The Montessori Method Part 20

But putting aside this purely scientific side of the question, the _education of the senses_ must be of the greatest _pedagogical_ interest.

Our aim in education in general is two-fold, biological and social. From the biological side we wish to help the natural development of the individual, from the social standpoint it is our aim to prepare the individual for the environment. Under this last head technical education may be considered as having a place, since it teaches the individual to make use of his surroundings. The education of the senses is most important from both these points of view. The development of the senses indeed precedes that of superior intellectual activity and the child between three and seven years is in the period of formation.

We can, then, help the development of the senses while they are in this period. We may graduate and adapt the stimuli just as, for example, it is necessary to help the formation of language before it shall be completely developed.

All education of little children must be governed by this principle--to help the natural _psychic_ and _physical development_ of the child.

The other aim of education (that of adapting the individual to the environment) should be given more attention later on when the period of intense development is past.

These two phases of education are always interlaced, but one or the other has prevalence according to the age of the child. Now, the period of life between the ages of three and seven years covers a period of rapid physical development. It is the time for the formation of the sense activities as related to the intellect The child in this age develops his senses. His attention is further attracted to the environment under the form of pa.s.sive curiosity.

The stimuli, and not yet the reasons for things, attract his attention.

This is, therefore, the time when we should methodically direct the sense stimuli, in such a way that the sensations which he receives shall develop in a rational way. This sense training will prepare the ordered foundation upon which he may build up a clear and strong mentality.

It is, besides all this, possible with the education of the senses to discover and eventually to correct defects which to-day pa.s.s un.o.bserved in the school. Now the time comes when the defect manifests itself in an evident and irreparable inability to make use of the forces of life about him. (Such defects as deafness and near-sightedness.) This education, therefore, is physiological and prepares directly for intellectual education, perfecting the organs of sense, and the nerve-paths of projection and a.s.sociation.

But the other part of education, the adaptation of the individual to his environment, is indirectly touched. We prepare with our method the infancy of the _humanity of our time_. The men of the present civilisation are preeminently observers of their environment because they must utilise to the greatest possible extent all the riches of this environment.

The art of to-day bases itself, as in the days of the Greeks, upon observation of the truth.

The progress of positive science is based upon its observations and all its discoveries and their applications, which in the last century have so transformed our civic environment, were made by following the same line--that is, they have come through observation. We must therefore prepare the new generation for this att.i.tude, which has become necessary in our modern civilised life. It is an indispensable means--man must be so armed if he is to continue efficaciously the work of our progress.

We have seen the discovery of the Roentgen Rays born of observation. To the same methods are due the discovery of Hertzian waves, and vibrations of radium, and we await wonderful things from the Marconi telegraph.

While there has been no period in which thought has gained so much from positive study as the present century, and this same century promises new light in the field of speculative philosophy and upon spiritual questions, the theories upon the matter have themselves led to most interesting metaphysical concepts. We may say that in preparing the method of observation, we have also prepared the way leading to spiritual discovery.

The education of the senses makes men observers, and not only accomplishes the general work of adaptation to the present epoch of civilisation, but also prepares them directly for practical life. We have had up to the present time, I believe, a most imperfect idea of what is necessary in the practical living of life. We have always started from ideas, and have _proceeded thence_ to _motor activities_; thus, for example, the method of education has always been to teach intellectually, and then to have the child follow the principles he has been taught. In general, when we are teaching, we talk about the object which interests us, and then we try to lead the scholar, when he has understood, to perform some kind of work with the object itself; but often the scholar who has understood the idea finds great difficulty in the execution of the work which we give him, because we have left out of his education a factor of the utmost importance, namely, the perfecting of the senses. I may, perhaps, ill.u.s.trate this statement with a few examples. We ask the cook to buy only 'fresh fish.' She understands the idea, and tries to follow it in her marketing, but, if the cook has not been trained to recognise through sight and smell the signs which indicate freshness in the fish, she will not know how to follow the order we have given her.

Such a lack will show itself much more plainly in culinary operations. A cook may be trained in book matters, and may know exactly the recipes and the length of time advised in her cook book; she may be able to perform all the manipulations necessary to give the desired appearance to the dishes, but when it is a question of deciding from the odor of the dish the exact moment of its being properly cooked, or with the eye, or the taste, the time at which she must put in some given condiment, then she will make a mistake if her senses have not been sufficiently prepared.

