Highlighting "The Parenting Handbook"
This fall, Montessorium was lucky to bring education writer Samantha Blaisdell onto our content team. Samantha is a former teacher, trained mechanical engineer, philosophy student, and newly-minted Montessorian. She’s written a number of excellent pieces on her Substack, The Parenting Handbook, where she digs into the deep principles behind different parenting and education methods (e.g. Montessori, RIE, gentle parenting, etc.).
Samantha is going to be a regular contributor on the Montessorium website, where we will host her existing Parenting Handbook content alongside new pieces. I’ll let her introduce herself, and one of her recent articles, below.
Have a great week,
Matt
Hi everyone, I’m so happy to be here and to have joined Montessorium, and Higher Ground more broadly. It’s incredible to get to work with such passionate people who all have a bright vision for how to transform education and help children reach their full potential.
I discovered Montessori a few years ago, after I had already quit teaching and had given up out of despair of there being just such a positive vision. For years, I obsessively read blogs and watched videos of regular moms who were implementing Montessori at home with their children, with the hope that one day I would do the same with my own children. But it wasn’t until last year that I decided to sit down and read Montessori’s work for myself. There was no turning back after that—I was all in.
In a quest to get a deeper understanding of her ideas and to share what I gleaned with others, I started the Substack that Matt mentioned. This first piece tells the story of how Montessori was just as startled as anyone else to discover the capabilities of young children. Namely, that the child and her true, normal characteristics had been hidden for millennia underneath a bulky array of adult-imposed defects.
This discovery was what started Montessori’s journey to refine a method to help the untapped potential of the child fully blossom—the journey we at Higher Ground hope to continue and expand to every child across the world, from birth to adolescence. I’ve excerpted this piece, Montessori’s Discovery of the Normalized Child, below. If you’re interested, you can find the full piece, and the rest of the series, here.
Excited to be here and hope to share more soon!
Samantha
Montessori's Discovery of the Normalized Child
Written by Samantha Blaisdell on April 23, 2022
Originally published on The Parenting Handbook
Maria Montessori started her pioneering educational work in, what we would call today, special education and early childhood education. She first worked with children who were cognitively impaired or otherwise considered “ineducable” by society. Through her efforts, these children took the same academic tests as other children and, to the surprise of all, did as well as or better than them. Most people thought this was nothing short of miraculous. Montessori, however, was disturbed.
If these children, with all their disadvantages, could do as well as the “normal” children, then weren’t the normal children being held down to an artificially low level? What was happening in mainstream education to stifle children’s potential?
These questions spurred Montessori to dream of working with all children. In 1906, she got her chance when the owners of a tenement building in the slums of Rome approached her and asked if she would oversee the care and education of the children living there. These children lived in conditions of horrifying poverty—but they weren’t institutionalized. They were normal children at the very lowest echelons of society in Rome.
Thus, Montessori’s first school, known as the Casa dei Bambini or Children’s House, opened on January 6, 1907. It was here that she made incredible discoveries, later repeated with children all over the world. It was here that she developed her signature materials and method. It was here that she came to the startling conclusion that the true nature of childhood had been hidden by inadequate care, deficient environments, and centuries of prejudicial thinking about children.
The First School
Montessori believed that the unique environment of the first Casa was what made it possible to discover the true nature of the child. The physical space, the teacher, and the children were the opposite of what most educators and caretakers would have chosen as the ideal. It was not a place where anyone would have expected educational miracles or psychological breakthroughs. Yet, if any place existed where the raw abilities of children could be seen, this was it. Any success the children had here couldn’t be attributed to their parents, their school, or their teacher—it could only belong to them.
The school was in a tenement building in one of the worst slums of Rome: San Lorenzo. The tenement housed the poorest of the poor, the lowest strata of society. Depravity, despair, and routine violence were the chief hallmarks of these slums. The parents were uneducated and illiterate.
Montessori had little money with which to furnish her school and in this room, there were around 50 children, all between the ages of 2 and 7 years old. They were traumatized, malnourished, shy, and practically abandoned. Montessori hired the porter’s daughter to be the “teacher” and she provided toys and the same educational materials she had used in her prior work. She showed the teacher how to present these materials in a specific way but gave little direction otherwise.
Despite all the apparent drawbacks—the lack of a trained teacher, the poor and malnourished state of the children, the lack of culture and support the children received at home, the meager supplies—what Montessori did have was the mind of a scientist. She was a keen observer who noticed things about a child’s motivation that others would miss or misattribute. She had an active mind that looked beneath superficial behaviors to discover their causes. She was not satisfied with easy answers or the status quo. She was willing to admit when she was wrong and followed the empirical evidence over any prior ideas she might have had. She asked the children “Who are you?” and followed the evidence of her eyes to uncover the answer.
Click here to read the full piece on the Montessorium website.