The Montessori System Examined

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Houghton Mifflin, 1914 - Montessori method of education - 71 pages
 

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Page 9 - If any educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of this life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.
Page 55 - I saw especially that preparatory movements could be carried on, and reduced to a mechanism, by means of repeated exercises not in the work itself but in that which prepares for it. Pupils could then come to the real work, able to perform it without ever having directly set their hands to it before.
Page 51 - It is exactly in the repetition of the exercises that the education of the senses consists; their aim is not that the child shall know colors, forms, and the different qualities of objects, but that he refine his senses through an exercise of attention, of comparison, of judgment.
Page 47 - the aim is not that the child shall know colors, forms and the different qualities of objects, but that he refine his senses through an exercise of attention, of comparison, of judgment; the exercises are true intellectual exercises.
Page 9 - ... given to the normal expansion of the life of the child. The child is a body which grows, and a soul which develops, these two forms, physiological and psychic, have one eternal font, life itself. We must neither mar nor stifle the mysterious powers which lie within these two forms of growth, but we must await from them the manifestations which we know will succeed one another.
Page 32 - ... and is greatly interested in the game, as is clearly shown by the expression of attention on the little face. If he mistakes, placing one of the objects in an opening that is small for it, he takes it away, and proceeds to make various trials, seeking the proper opening. If he makes a contrary error, letting the cylinder fall into an opening that is a little too large for it, and then collects all the successive cylinders in openings just a little too large, he will find himself at the last with...
Page 13 - Humanity shows itself in all its intellectual splendour during this tender age as the sun shows itself at the dawn, and the flower in the first unfolding of the petals ; and we must respect religiously, reverently, these first indications of individuality.
Page 66 - Montessori among the significant contributors to educational theory. Stimulating she is; a contributor to our theory, hardly if at all.
Page 14 - The most evident difference is seen in the function of the teacher. The kindergartner is clearly the center and arbiter of the activity in the room. The Montessori directress seems, on the contrary, to be at one side. The kindergartner contemplates at each moment the whole of her group; the directress is talking usually to one alone, — possibly to two or three. The kindergarten children are engaged in some sort of directed group activity; each Montes.sori child is an isolated worker, though one...
Page 31 - For this teacher we have substituted the didactic material, which contains within itself the control of errors and which makes auto-education possible to each child. The teacher has thus become a director of the spontaneous work of the children.

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