She can only gain such ability through long practice, and such practice on the part of the cook is nothing else than a _belated education_ of the senses--an education which often can never be properly attained by the adult. Thia is one reason why it is so difficult to find good cooks.

Something of the same kind is true of the physician, the student of medicine who studies theoretically the character of the pulse, and sits down by the bed of the patient with the best will in the world to read the pulse, but, if his fingers do not know how to read the sensations his studies will have been in vain. Before he can become a doctor, he must gain a _capacity for discriminating between sense stimuli_.

The same may be said for the _pulsations_ of the _heart_, which the student studies in theory, but which the ear can learn to distinguish only through practice.

We may say the same for all the delicate vibrations and movements, in the reading of which the hand of the physician is too often deficient.

The thermometer is the more indispensable to the physician the more his sense of touch is unadapted and untrained in the gathering of the thermic stimuli. It is well understood that the physician may be learned, and most intelligent, without being a good pract.i.tioner, and that to make a good pract.i.tioner long practice is necessary. In reality, this _long practice_ is nothing else than a tardy, and often inefficient, _exercise_ of the senses. After he has a.s.similated the brilliant theories, the physician sees himself forced to the unpleasant labor of the semiography, that is to making a record of the symptoms revealed by his observation of and experiments with the patients. He must do this if he is to receive from these theories any practical results.

Here, then, we have the beginner proceeding in a stereotyped way to tests of _palpation_, percussion, and auscultation, for the purpose of identifying the throbs, the resonance, the tones, the breathings, and the various sounds which _alone_ can enable him to formulate a diagnosis. Hence the deep and unhappy discouragement of so many young physicians, and, above all, the loss of time; for it is often a question of lost years. Then, there is the immorality of allowing a man to follow a profession of so great responsibility, when, as is often the case, he is so unskilled and inaccurate in the taking of symptoms. The whole art of medicine is based upon an education of the senses; the schools, instead, _prepare_ physicians through a study of the cla.s.sics. All very well and good, but the splendid intellectual development of the physician falls, impotent, before the insufficiency of his senses.

One day, I heard a surgeon giving, to a number of poor mothers, a lesson on the recognition of the first deformities noticeable in little children from the disease of rickets. It was his hope to lead these mothers to bring to him their children who were suffering from this disease, while the disease was yet in the earliest stages, and when medical help might still be efficacious. The mothers understood the idea, but they did not know how to recognise these first signs of deformity, because they were lacking in the sensory education through which they might discriminate between signs deviating only slightly from the normal.

Therefore those lessons were useless. If we think of it for a minute, we will see that almost all the forms of adulteration in food stuffs are rendered possible by the torpor of the senses, which exists in the greater number of people. Fraudulent industry feeds upon the lack of sense education in the ma.s.ses, as any kind of fraud is based upon the ignorance of the victim. We often see the purchaser throwing himself upon the honesty of the merchant, or putting his faith in the company, or the label upon the box. This is because purchasers are lacking in the capacity of judging directly for themselves. They do not know how to distinguish with their senses the different qualities of various substances. In fact, we may say that in many cases intelligence is rendered useless by lack of practice, and this practice is almost always sense education. Everyone knows in practical life the fundamental necessity of judging with exactness between various stimuli.

But very often sense education is most difficult for the adult, just as it is difficult for him to educate his hand when he wishes to become a pianist. It is necessary to begin the education of the senses in the formative period, if we wish to perfect this sense development with the education which is to follow. The education of the senses should be begun methodically in infancy, and should continue during the entire period of instruction which is to prepare the individual for life in society.

aesthetic and moral education are closely related to this sensory education. Multiply the sensations, and develop the capacity of appreciating fine differences in stimuli, and we _refine_ the sensibility and multiply man's pleasures.

Beauty lies in harmony, not in contrast; and harmony is refinement; therefore, there must be a fineness of the senses if we are to appreciate harmony. The aesthetic harmony of nature is lost upon him who has coa.r.s.e senses. The world to him is narrow and barren. In life about us, there exist inexhaustible fonts of aesthetic enjoyment, before which men pa.s.s as insensible as the brutes seeking their enjoyment in those sensations which are crude and showy, since they are the only ones accessible to them.

Now, from the enjoyment of gross pleasures, vicious habits very often spring. Strong stimuli, indeed, do not render acute, but blunt the senses, so that they require stimuli more and more accentuated and more and more gross.

