John Snyder

Tending the Light of Intelligence

In a previous article we explored the importance of the imagination in our work with the children of the elementary. We took as our touchstone something Dr. Montessori wrote in To Educate the Human Potential:

The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim therefore is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inmost core.

There is a related exhortation in the chapter on “Intelligence” in The Advanced Montessori Method, Vol. 1, which I think of as “Montessori elementary in a nutshell:”

Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire “to make him learn things,” but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called the intelligence.

In this, Montessori has herself sown a seed which we as classroom teachers can, if we work carefully and reflectively, nurture into a strong and flexible practice that can serve children of all cultures, temperaments, predispositions, backgrounds and abilities. Montessori gently, but firmly, turns our attention away from the aims and concerns of traditional education to the key concern of Cosmic Education: supporting the natural development of the reasoning mind in all its aspects.

It is for this purpose that we appeal to the child’s imagination to inspire her to work. It is for this purpose that we painstakingly prepare a physical and social environment in which the elementary child can self-educate. It is for this purpose that we give the lessons, build the Going Out program, and communicate high expectations for the children’s learning.

In the Children’s House, the teachers must constantly ask themselves, “What tasks am I doing for the children that they could be doing for themselves?” While this question is still a good one at the elementary level, the more important question for the elementary teacher is “What thinking am I doing for the children that they could be doing for themselves?”

The Second Plane is the time of great development in thinking and great passion for exploring and understanding the world and, indeed, the cosmos. It is the springtime of the intellect in which all the many seeds planted in the Children’s House begin to bloom most beautifully. One sees the intertwined growth of what the Greeks called “practical reason” and “theoretical (intellectual) reason.” Whereas the younger child often repeats tasks for the sheer joy of doing them, the Second Plane child often seems to be thinking just for the sheer joy of thinking.

A story from Albert Einstein’s childhood is most instructive. Five-year-old Einstein was shown a magnetic compass by his father. This mysterious device with the needle that was moved by some invisible force made “a deep and lasting impression” on young Albert. Albert’s father and other family friends noted Albert’s fascination with such things and continued to offer him such experiences.

At the age of 10, a family friend introduced Albert to Kant’s philosophy and to Euclid’s Elements. Euclid became such a touchstone for his young mind that he came to call it “the holy little geometry book.” Einstein also loved to tinker around in his father’s shop, building things and carrying out his own investigations.

Montessorians can easily recognize these sorts of experience as cognate with the work in the Montessori elementary. The salient point is that by the time Einstein came in contact with the very rigid German education establishment, he was already well-acquainted with the true life of the mind and with the development of his own particular mind in all its particular beauty and idiosyncrasy.

Albert, the young adolescent, was famously unhappy with, and unsuccessful in, the rigid confines of traditional schooling, complaining that it killed creativity and the natural passion for learning. Einstein’s experience was exactly what Montessori observed as she contrasted her own experiments in the classroom with the traditional methods of her day.

One might well speculate that had Einstein’s developing mind been straitjacketed by traditional education from a very early age, the world might not now remember him as the great scientist and humanitarian that he actually became.

As Montessorians into whose care dozens of potentially world-class minds are annually given, we do well to evaluate everything we do by asking whether or not it supports the love of learning and the development of independent thinking in the children.

We also do well to remember—along with Montessori, Howard Gardner and others—that human intelligence is a multi-faceted thing. One mind may be liberated by the mysteries of magnetism and geometry, another by the mysteries of animal and plant life, another by the challenges of music or drama, another by the infinite depths of language or the compelling questions of human behavior and culture. This is a key insight behind Montessori’s development of Cosmic Education for the Second Plane child and her exhortations to bring the whole universe to the elementary-age child.

Aiding Thinking

So how do we keep the light of intelligence “burning within [the child]?” By consistently making intelligent, informed choices about lesson content, the structure of the physical environment, and the modes of interaction between guide and child and between child and child.

As to content, we must, as Montessori said, sow as many seeds as possible in the given time, and these seeds must be drawn from all areas of human knowledge and experience. This responsibility and the breadth and depth of human knowledge dictate that we do not have time to indulge adult fantasies about pre-designed, grade-leveled curricula, nor do we have time to expect every child to pursue, much less master, every lesson given.

