Essai n°3 - Education des sens

L'enfant découvre le monde par ses sens, et les utilise pour comprendre l'environnement dans lequel il cherche à s'inscrire. C'est autour de ce principe que l'essai suivant se tisse. Il s'agit de décrire et de comprendre l'intérêt de l'aire Sensoriel dans la classe Montessori.

Maria Montessori said : “A child is by his nature an avid explorer of his surroundings because he has not yet had the time or means of knowing them precisely.” (Montessori, 1997 p.102). Exploration  is made through the use of the senses that allows the child to perceive the world around them, leading them to the goal of development, known as the understanding of the world and the child’s integration within it. Senses are innate and present in our bodies since we were born. But the development of those senses is our responsibility. Then, we can ask ourselves: how can we develop them to their full potential? Maria Montessori designed a series of material in order to answer this question. But how does the use of the sensorial materials in a Montessori classroom enable the child to make sense of their environment, and how is this preparing them for later learning? First, we will see the importance of first-hand experience and the sensorial basis of learning for children. Then we will discuss the human tendencies and sensitive periods to understand how the sensorial material help the child to categorize and organize previously absorbed sensory experiences. To continue, we will focus on the “mathematical mind”, and the role of the sensorial material in its development. Last, we will explain the roles of the favorable environment and the empathic practitioner in supporting child’s development.

For Montessori, “[t]he hand is an instrument of man’s intelligence” (Montessori, 2007). It is through the hand that the child can discover the shapes and get in contact with the objects of the world around them. “The opportunities to manipulate objects stimulate and reinforce specific neural pathways implicated in development of key abilities” (Isaacs, p.100). Indeed, manipulating objects allows the child to build a mental image of those. It is what Montessori calls the “materialized abstraction”: through the senses, the child receives stimuli from the environment they explore, which result in sensations. Then, they will form some precepts from these sensations. When the child is ready, language will help them to create a concept, and acquire a full understanding of the object (MCI, 2010); “From sensations to ideas – from the concrete to the abstract” (Montessori, 1912, p.227).

            For Montessori, education is a whole process, whose aim is to help the child to fit in the world they belong to. Therefore, they need to discover it, by experiencing it with their senses in order to understand it. She deplores the fact that education nowadays focuses only on intellectual knowledge: “We have but made thinkers, whose tendency will be to live without the world” (Montessori, 1912, p.221).  For her, each learning experience has to be based on a sensorial approach. Sensorial development is the foundation of intellectual development: “Both hand and senses can be perfected to perform much higher tasks and thus become ever more worthy servant of the spirit that retains them in its service. Any real education of the intellect should also raise the potentialities of these two faculties, which are capable of almost indefinite improvement.” (Montessori, 1997, p.148)  About the education of senses, she states: “This education, therefore, is physiological and prepares directly for intellectual education, perfecting the organs of sense, and the nerve-paths of projection and association” (Montessori, 1912, p. 220). The main example is the development of the mathematical mind, which will be discussed further on.

The child, from three years old, enters the conscious absorbent mind – or “social embryo” as Montessori calls this stage. One of the main sensitive periods presented in this moment is the refinement of the senses. The child needs to practice and improve their senses. Following their tendencies to explore the environment, as well as the tendencies for repetition, exactness and precision (Stephenson, 2000), they aim to discriminate and order all the information absorbed in the mneme for the past three years.

            The sensitive period for order is visible from the birth and relies on the same human tendencies. It explains the child’s urge for constancy and order.

            The sense of movement plays an important role in Sensorial education: linked with the tendencies to explore their environment and to work with the hands, the child moves and uses their muscles to get in touch with the world. By touching, they build a muscular memory and increase the integration of concepts.

            The sensitive period for language plays an important role in the conceptualization of the world: naming the object is the last step before the conceptualization is completed. It is embedded in the tendencies for thinking, for imagination and for communication. When the child tries to solve a problem, during the exploration of the sensorial material, the teacher should engage conversations to force them to express their thoughts, as well as introduce them to a specific vocabulary to enable the generalization of the concept.