_Onanism_, so often found among normal children of the lower cla.s.ses, alcoholism, fondness for watching sensual acts of adults--these things represent the enjoyment of those unfortunate ones whose intellectual pleasures are few, and whose senses are blunted and dulled. Such pleasures kill the man within the individual, and call to life the beast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _S_--Sense, _C_--Nerve centre, _M_--Motor.]

Indeed from the physiological point of view, the importance of the education of the senses is evident from an observation of the scheme of the diagrammatic arc which represents the functions of the nervous system. The external stimulus acts upon the organ of sense, and the impression is transmitted along the centripetal way to the nerve centre--the corresponding motor impulse is elaborated, and is transmitted along the centrifugal path to the organ of motion, provoking a movement. Although the arc represents diagrammatically the mechanism of reflex spinal actions, it may still be considered as a fundamental key explaining the phenomena of the more complex nervous mechanisms.

Man, with the peripheral sensory system, gathers various stimuli from his environment. He puts himself thus in direct communication with his surroundings. The psychic life develops, therefore, in relation to the system of nerve centres; and human activity which is eminently social activity, manifests itself through acts of the individual--manual work, writing, spoken language, etc.--by means of the psych.o.m.otor organs.

Education should guide and perfect the development of the three periods, the two peripheral and the central; or, better still, since the process fundamentally reduces itself to the nerve centres, education should give to psychosensory exercises the same importance which it gives to psych.o.m.otor exercises.

Otherwise, we _isolate_ man from his _environment_. Indeed, when with _intellectual culture_ we believe ourselves to have completed education, we have but made thinkers, whose tendency will be to live without the world. We have not made practical men. If, on the other hand, wis.h.i.+ng through education to prepare for practical life; we limit ourselves to exercising the psych.o.m.otor phase, we lose sight of the chief end of education, which is to put man in direct communication with the external world.

Since _professional work_ almost always requires man to make _use of his surroundings_, the technical schools are not forced to return to the very beginnings of education, sense exercises, in order to supply the great and universal lack.

CHAPTER XV

INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION

"... To lead the child from the education of the senses to ideas."

_Edward Seguin._

The sense exercises const.i.tute a species of auto-education, which, if these exercises be many times repeated, leads to a perfecting of the child's psychosensory processes. The directress must intervene to lead the child from sensations to ideas--from the concrete to the abstract, and to the a.s.sociation of ideas. For this, she should use a method tending to isolate the inner attention of the child and to fix it upon the perceptions--as in the first lessons his objective attention was fixed, through isolation, upon single stimuli.

The teacher, in other words, when she gives a lesson must seek to limit the field of the child's consciousness to the object of the lesson, as, for example, during sense education she isolated the sense which she wished the child to exercise.

For this, knowledge of a special technique is necessary. The educator must, "_to the greatest possible extent, limit his intervention; yet he must not allow the child to weary himself in an undue effort of auto-education_."

It is here, that the factor of individual limitation and differing degrees of perception are most keenly felt in the teacher. In other words, in the quality of this intervention lies the art which makes up the individuality of the teacher.

A definite and undoubted part of the teacher's work is that of teaching an exact nomenclature.

She should, in most cases, p.r.o.nounce the necessary names and adjectives without adding anything further. These words she should p.r.o.nounce distinctly, and in a clear strong voice, so that the _various sounds_ composing the word may be distinctly and plainly perceived by the child.

So, for example, touching the smooth and rough cards in the first tactile exercise, she should say, "This is smooth. This is rough,"

repeating the words with varying modulations of the voice, always letting the tones be clear and the enunciation very distinct. "Smooth, smooth, smooth. Rough, rough, rough."

In the same way, when treating of the sensations of heat and cold, she must say, "This is cold." "This is hot." "This is ice-cold." "This is tepid." She may then begin to use the generic terms, "heat," "more heat," "less heat," etc.

_First._ "The lessons in nomenclature must consist simply in provoking the a.s.sociation of the name with the object, or with the abstract idea which the name represents." Thus the _object_ and the _name_ must be united when they are received by the child's mind, and this makes it most necessary that no other word besides the name be spoken.

_Second._ The teacher must always _test_ whether or not her lesson has attained the end she had in view, and her tests must be made to come within the restricted field of consciousness, provoked by the lesson on nomenclature.