Optimus Template

Excerpts taken from "The Adolescent and the Future" by Marizaret E. Stephenson (1988).

Miss Stephenson presents adolescence in the context of the planes of education, the human tendencies, and the psychological characteristics, all of which are integral to Montessori's concept of the human personality.

Dr. Robin Tanner, the statesman and educator who died at the age of eighty-four and once worked with the English Ministry of Education, disagreed with the requirements for results demanded by the educational establishment, and stated that "Everybody knows that the true results of education only show with maturity".

I would suggest that everybody does not know that, or at least, most do not behave as if they do. Looking at the educational establishment worldwide, can we find any country that does not insist on immediate results of a day's teaching, that does not ask for marks and grades, that does not require examinations and tests? And looking again worldwide, are we not faced with a picture of drugs, drink, suicides, desperate battles for success, fights for the next rung on the ladder of achievement, faces in the street that show no light in the eyes?

More than fifty years ago, Dr. Maria Montessori told us:

The child is both a hope and promise for mankind.... What is needed is faith in the grandeur and superiority of ma., If he has managed to master the cosmic energies circulating in the atmosphere, he will be able to understand that the fire of genius, the value of intelligence, the light of conscience, are also energies to be organised, to be regulated, to be treasured and put to good use, and given social life. (Education and Peace, p66).

With that in mind, she explained that the purpose of her work for the child and therefore for man, is "to influence the whole life of the child; it aims, in short, at a total development of the personality, a harmonious growth of all the potentialities of the child, physical and mental, according to the laws of its being" (Child in the Church).

She castigated education in 1935, saying "Education today does not take personality into account and does not develop it ...Man today pays no heed to human personality and regards human society as colony without individuals " (Education and Peace, p. 124).

Looking at education in 1988, (or 2009) is the picture any different? Are we developing the human personality or teaching subject matter and a curriculum, and then testing it?

Dr. Montessori expressed her hope 'for a normal development, that fortunately does not depend on what we attempt to teach the child. "

Perhaps one of Dr. Montessori's greatest contributions to us is her realisation of the planes of development. "The child," she said, "is in a continual state of growth and metamorphosis, whereas the adult has reached the norm of the species" (E.M. Standing, p. 106). We are dealing with different types of mind at different periods. Alongside her teaching on the different planes of development we should place as much emphasis on her understanding of the nature of the organism. This is where we part company with traditional education. The study for Montessorians is of man, whom Dr. Montessori termed the "Unknown"; the study for other educators is of curriculum and text books.

Just as she had condemned the schools for younger children at the time of the opening of the first Casa dei Bambini for "putting the children into mourning" and "pinning them to their desks, like butterflies to a board," so now she was equally critical of the secondary school. She said:

The need which is so keenly felt for a reform of secondary schools concerns not only an educational, but also a human and social problem. This can be summed up in one sentence: Schools as they are today, are adapted neither to the needs of adolescence nor to the times in which we live... While material progress has been extremely rapid and social life has been completely transformed, the schools have remained in a kind of arrested development, organised in a way that cannot have been well suited even to the needs of the past, but that today is actually in contrast with human progress. The secondary schools as they are at present constituted do not concern themselves with anything but the preparation for a career, as if the social conditions of the time were still peaceful and secure. They do not take any special care for the personality of the children, nor do they give all the special physical care that is necessary during the period of adolescence. Thus not only do they not correspond to the social conditions for our day, but they fail to protect the principal energy on which the future depends: human energy, the power of individual personality.

This was said in 1937. And there we have it again - this Montessori theme that has run through the first and second planes of development, and comes again in the third - the concept of human personality.