8 pages about Maria Montessori's story. How she got a special permission slip from the pope to study medicine after being told no, and then went on to use her medical knowledge to grow one of the most used education models while defying Mussolini. However, in that pursuit of understanding the person that was Maria Montessori I was left with the question: what did Maria Montessori find?
She spent over 50 years studying and observing children. There must be some insights she gained. So, in the next pages I'll outline Montessori's beliefs and how she came to them, starting first with the periods of development.
The four planes 0–6, 6–12, 12–18, 18–24
Maria believed there were four periods of development: ages 0–6, 6–12, 12–18, and 18–24. She believed that the time between 0–3 and 12–15 were most impactful, as they were the times when the kid was most malleable and creative. More on this later.
Auto-education the girl who did it 42 times
Auto-education — kids can self-direct their own learning and have an internal sense of what, how long, and how to approach different learnings.
Maria Montessori was in San Lorenzo at her casa school she had made for kids there. One day she was observing a little girl playing with a set of circular holes and cylinders. The girl was completing the set, resetting it, and going at it again, and seemed intensely concentrated.
Maria knew there was a belief that children's attention was fundamentally flitting, that they did not concentrate long on anything let alone enjoy them for that long, and decided to test the girl's concentration and understand it deeper. So she started counting the amount of times the girl completed the set. 3, then 4 times, then 10 times.
Maria then asked the kids around her to start singing and dancing loudly, wondering if the girl would give up her task to join them. She didn't even look up. 20 times, 21 times. On and on the girl went, repeating the practice.
At one point Maria grabbed the kid and her exercise and lifted them up on top of the table, but the kid kept going unbothered. 33, 34 times.
After the 42nd time the girl sat back with a sigh and, as Maria noted, a satisfied and peaceful look on her face. This is what she began to call polarization of attention, and from this Maria concluded that the kid's motivation was internal, that kids could concentrate, and that kids had a specific direction or decision towards what they wanted to be learning. This theory, auto-education, she shared around the world along with this story.
The absorbent mind the sensitive periods
The Absorbent Mind — Montessori believed that kids not only learn things from their environment, but absorb them, become them. She believed they do this unconsciously ages 0–3 and consciously 3–6. They do this with joy and pleasure rather than effort, and the evidence she cites is language and grammar, as well as her own observations.
She concluded that there are sensitive periods where the kids are more open and interested in absorbing certain practices and knowledge, and that these close eventually. These periods are: order, movement, small objects, the senses, language, and social behavior.
These sensitive periods overlapped, but were roughly observed to follow this:
| Sensitive period | Ages | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Order | 0–5, peak at 2 | Everything having its place, routines having their sequence. Maria was particularly outspoken about children needing this. |
| Movement | 0–4 | Gross motor movement, and then refinement towards specific actions with purpose. |
| Small objects | 1–4 | Intense interest in crumbs, buttons, little bouncy balls. |
| Language | 0–6 | Sounds, then words at around a year, then grammar explosions between 2 and 3. |
| Refinement of the senses | 2–6 | Sorting, matching, ordering, colour, textures, scents. |
| Social behavior | 2.5–6 | Interest in other children, social belonging. The last one to open up. |
Normalization her most contested claim
Lastly, one of her most controversial beliefs, and one foreshadowed in her outspokenness about the importance of order to children: normalization. To Maria this meant many of the issues adults find with kids are created through adults interrupting and disrupting the kids. That they would normalize through concentration on the tasks they choose, and by observing and learning from their environment. Montessori argued that a satisfied, peaceful, calm state is most normal to kids, and that they misbehave — tantrums, disorder, destruction — simply because of adults' interruptions.
Montessori said that there were four factors of normalization:
- Love of work — a spontaneous, joyous approach to tasks.
- Concentration — this comes from a deliberate environment, with progression.
- Self-discipline — Maria speaks about this as perseverance. Follow-through on the tasks the kids begin.
- Sociability — this is why there is only one of each material in the classroom.
Later in her work she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in three separate years, which makes sense because it was about peace. Essentially she argued that although politics could prevent wars, it could never create or construct peace, because only education was constructive and creative.
The prepared environment real tools, child-sized
So Maria had ideas, but how do those work in practice? Well, she was also one of the first people to make child-sized furniture and cupboards, and to take Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard and Édouard Séguin's learning materials — built for children with intellectual disabilities — and bring them out of that setting so that any child could practice and learn what they wanted to.
