Optimus Template

Integral Montessori for the 21st Century

The Times, They Have a-Changed:

An Integral Perspective of the Montessori Method in the 21st Century

by James Wheal

Head of School

Misty Mountain Montessori Educational Centre

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

(410) 259-7003

At 10 O’clock on the morning of the 17th of December, 1903 five members of the Lifesaving Station at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina trudged grimly down the wooden steps and across the sand.  With their collars turned up against a cutting winter wind, they joined two brothers who had asked them to help test an experimental machine that few of them thought would ever work.  After checking the wind speed, setting up their cameras and synchronizing their watches, the two Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, started the engine of their odd contraption and pushed off gingerly down a rickety wooden track.  Twelve seconds later, the Kitty Hawk Flyer returned to the sands, changing the course of aviation and, with it, modern history.

In the same early years of the Twentieth century when the Wright Brothers were tinkering with their revolutionary invention, Dr. Maria Montessori was busy developing her own.  On January 6th, 1907, in the San Lorenzo slum of Rome, she opened her first Casa dei Bambini—or “Children’s Home” to teach the “throw away” children of poor families who had never before had the chance of formal schooling. There, she led an effort to reconceive early childhood education based on the principles of scientific research, close observation, and her profound respect for the life of a child.  Like the brothers Wright four years before her, Montessori quickly became a celebrity, honored by governments, national leaders and the global press; and immortalized in the history books as the founder of an entire educational movement.

Today, as we straddle the two centennial celebrations of what began in Kitty Hawk and San Lorenzo, we might ponder what has changed and also what has stayed the same in the respective worlds of aviation and education.  Within a matter of a few years of its first flight, the odd back-to-front styling of the original Wright Flyer had given way to the familiar bi-planes of World War I. Within decades, those had yielded to the more formidable outlines of Spitfires Messerschmitts, and Flying Fortresses.  Those warbirds then morphed into the sleek shapes of supersonic jets, massive passenger planes, and eventually, space shuttles—taking the limits of flight into realms that Wilber and Orville could never have imagined.

If, like Ebenezer Scrooge’s hitch with the Ghost of Christmas Future, the Wrights could have glimpsed their own centennial celebration at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum—they may have been shocked at the wild variety of flying craft dangling from the ceiling, but also reassured that even the most fantastical contraptions all obeyed the same immutable laws—Lift, Thrust, Drag, and Gravity, that they had first wrestled off the ground so many years ago.

Were Maria Montessori to be afforded the same perspective two years from now, when the movement bearing her name breaks into triple digits and a shot at true posterity, what would she see?  What would she think?  Would she nod approvingly at all the Pink Towers, Red Rods and Brown Stairs, arranged just so, as they had been back in San Lorenzo?  Would she smile with gratitude at all the teachers carefully training themselves and their students to replicate each movement in the classroom precisely as it had been handed down to them? Or would she feel then, much the same way that she felt ninety odd years earlier when she wrote, “anyone who wants to follow my method must understand that he should not honor me, but follow the child as his leader”  (emphasis added).

You must be a member to read this article.  Join here.