“The basis of the reform of education and society which is a necessity of our times must be built upon the scientific study of Man the Unknown”. (Dr.Maria Montessori, Clio Press, The Formation of Man ,p 9) Can we ever know ourselves fully? As social beings we crave communication, collaboration and an environment to share our ideas, our very essence, desiring at times to leave a permanent legacy to humanity. Maria Montessori herself was not immune from human tendencies. Although she did not expound on them directly they can be extrapolated from her writings. Woven through the overall bundle of her life and work are the essences of human development, the human tendencies; activity, communication, order, orientation, exploration, concentration, repetition, and abstraction.
There can be little denial that Montessori ‘s development of a new pedagogy forms the basis for the human tendency of activity or work. Through her sharing of this work both orally and written she filled the need for communication. She engaged her mental faculties in the human tendencies of abstraction and imagination by taking the work of her predecessors and contemporaries to develop didactic materials and a pedagogy that was new. She also physically interacted with children deemed “deficient”. This choice of work, given her religious background and inference from texts, also fulfilled the spirit. Although humble success gives a sense of satisfaction and in her desire to share her findings with others for the good of children it is definite that she knew her work to be meaningful and purposeful.
Montessori oriented herself to working with “deficient children” and by doing so created a new system to help educate them. She could have rested in her work, but instead chose exploration, investigating and discovering new uses for her system. The search for a reason why privileged children were doing only as well as her “deficient children” on standardized testing can be seen as a desire to give meaning to experiences, to classify educational outcomes, to find order and she communicated these theories with others.
Throughout her lifetime Montessori dealt with issues of self-preservation; not just physical safety but also preservation of who she was and her achievements. Even more impressive than these hurdles was the continued self-development throughout her works and life witnessed by her repetitious search for new knowledge, her abstraction of that knowledge that created more self-perfection, more exact and precise pedagogy.
It could be possible that the “Montessori Method” would not exist as we know it had Montessori not had a supportive home environment that allowed her to initially search out activity that piqued her interests. This is the crux of the human tendencies as they relate to education reform. We need to provide our children with a safe, ordered environment to which they can orient and then explore. Communication and relationship opportunities will encourage positive self-development and birth the even deeper exploration through repetition of experiences which invites abstraction and imagination. Through self-perfection, exactness and precision children will experience a desire to excel and when supported by a stronger sense of security about who they are they can come to the world as a true global citizen.