The Joy Of Learning

Respect

The true hallmark of Montessori is its deep respect for the dignity of every child. While Montessori is used in a wide variety of communities with different religious backgrounds, Dr. Montessori was a Catholic and her philosophy is very much influenced by Catholic teaching of “the inherent dignity of the human person”

Respect does not mean that everybody is supposed to pretend to like everybody else all the time. Respect does mean that conflicts are to be resolved with consideration for the dignity of everyone involved. Respect is the foundation for access to the higher possibilities of learning.

Maria Montessori began looking at education from the child’s point of view, and recognized that children do not learn the same way that adults do. She also saw that adults often greatly underestimate the intellectual capacity of children, because the children are not able to express themselves fully in adult-style communication.

In a Montessori classroom, the respect toward children is based on Maria Montessori’s discovery and insight that children learn and think very differently from adults. Adults may start their learning with abstraction i.e. an adult college student may listen to a mathematics professor lecture about mathematical principles he has no concrete experience with the principles being described. Children very rarely learn in this way. Respect for the child, therefore, opened the way for the insight that children learn best from sensory approaches to knowledge before attempting abstraction. For example, the first step in learning to read is to trace one’s fingers over sandpaper cutouts of the letters of the alphabet. “From hands to mind” is the practical foundation of the Montessori Method.

The children are also shown to work on a small mat laid out on the floor and putting works away properly so that next person can use them. The mat sets the boundaries of the work, and guide the other children to respect others’ need to concentrate and not to disturb them at work. This teaches respect for the environment and to work with others in cooperative and constructive ways. As children learn about ways to care about the micro environment and the people in it, they will learn to care for the community and global environment.”Respect” in Montessori is not a command or a code for hierarchy, in the sense of authotarian “students must respect the teacher.” But, certainly, students must respect the teacher, and the teacher must respect the students, and the students must respect each other. Of course since nobody is perfect, nobody at in a Montessori school achieves this high standard of respect every single moment during the school year.

Tim Seldin, president of the Montessori Foundation, explains that “Montessori is a way of life. It is a philosophy about how human beings ought to live their lives and treat one another. It is an attitude of respect for each human being, no matter how young or how old. It is a sense of partnership, rather than power and authority.” (”Montessori in the Home,” Tomorrow’s Child, Spring 2000, p. 5.)

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