As we are now into the second semester, students are accomplishing a lot each day.  They have expanded levels of concentration, with more focus and capability of work for an extended time. 

Montessori firmly believed that our duty as educators is to prepare ourselves and our classroom environment to help each child reach his or her full potential.  She created a set of rules to help us as teachers serve our students better. (Translated from Italian)

1.      Never touch the child unless invited by him (in some form or the other).

2. Never speak ill of the child in his presence or absence.
3. Concentrate on strengthening and helping the development of what is good in the child so that its presence may leave less and less space for evil.
4. Be active in preparing the environment. Take meticulous and constant care of it. Help the child establish constructive relations with it. Show the proper place where the means of development are kept and demonstrate their proper use.
5. Be ever ready to answer the call of the child who stands in need of you and always listen and respond to the child who appeals to you.
6. Respect the child who makes a mistake and can then or later correct himself, but stop firmly and immediately any misuse of the environment and any action which endangers the child, his development or others.
7. Respect the child who takes rest or watches others working or ponders over what he himself has done or will do. Neither call him nor force him to other forms of activity.
8. Help those who are in search of activity and cannot find it.
9. Be untiring in repeating presentations to the child who refused them earlier, in helping the child acquire what is not yet his own and overcome imperfections. Do this by animating the environment with care, with restraint and silence, with mild words and loving presence. Make your ready presence felt to the child who searches and hide from the child who has found.
10. Always treat the child with the best of good manners and offer him the best you have in yourself and at your disposal.

On Monday, the Upper Elementary led the school in a Lunar New Year parade and assembly.  Two years ago we hosted an exchange teacher from China who organized a similar parade. The children made a beautiful dragon that is on display in the lobby and was used to lead our school parade.  It was a very loud and boisterous parade, which delighted us all!  The Upper Elementary presented what the Lunar New Year is and how it is celebrated around the world.  This was one of the many holidays enjoyed by our diverse population and is part of the wonderful ways we appreciate each other’s culture and traditions.  Whether it is Hinamatsuri, Diwali, Hanukkah, or Christmas, we value our families’ cultures. Montessori has always taught global citizenship; we embrace and appreciate the diversity among us. 

Montessori faced many challenges in developing and promoting her pedagogy.   She established her first school for young children in 1907 and published her Handbook outlining her Method in 1912.  By the mid-1920s, the Montessori movement had spread across Europe, as Mussolini gained power in her native Italy.  Mussolini engaged Montessori to develop schools using her method throughout Italy during his regime.  She thought she could positively influence the children of Italy despite the fascist rule, but by 1931, when Montessori teachers refused to take an oath of loyalty to fascism, the schools were closed and Montessori left Italy and returned to Spain, where she had been living prior.   During the war, Montessori lived in Amsterdam for three years and then in India for seven years, training teachers, writing and opening schools. 

Montessori was nominated six times for the Nobel Peace Prize.  She believed that the education of children was key to world peace; Understanding the cultures and religions of others leads to understanding that we are world citizens, more alike than different.  In Education and Peace, (1943) Montessori writes (again translated):

“The child who has never learned to act alone, to direct his own actions, to govern his own will, grows into an adult who is easily led and must always lean on others. The school-child, being continually discouraged and scolded, ends by acquiring that mixture of distrust of his own powers and of fear which is called shyness, and which later, in the grown man, takes the form of discouragement and submissiveness, of incapacity to put up the slightest moral resistance.  The obedience which is expected of the child both in the home and in the school- and obedience admitting neither of reason nor of justice- prepares man to be docile to blind forces.”

 

So by educating our students to be critical thinkers, to empower them to think and make decisions for themselves, we are helping them in their stewardship of the next generation.  By ensuring their education and inspiring their curiosity, we are strengthening our democracy.  They will not be ‘docile to blind forces.’ 

-Susan