Character-Building
Happy Friday, everyone.
As Montessorians, we believe that concentrated work helps a child build a virtuous character. Indeed, we think work is central and all-important to the task.
Whether it’s preparing a meal, scrubbing a table, or counting by 10s to 1000, we see a child who is doing more than merely accomplishing a practical task or gaining academic knowledge. We see a child who is forming habits of mind and character that will propel her toward virtue, success, and happiness for her whole life.
We emphasize often that the child is happy to do this work— that it’s captivating and soul-nourishing, even.
But despite our explanation that children in a Montessori environment really enjoy working, I worry that parents new to the Montessori approach still conjure a different image when they hear our emphasis on the character-building properties of work.
I worry that they imagine something a bit more like the movie Holes:
After being wrongly convicted of a high-profile theft, Stanley Yelnats is sentenced to 18 months at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention center in the Texas desert. Stanley is required to dig holes every day, each 5 feet deep by 5 feet wide. After this is relayed to him, Stanley asks what he should be looking for when he digs. Mr. Sir, the warden’s assistant, sternly replies:
You’re not looking for anything. You’re building character. You take a bad boy, make him dig holes all day in the hot sun, and it turns him into a good boy. That’s our philosophy at Camp Green Lake.
Even though Camp Green Lake’s ‘rehabilitation’ scheme is quite exaggerated and silly, it is still a great representation of the traditionalist idea that hard work builds character. It echoes the exhortations we have all heard from our elders at some point—perhaps that the chores we need to do, the homework that’s been assigned, or the thermostat being set low in the winter builds our character.
Like Stanley, however, the assurance that we were building character might not have provided us with much solace as we begrudgingly got to work.
I’m sure you sense that there’s a world of difference between the hard-nosed traditional attitude toward ‘building character’ through work and the Montessori attitude.
But if both Montessori and the traditionalists believe work helps a child build character, what exactly differentiates their views? Let’s look at two aspects:
Elevating, not humbling
In the Montessori approach, work is used to raise the child in her own eyes. It adds to her abilities and gives her a deepened sense of self-confidence and pride. Work elevates a child—it adds to her dignity.
Part of the reason for this is because work in a Montessori environment is real. The infant who can sit at a low table and drink from an open glass, the toddler who can put on her own jacket, the preschooler who can wash a window, are children succeeding at the activities of life.
A child who engages with the work in a Montessori environment is getting better at living. Not only is she learning to do the task at hand, but she is also practicing higher-level skills like focus, attention to detail, and self-control: the fundamental components of any virtue.
This work elevates a child because, through it, she proves that she is capable of accomplishing all that her life will demand of her.
The traditionalists, by contrast, demonstrate that they think work builds character because it is humbling. Work, for them, is a means of lowering a child’s view of themselves. Think of the stern traditional teacher punishing a child by having them write lines, clean chalkboard erasers, or run laps. The goal is clearly not to enhance the child’s pride. It’s to lower the child, to reduce her to tasks they view as debasing.
Ultimately, the traditionalist belief in the character-building property of work stems not from a positive view of the power of work, but from a negative view of children—while the Montessori view holds both work and children in high esteem.
Achieving purpose, not toil
The virtue of real work in a Montessori environment only gets you so far. If Mr. Sir, Camp Green Lakes’ spokesman, dictated to the child that she scrub the table or else, this would certainly not result in the child’s enjoyment—and neither would it result in pride or character-building.
There is another necessary ingredient: choice.
Work in a Montessori environment is not just about getting the child to perform the mechanical movements in a task or even in achieving the desired outcome. It’s about an alignment of the child’s mind and body. It’s about helping the child think and then align her actions with her thoughts.
It’s why we allow children in our classrooms to choose which activity to work on at any given point, to persist with it as long as they want, and to move on when they’re ready. We want to help children become purposeful—to set ambitious goals, determine what is needed to achieve them, and to stick with it even when there are obstacles and frustrations.
We don’t leave the child to her own devices, to default on choosing altogether or to make destructive choices, but view our most important role as inspiring the child to choose well.
The traditionalist view, by contrast, is clearly not about helping a child achieve purpose. It’s not about capturing or inspiring a child’s mind; it’s about occupying a child’s body. It’s about duty and toil. It’s about digging holes.
Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, encapsulates the difference well. When reflecting on his plan to start the school to help educate newly freed slaves, he said:
“From the very beginning, at Tuskegee, I was determined to have the students do not only the agricultural and domestic work, but to have them erect their own buildings. My plan was to have them, while performing this service, taught the latest and best methods of labour, so that the school would not only get the benefit of their efforts, but the students themselves would be taught to see not only utility in labour, but beauty and dignity; would be taught, in fact, how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, and would learn to love work for its own sake.” 1(emphasis added)
It is learning to love work, to find the beauty and dignity in doing your best, in thinking about your purpose and doing what’s required to achieve it, in doing work that is meaningful to you, that really matters to your success in life and to your virtue.
It is only this kind of work that nourishes a child—body and soul—and helps her build character.
Enjoy your weekend!
Samantha Watkins
Editor, Higher Ground Education
T. Washington, Booker. Up From Slavery: The Original 1901 Edition (A Booker T. Washington Classics) (p. 79). Global Publishers. Kindle Edition.