Notices by Richard Carroll (cheshire_ocelot@cawfee.club), page 2

For the past couple years, most of my books have been boxed up to protect them from toddler hands that want to throw them around. This morning I decided to try shelving them again, starting with these books. Please pray for their safety so the rest of their friends can be freed, too.

I finished that pragmatic handbook on the subject, so now it’s time to go to the source: The Montessori Method, by Maria Montessori. I’m reading a 1960s edition of the original from the 1910s.

Montessori's idea of "liberty" makes little contact with that word as it was defined by Kant or as it is understood in northern Protestant countries. Montessori's "liberty" is that of Catholic tradition, which offers an absolute freedom to do what is right, but reserves to authority at all times the power of determining what is wrong.

This and the other excerpt from the introduction explains something that seemed a bit off in the other book,which emphasised the “liberty of the child” but also seemed very structured in the lessons and routines.

We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.

Montessori emphasises the child’s liberty throughout the book, but note also that she adds here, “We must, therefore, check in the child whatever offends or annoys others, or whatever tends toward rough or ill-bred acts.” She’ll discuss this more later, but while a Montessori classroom is much freer than is traditional, it’s not anarchic.

The teacher must learn to judge when she should and shouldn’t intervene when a child is doing something, and she says this was the most difficult thing for her new teachers to learn, especially those experienced in traditional classroom settings.

Montessori:

If discipline is to be lasting, its foundations must be laid in this way and these first days are the most difficult for the directress. The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in the case of the old-time discipline.
And all this because our aim is to discipline for activity, for work, for good; not for immobility, not for passivity, not for obedience. A room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom very well disciplined indeed.

@prettygood lain references, naturally. For instance, my servers are “navi[number],” my Mac Mini is “arisu-mini,” other devices have received other names like “eiri” and “tachibana.”