The goal was child accessibility and real tools. There were no fake knives or plastic substitutes. Everything in the room was ordered and had its place on a shelf or in a cupboard the children could reach. Freedom of movement was assumed, where the children could go where they pleased. Lastly, beauty was important, because the children were absorbing the environment, so Maria believed it should be beautiful.
The learning materials were specifically designed too. There was only one difference with any of them. As an example, the cylinder blocks that they would put in the circle holes were all the same colour and material and only varied by size. For materials where learning colours was the goal, they were all the same size and material, and varied only by colour.
They also included what is called control of error, meaning for example with the cylinders, they would not fit in the circle holes if they were too big. This allowed the kids to self-correct and learn without needing adult intervention.
How a lesson works three hours, three steps
The schedule was not one of bells, but instead one of three-hour blocks, allowing for what Maria observed to be the process of concentration. First was a false start, followed by some restlessness or confusion about what to do, next was settling into intense concentration. If the sections were shorter, then the kids wouldn't be able to get into focus on their tasks.
For the lessons when the adult did get involved, she devised a three-step framework. First came naming, like "this is smooth." Second came recognition, where the adult provides the word and the child provides the object. Third and last came recall, which is the adult providing the object and the child providing the word.
While these lessons depended on the period of development that the kids were in, they were almost always tied to real practical things applied to life. Tasks like polishing, pouring, organizing — things that had visible results. These tasks were only demonstrated by the adults; the directresses never told the kids when to do them.
Another key piece of Maria's methodology was mixed age classrooms. This, aside from the obvious benefits of interacting with kids different from themselves, allows the youth to learn through modeling the older kids' behavior. This mixing was done in 3-year spans.
Maria even had a name for the teacher, which she called directress. The directress's role was simply to prepare the environment, provide the materials when the child was ready for their next learning, and in the higher grades, tell stories. Even praise would distract from the kid by taking the reward from internal to external.
What each plane needs the prescriptions
| Ages | Plane | What she prescribed | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–6 | The Absorbent Mind | The prepared environment and the sensory materials. | Building the person from nothing. |
| 6–12 | The Reasoning Mind | Cosmic Education — from the creation of the universe onward, so that youth understand what they're learning in context. | The child turns outward, wants justice and morality, wants to understand how things work, and can handle abstraction. |
| 12–18 | Adolescence | Erdkinder — a working farm where youth live, work, manage, sell, and gain income for doing their work. Academics are still a focus, but they build into adulthood. | Rebirth. They are physically transformed, socially interested, unstable, and in her belief not suited well for academic pressure. |
| 18–24 | Maturity | University as a place where people who are fully formed take their position in society independently. | Montessori did not talk as much about this period. |
The five great stories the second plane
Now that we've talked about Maria's findings and what they look like in practice physically, let's move to how the curriculum is taught.
After the very physical, concrete 0–6ish period where the kids are learning senses and order, the kids move into growth that she illustrates as the heat of imagination on the kids as plants in the ground. The curriculum begins with the teacher telling five 'great stories':
- The story of the universe
- The story of life
- The story of humans
- The story of writing
- The story of numbers
From these great stories stem the specifics of quality writing and math. While the guides tell these stories, the kids are using their imagination to understand what is the big bang, and how might one cell become multi-celled.
This second 'plane', as she calls it, allows some unique practices — like the kids having freedom to go out of the classroom and speak with experts, conduct experiments, and otherwise learn in the world. Maria talks about 'Timelines', long scrolls that demonstrate the enormity of the stories, and about how negotiations about what's fair and moral are treated as normal, because this plane is when kids are learning about rules and equity naturally.
Erdkinder the third plane
The third plane is also unique, and known as what she calls erdkinder. This plane is from 12–18. A word that translates to 'children of the earth'. In this plane she proposed a working farm where the children's developmental task was real contribution to the production of the farm, therefore establishing their value in the contribution to the group. This she labeled valorization of personality.
This school, because it was a business, would become an immersive way for the kids to learn the rest of their subjects. Math as yield per square foot, finance from P&Ls, and science from botany and soil composition.
To sum up her view on this stage, she believed that adolescents were still 'social newborns' and should be treated as such. However, she believed the only noble thing to do was work and contribute.
To end this, I give you Maria Montessori:
"If salvation and help are to come, it is through the child; for the child is the constructor of man."