            Education of the senses must happen in the first years of life, because it is at this very moment that the child conceives basic ideas and forms intellectual habits (Montessori, 1997). She advises to use the time between three to six years old, “when there is a natural inclination to perfect one’s senses and movements” (Montessori, 1997, p.146).  The child gathers many sensory impressions during the first three years of their life, during the unconscious period of the absorbent mind. After three years old, it is time for them to put order in the mneme, to organize and classify those perceptions. “This is the time when we should, therefore, methodically direct the sense stimuli, in such a way that the sensations which he receives shall develop in a rational way” (Montessori, 1912, p.220). The design and use of the sensorial materials encourage the child to work in a systematic way, contributing to logical thinking.  As “material abstractions” (Montessori, 2012), they aim “to help the child to attain a maximum refinement of their senses and to help them discriminate between stimuli” (MCI, 2010, p.7). It gives the child the means to reach perfection of their senses and to put order in their sensations: by being auto-educational (for individual use with control of error), by isolating one sense and by containing a rational gradation of stimuli (Montessori, 1912). The material has to be clear and ordered, to allow experience, exploration, and repetition from the child and a minimum intervention from the teacher (MCI, 2010).

The “mathematical mind” is a mind which is especially interested in mathematics. For Montessori, all human beings, having enjoyed a favorable environment, should enjoy math: “Thanks to the preparation of their minds, they feel pleasure. Observations of exact mathematical relationships must be stored in the subconscious, so that when the conscious mind is brought into these things, an interest is aroused.” (Montessori, 2012, p. 71) If the child has had a lot of sensorial experiences with mathematical concepts in the first years of their life, when they are able to consciously conceptualize them, it will ring a bell and make sense (Montessori, 2012).

            The activities of the sensorial area help the child to develop rational cognitive skills, such as matching, grouping, one-to-one correspondence, concepts as length and size, plan or solid shapes, exploration of fractions. They introduce them indirectly to algebra and geometry (MCI, 2010), preparing their minds for later deeper understandings.

“[The child is] an ardent explorer of a world that is new to him. And, what he needs, as an explorer, is a road (that is; something which is straight and limited) which can lead him to his goal and keep him from wandering aimlessly about” (Montessori, 1997, p.102). This road is the favorable environment, and the designer of the road is the teacher. To facilitate exploration and discovery, the environment should provide order and freedom to the child, allowing them to experiment and explore. It should allow the child to move, to help themselves independently from the adult. As said above, the auto-corrective material improves children’s autonomy. The only way of learning is to do it themselves. Indeed, no teacher can teach a child how to smell without letting the child use their nose. “We can not create observers by saying, ‘observe’, but by giving them the power and the means for this observation, and theses means are procured through education of senses” (Montessori, 1912, p.229). Thus, the teacher must not interfere in the slightest way. Using Montessori’s vocabulary, the empathic “directress” (Montessori, 1912) should observe the child working as a psychologist would, letting the child to take their time and absorb the environment. Their aim is to “guide the spontaneous education of the child” (Montessori, 1912, p. 174). 

            In the video clip included in the unit, we can see a little girl using the knobbed cylinders. She is focused, working on her own. When she makes a mistake, no adult rushes to her to correct what she did. At the end, she realizes that she has done something wrong in her exercise and fixes the problem by herself, using the auto-corrective quality of the material. She went to the shelf to help herself and used her fingers to take the knobbed cylinders from the solids insets, feeding her need for movement. Thanks to the presentation of the teacher, she knew where to find it, how to use it and how to put it back to its place, following her sense of order. Then, she refined her senses doing the activity (such as visual, tactile, baric, stereognostic senses). In a  nutshell, this sensorial activity shows us how the favorable environment and the empathic practitioner support the child’s need for exploration and discovery.

The world is an endless source of stimuli for our senses. Walking out of my house, I feel the sun and the wind on my skin, I look at the blue color of the sky and I smell the dry hay coming from the fields. Those sensations will help me to understand that it is summertime. But our senses need to be trained and refined, to build a strong foundation to later learning. Thanks to the sensorial material in the favorable environment in a Montessori classroom, the child is able to improve the faculty of senses and understand the world around them, in order to find a place where they can bloom, like the poppy flower in my garden.