Just as the adults in Einstein’s young life, we cannot predict what encounters with the world will produce “deep and lasting impressions” in each child. We must have unshakeable faith that every child will respond deeply to something, and we must keep sowing more and more seeds, remembering, as AMI elementary trainer Dr. Kay Baker reminds us, that Montessori’s directive was to sow the seeds, not to plow the field and plant the seeds.

To have as our goals the sowing of the maximum number of seeds and the fueling of the “light of intelligence” or to have as our goals the delivery of a standard curriculum and the assessment of the children’s performance on it lead to very different decisions about how to spend one’s time and energy in the classroom. This is, in fact, the single greatest source of conflict between the Montessori paradigm and the current “accountability to standards” paradigm.

If we Montessorians sacrifice—whether to school district directives, parent pressure, or our own fears—this way of working with the children and this orientation toward our role as guides, we give up any chance of creating the miraculous results that Montessori saw in her own classrooms.

To any who might accuse us of resisting accountability to standards, we must reply that our accountability is necessarily to a much higher, much more challenging standard: that of the astonishing potential of the developing human mind, before which we stand daily in near-religious awe. Full realization of this unbounded and unpredictable potential is what we give up when we settle for higher numbers on exams and more uniform performance across a lock-step curriculum.

How we choose our goals also effects how we view and present the Montessori materials. If our goal is to support the maturation of innate intelligence, broadly construed, we will offer the materials as means of self-education and, above all, of child-directed exploration. Exploration requires uninterrupted work time and the freedom to “fail,” or discover dead ends, as well as more fruitful outcomes.

If our goal is to achieve high scores on standardized tests or “universal coverage” vis-à-vis some standard curriculum, we will tend to use the materials as “manipulatives” in a traditional teacher-oriented system of direct instruction and thinly-disguised drill.

Paradoxically, a century of Montessori classroom experience shows that the only way to achieve the results that attracted the world’s interest to the work of Dr. Montessori is to protect the children’s freedom to choose and to work at their own pace, and to resist our ever-present impulses to control, to direct, to over-teach—all ways of doing for the children what is properly the children’s own thinking.

Truly collaborative learning is another sine qua non of the Montessori way of aiding the natural development of intelligence and independence. Like most Montessori freedoms, freedom to collaboratively learn runs against the grain of the current increased emphasis on standards-based individual performance and assessment. The Montessorian wisdom is that the best way for individuals to learn is for self-selected, interest-driven groups to learn together.

Clues that this is the case keep cropping up in all sorts of places. For example, a major Norwegian study of intelligence and birth order recently attracted attention in the mainstream press. [e.g., NY Times, 6/21/07] Researchers studied almost a half-million Norwegians, including about 62,000 pairs of brothers to see if they could detect a link between performance on standard IQ tests and birth order. There has long been evidence, albeit inconclusive, that oldest children do better on intelligence tests than their younger siblings, and there has been much “nature vs. nurture” speculation as to possible causes.

The Norwegian study found that, on average, older brothers do indeed slightly outperform their younger brothers. Attempting to determine whether the difference was due to biological or environmental factors, the researchers then examined the test scores of brothers who had become the eldest child in the family after the death of a first-born brother. They were surprised to find that these young men’s scores were, on average, the same as those who were biologically eldest. In other words, these boys had, after the death of their sibling, come from behind to achieve parity with the whole population of first-born brothers.

Stanford social psychologist Robert Zajonc suggests that the cause of these observed improvements in IQ scores could be the beneficial effects of becoming the mentor and tutor for younger children in the family. In other words, the act of teaching or coaching one’s younger siblings could, in the words of the Times, “benefit the teacher more than the student.” Montessori elementary teachers who daily observe the interactions between older and younger students in the mixed-age classroom will have no trouble understanding the effect Zajonc is pointing to.

Lev Vygotsky famously theorized that children learn best when they are challenged to perform just beyond their best individual effort and then helped to success by a more knowledgeable partner. Hierarchy-minded American educators have typically interpreted this to mean “helped by the teacher” and reduced the idea to that of traditional instruction through “scaffolding,” but Vygotsky himself left open other possibilities.

In the Montessori elementary we see the salutary effects of peer-aided learning. We see the children often stretching each other far beyond where we as adults might have assumed children could cognitively go. And they need not be “Einsteins” to reap the benefits of such collaboration.

John R. Snyder is an upper elementary guide at Austin Montessori School in Austin, TX.