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Updated: June 15, 2025
For his crest, the little child should share in the "motto given to the mongoose family, in Kipling's Rikki-Tikki, 'Run and find out." Most writers on the education of young children have emphasised the importance of what is most inadequately called sense training, and it is here that Dr. Montessori takes her stand with her "didactic apparatus."
At a recent meeting of an University Montessori Club the case of donors to colleges and universities was reported on by a special committee. The majority report drew a pretty heavy indictment. It was shown that the givers to colleges and universities seldom considered the real needs of their beneficiaries.
The strongest reason for keeping children back from books is a physiological one. In the Psychology and Physiology of Reading strong arguments are adduced against early reading as very injurious to eyesight, so it is surprising that Dr. Montessori begins so soon.
Montessori, while advocating freedom in words, has really set strict limits to the natural activities of children by laying so much stress on her "didactic apparatus," the intention of which is formal training in sense-discrimination.
"We have been working for some sixteen hundred years, devising better and better games for children," continued Somel. I sat aghast. "Devising games?" I protested. "Making up new ones, you mean?" "Exactly," she answered. "Don't you?" Then I remembered the kindergarten, and the "material" devised by Signora Montessori, and guardedly replied: "To some extent."
In the Montessori system there is provided an elaborate apparatus, the didactic material, designed to cultivate tactile sensation and the perception of sense stimuli. It will generally suffice to advise the mother to make use of the ordinary apparatus of the nursery.
A cheerful "What are you making?" sometimes crystallizes hitherto rambling desires. A timely suggestion often meets with enthusiastic response. Helping in the home tasks. The working outfit of a child under school age may or may not include kindergarten or Montessori material.
As Madame Montessori has put it: "We ask for obedience and the child in turn asks for the moon." Only when we have developed the child's reasoning powers, by treating him as a rational being, can we expect him deliberately to defer his wishes to ours, because he has learned that our requests are generally reasonable.
He urged the early development of the social consciousness as well as insisting on expansion of individuality, but it is always difficult to combine the two, and most Kindergarten teachers will benefit by learning from Dr. Montessori to apply the method of individual learning to a greater extent.
This prince was in feeble health, and it was said had epilepsy. They were lodged at the residence of the Spanish Embassy, formerly the Hotel Montessori; and he requested Madame de Montessori, who lived in the next house, to reopen a private communication between the houses which had long been closed.
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