Hand Made Materials or Hands On Learning?

by Tim Seldin

Many Montessori guides tend to place too much emphasis on the importance of teacher prepared charts and card material at the elementary level.

As many elementary guides point out, it takes years to compile it all, especially in a smaller school. However, what seems missing to me in this equation is the principle of the use of the prepared material simply as a springboard to get children intrigued.

In following the child at the elementary and secondary level, we can use a much richer array of learning strategies than cards and charts. There are museums and fields, quarries, our side yards outside the school, our small gardens, the school library collection and the public libraries, book shops, and the Internet to name a few.

The best teachers in any school ask more questions, rather than providing children with canned solutions and information.

They use Socratic dialog, weave stories in the old oral tradition, and encourage children to interview people who know far more than we do.

These teachers help children to get started in writing their own plays and developing their own recreation experiences. Children can use their imaginations far more effectively than cards, but imagination is fueled by a blend of direct experience and guided imagery from a story told or a past experience recreated.

For example, some years ago I wrote about my favorite memory of a day as a child at Barrie, when we spent a day sailing the Chesapeake Bay on a Viking Longboat (which we were told to imagine was a Greek warship like Odysseus might have sailed. When the day was done, we beached the boat, cooked lamb on an open fire, and slept under the stars while our teacher, dressed as the blind poet Homer (try to picture obi-wan-kenoobi) recited the Odyssey from her memory.

For almost a century, educators in Montessori schools around the world, and progressive schools very much like ours in many ways, have taught children to flake flint as in the Old Stone Age, card, spin and weave raw wool, build daub and wattle structures, learn knot tying and lashing, cook over camp fires, prepare for hikes, make their own costumes for plays and special events, and cook ancient meals.

No, we do not all live next to a library, university, quarry, forest, lake, river, fossil beds, or have acres and acres of land. But even on a shoestring, it is possible to study nature in the midst of an urban environment, "do" science even without a laboratory, grow plants in containers, and make the cultures of the world (those of the world today and those of the far distant past) come alive.

I don't mean to suggest that the card materials and charts have no value, just that I believe that they are less important in the big picture than they have come to seem. These other skills are just as important, if not more so.

As for cards and charts, in addition to those that we do prepare, let's not forget how much many children enjoy, or would enjoy, preparing their own to use as study aids, teaching tools for their friends, and as one form of research report. Cards, charts and timelines can be created by children, as well as by adults.
Topics like the Great Lessons were not meant to be units of teacher directed study, but rather invitations to a party, or journey, celebrating and exploring our culture, history, technology, the process and history of science and discovery, and our arts, philosophy and search for spiritual meaning in our lives. As Maria wrote, we sow seeds of culture.

We always walk the razor's edge between society's current expectations for what children should know and be able to do by a given age, and the child's initiative and ownership of her education and passion for those things that capture her interest and imagination.

While we all are concerned that our children end up culturally literate and competent, I worry that in our wish to control and ensure that things develop as we, the adults, have planned, we lead many children to become passive, quietly bored, and eager to get on with their "real" lives outside of school.
I believe it was John Dewey who said, school should not prepare children for life, it should be life itself as it is daily lived by children (paraphrased, not a direct quote).