John Dewey - Ultimate Collection: 40+ Works on Psychology, Education, Philosophy & Politics. Джон Дьюи
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one from the other that the exercises of practical life cannot perform the function of the exercises arranged to train the faculties and senses of the child.
The exercises of practical life are designed to teach the child to be independent, to supply his own wants, and to perform the actions of daily life with skill and grace. The pupils keep the schoolroom in order, dusting and arranging the furniture, and putting away each piece of material as soon as they are through with it. They wait on themselves while they are working, getting out the things they want, finding a convenient place to work, and then taking care of the apparatus when they have worked with it as long as they like. In schools where the children do not live in the building, a midday lunch is served for the pupils; and, except for the cooking, the children do all the work connected with the meal, setting tables, serving food, and then clearing away and washing the dishes. All the pupils share alike in this work, regardless of their age; children of three and four soon learn to handle the plates and glasses, and to pass the food. Wherever possible the schools have gardens, which the children care for, and animal pets of a useful sort—hens and chickens or pigeons. Even the youngest children put on their own wraps, button and unbutton their aprons and slippers, and when they can not do it for themselves, they help each other. The necessity of the pupils’ learning to take care of themselves as early as possible is so much insisted upon that in order to help the youngest in learning this lesson, Montessori has designed several appliances to give them practice before they begin to wait upon themselves. These are wooden frames, fitted with cloth which is opened down the center. Then the edges are joined either with buttons, hooks and eyes, or ribbons, and practice consists in opening and closing these edges by buttoning, hooking, or tying as the case may be.
These appliances may be taken as a bridge between the two sorts of exercises in use in the Montessori schools. They mark a transition from the principles which are common to most educational reformers to those associated particularly with the method worked out by Madame Montessori. Another quotation from her first book gives the clew to an understanding of this method: “In a pedagogical method which is experimental the education of the senses must undoubtedly assume the greatest importance.... The method used by me is that of making a pedagogical experiment with a didactic object and awaiting the spontaneous reaction of the child.... With little children, we must proceed to the making of trials, and must select the didactic materials in which they show themselves to be interested.... I believe, however, that I have arrived at a selection of objects representing the minimum necessary to a practical sense education.”
Madame Montessori started her career as a teacher among deficient children in the hospitals where Seguin had worked. Naturally she experimented with the material used with her subnormal pupils when she began working with normal children. It is equally natural that many of the objects which had proved useful with the former were also usable with the average school child. Ordinary school methods succeed with deficient children when used more slowly and with more patience; and in the same way Madame Montessori found that many of the appliances which had before been used only for deficients produced remarkably successful results with ordinary children, when used with more rapidity and liberty. Therefore her “didactic material” includes many things that are used generally to develop sensory consciousness among deficients. But instead of using the material in a fixed order and under the guidance of a teacher, the normal child is allowed complete liberty in its use; for the object is no longer to awaken powers that are nearly lacking, but to exercise powers that the child is using constantly in all his daily actions, so that he may have a more and more accurate and skillful control over them.
The exercises to develop the faculties of the child are especially so arranged as to train the power to discriminate and to compare. His sensory organs are nearly all exercised with apparatus designed, like the button frames, to allow the child to do one thing for one purpose. The pupil does not have to use these objects in any fixed order or work for any length of time on one thing. Except for the very youngest children, who do only the very simplest exercises, pupils are at liberty to work at any one they wish and for as long as they wish. Montessori believes that the child will turn naturally to the exercise he is ready for. The materials to develop the sense of touch are among the simplest. There are small boards with strips of sandpaper running from the roughest to the smoothest, and pieces of different kinds of cloth; these the child rubs his hands over while his eyes are blindfolded, distinguishing the differences. The appliances designed to teach the child to distinguish differences of form and size use the sense of touch as a strong aid to sight. There are blocks of wood with holes of different diameters and depths, and cylinders to fit each hole. The child takes all the cylinders out, rubs his fingers around their edge and then around the rim of the holes and puts them back in the proper hole. The ability to judge of size is also exercised by giving the child a set of graduated wooden blocks with which he builds a tower, and another set which he may use to make a stair. The power to distinguish form is developed by wooden insets of all shapes which fit into holes in a thin board. The child takes out the insets, feels of them and then replaces them. Later the teacher tells him the geometrical name of each form while he is touching it, and then has him distinguish them by name.
There are sets of cardboard forms to correspond to the wooden ones, and metal plaques where the form appears as a hole in the center of the plaque. These are used in games which consist in matching the same form in the different materials, and for drawing the form in outline on paper to be filed in with colored pencils.
The method of teaching reading and writing uses the sense of touch to reënforce the lesson the pupil gets through the eye and ear. Sandpaper alphabets with each letter pasted on a square of cardboard are given a child. He rubs his finger over these as if he were writing and makes the sound of the letter as he rubs. Movable letters are used only after the child is familiar with the letters by touch, and with them he makes words. Writing usually precedes reading when children learn in this way; when they take pencil or chalk, they are able to trace the letters with very little difficulty because the muscles as well as the eye are familiar with the forms.
The sense of hearing is exercised by means of two sets of bells, one fixed to give the scale, the other movable, so that the child can make his own scale by comparing with the fixed scale. The children play a number of games where they are as quiet as possible, acting out simple, whispered directions from the teacher. There is as well a series of rattles filled with sand, gravel, and grains, and the game is to guess which rattle is being shaken. The sense of color is developed in the same way by means of specially arranged apparatus. This consists of small tablets wound with colored silks in all colors and shades, which are used in many different ways, according to the age and skill of the pupil. The youngest learn to distinguish two or three colors and to tell dark from light shades. The older pupils who are familiar with the colors acquire enough skill in their manipulation to be able to glance at one tablet and then go to the other side of the room and bring either an exact match or the next shade lighter or darker, according to what the teacher has asked for.
Muscular development is provided for by giving the children plenty of time during the school day to run and play, and by means of apparatus for free gymnastics, while the finer coördinating muscles are being constantly exercised while the child is manipulating the appliances for sense training. The faculty of speech is trained by having the children practice the pronunciation of words and syllables. The fundamental conceptions of number are taught much as are reading and writing. Besides the sandpaper numbers and the plain cardboard ones, there is a series of wooden bars varying in length from one to ten meters, which the children use in connection with numbers in learning the combinations up to ten.
The foregoing description of the didactic material is very brief and general and omits many of the uses of the appliances as well as reference to some of the less used material, but it serves to illustrate the nature and purpose of the work done by the children. Pupils acquire a marked skill in the handling of the material which appeals especially to them, and children of four and five learn to write with very little effort. In fact, Madame Montessori believes that the average child is ready for many of the ideas which he usually does not get until his sixth year at an earlier age, when they can be acquired more easily; and that a system such as hers which allows the child to perform one set of acts at the time when he is ready for it saves him a great deal of time later on, besides giving a more perfect result than could then be achieved.
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