John Snyder

Community, Purpose and Responsiblity in the 9-12 Class

In The Advanced Montessori Method, Vol. 1, (AMM 1) Maria Montessori sets out a list of things to look for in the behavior of the child that to her signal “the evolution of spiritual order.” They are, in essence, the desired outcomes of Montessori education. She divides them into three clusters: behaviors related to the child’s work, behaviors related to the child’s conduct and behaviors related to the child’s cooperation with the adults in the environment.

Within the cluster related to work, the looked-for behaviors can be summarized as (a) regular engagement in concentrated work and (b) the display of enthusiasm or joy in the act of work.

With regard to conduct, one hopes to see correlations between periods of concentrated, joyful work and orderly thinking and behavior. One can also expect to see altruistic or prosocial behavior (“the part the child takes in the development of his companions.”).

According to Montessori, spiritual order is increasing in the child when he or she moves from one level of obedience to another until finally the child “obeys eagerly and joyously.” One also looks for correlations between improvements in work, conduct and obedience.

Establishing Order

It is the guide’s role to prepare an environment for the child in which the child’s inner order (and the attendant outward manifestations of it) can evolve along the lines laid out by Montessori. Part of this preparation involves the physical provision of the classroom, and another equally important part involves the establishment of a secure, healthy social environment in which the child can thrive. What does this entail?

In my work with 9-12 year olds, I prefer not to use the language of “rules” or its euphemistic cousin “guidelines.” Instead I use the language of community, responsibility, and purpose. In the 9-12 class, the children should be actively engaged in using their rapidly developing powers of reason to probe, analyze and comprehend their experience of responsible participation in a purposeful community. I want to establish a community of learning, and the relation I wish the individual student to have to this community is one of participation and care, not rule following.

The approach begins with two axioms: that we as a class constitute a certain kind of community, and that our class community is part of a larger school community. Moreover, we are not a community merely thrown together by an accident of birth or geography; we are instead a community gathered for certain purposes:

• To support all its members in joyful learning;
• To support all its members in developing strength of character;
• To continue far into the future (beyond the tenure of its present members).
The community operates to realize its purposes according to two beliefs:
• People learn and develop best when they have freedom of choice, freedom to explore and question, freedom of movement, freedom to communicate and freedom to find and correct their own errors.
• Freedom must always be in balance with responsibility. The kind of freedom that supports the community’s purposes is freedom responsibly used.

(Readers will recognize these two beliefs as straightforward re-statements of the freedoms Montessori wanted all children to have at school and her insistence that freedoms be responsibly employed for the good of the individual and the community.)

The responsibilities which all members of the community have for the community are these:

• The responsibility to advance the purposes of the community.
• The responsibility to abide by the customs and decisions of the classroom community and of the school community as a whole.
• The responsibility to question the customs of the community when they seem to be causing suffering or injustice, or when they seem to conflict with the purposes of the community.

The Spiritual Order

This framework, understood and shared by the community, creates an orderly environment in which individuals can develop what Montessori called “spiritual order” (in our day we might want to call it “psycho-spiritual order”). Behaviors that tend to foster an environment of concentrated, joyful work; self-control; compassionate action on behalf of others; and cooperation with legitimate authority according to one’s best understanding of justice are tied directly to the shared purposes and responsibilities.

Conversely, actions that obstruct one’s own learning or that of others, actions destructive of community and actions that harm the physical or social environment can be shown objectively to be in conflict with the specific purposes, beliefs and responsibilities of the community, not merely contrary to the guide’s will. In those cases, the guide plays an important role in respectfully helping the child to reflect on how some action, done or contemplated, is in conflict with the purposes or fails to honor one or more of the responsibilities. Over time, the children can do more and more of this sort of analysis for themselves or with each other; this is the development of consciousness and moral reasoning in the community. It is another dimension of independence leading to more personal power and the readiness to accept more freedom and responsibility.

The ability to accept responsibility for oneself and one’s community is arguably the most important outcome of a Montessori education. Margaret Stephenson, one of the most influential teachers and developers of Montessori elementary theory and practice in the English-speaking world, often made the point that academic deficits, should they occur, can be corrected in adolescence, but that personal responsibility will be largely developed in childhood or not at all.

The framework described here makes visible the responsibility the children have for making the community work smoothly and for addressing problems that come up in the community. This level of responsibility is possible because the children have the freedom to act on behalf of themselves and others. Conversely, the level of freedom in the classroom is kept in balance with the children’s ability to use it responsibly, as demonstrated by the best efforts of the children. Montessori would have said that it is the adult, not the child, who acts irresponsibly if the child is given more freedom than they can responsibly use.

Montessori writes in AMM 1, “freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline.” [her emphasis] This is also the thinking behind the framework of purposes and responsibilities. Instead of a list of rules to be followed, there is a (short!) list of purposes to be advanced, and the chief of these is to support all members of the community in their work of self-development.

The framework of community-purpose-responsibility encourages the children to look to and rely on each other for help. It also speaks of the responsibility that each has for all and that all have for each. It understands that living out these purposes will likely stretch the community’s abilities and patience in surprising and unpredictable ways as the community struggles to aid and assimilate those children who have serious difficulties finding their psycho-spiritual anchor.

Montessori makes the point in her discussions of obedience that a child who does not yet have the physical and intellectual abilities necessary to obedience cannot properly be said to be disobedient. For the 9-12 age group, cooperation and obedience are closely tied to understanding and moral reasoning. The framework I am describing reflects the belief that children of this age often need to know the reasons why and that most of them cheerfully cooperate with adults who are willing to take their questions seriously and willing to be vulnerable and to admit mistakes -- even as they resist adults who expect to be obeyed simply by virtue of their adulthood. In the case that a child believes a demand to be unjust or unreasonable, the worst thing is for the child to silently obey. The alternative provided by the framework is for the child to respectfully question the demand. Then there can be a discussion in which either the child comes to understand the demand to be just and reasonable (although not necessarily pleasant), or the adult comes to understand that the demand was indeed unjust or unreasonable. Both possible outcomes are positive for the community.

It is important that the school as a whole, and not just the individual classrooms, cultivate a deep respect for the children’s concerns and perceptions of injustice, and that the children have access to all adults in the community, including the highest levels of administration. The children must know from experience that their ideas and concerns will be as respectfully received and as carefully considered as those of the adults in the community.

Living purposefully and responsibly requires more creativity than following rules. For 9-12 year olds, it specifically challenges them to stretch into the next level of moral reasoning and development, to go beyond the rule-based morality which is their natural comfort zone (Stage 2 moral thinking, as described by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg). It invites them to put their energy and formidable mental abilities into creating something strong and beautiful, instead of into finding and exploiting loopholes in a legal system.

The creativity needed is the creativity of the whole community in concert. It is wonderfully unclear what it means to “support the self-development of members of the community.” Indeed, it means very little except in the context of a specific community and its specific concerns. The community is always on a journey of discovery for such meaning. Practically speaking, this means frequent and open discussion about the problems in the community and how to get beyond them, as well as times of recognition and celebration when community goals are reached and community needs are met.

It is important to the success of the community-purpose-responsibility framework that children understand what they do and do not have the power to change about the framework. In this case, the purposes cannot be changed since they are the purposes of any good school. Likewise, the beliefs cannot be changed because they are an indispensable part of what makes the school a Montessori school. The responsibilities are open to discussion and empirical testing but are not easily changed since they are the logical and pragmatic consequences of attempting to be a Montessori community. What are open to debate and revision are those many lower level procedures and norms that the framework calls “customs” or “conventions.”

Contemporary research into moral development stresses the importance of children’s coming to understand the difference between genuine moral issues and issues related to social conventions. (Cf. the work of Elliot Turiel or Larry Nucci.) In practice, children frequently are in a position to see flaws in classroom conventions that the guide cannot see. When there is freedom in the environment to question and improve conventional practices, there are wonderful opportunities to learn from the children’s experience – another way to “follow the child.”

John R. Snyder is an Upper Elementary Guide at Austin Montessori School in Austin, Texas.