Montessori on beginnings
Happy Friday, everyone.
The New Year is a new beginning, and we celebrate it as such. We take stock of the year past, not out of nostalgia, but to weigh what we want to change for our immediate future.
Maddy shared with us all a couple months ago her experience of moving, of a new beginning, and how much it resonated with her experience of our shared educational mission. The phenomenon of beginnings was indeed something that Montessori was attuned to, and I thought I would share some four short passages from her to ring in the New Year.
1. “…a purpose…when the purpose is obscure…”
Anna Maria Maccheroni was a long-time collaborator’s of Montessori, especially with regards to music education. When she first met Montessori, she was inspired by her method and her words, feeling it was immensely important—but she didn’t know what to do with it. Montessori wrote to her, in a letter:
The state in which you find yourself is a beautiful sign of predestination: I can’t tell you how much it interests me. Gathering one’s own energies for a purpose, even when it seems that those energies are being dispersed—and when the purpose is obscure—is a great act, the fruits and comfort of which will sooner or later make themselves felt. (quoted in The Child is the Teacher, de Stefano)
It is characteristics of new beginnings that they involve uncertainty, potentially even at the level of the basic purpose of the new direction. But an intentional beginning is marked by a focus that, if nurtured, brings clarity and results over time.
2. “…little glimmers…”
Montessori believed that each child, though small and lacking in almost every adult human power, was a window into human nature. In one of her lectures recorded in Education and Peace, Montessori notes that humanity makes great, big, lasting, complex things that add up to “a world that is a marvel”—but, on their own terms, they can be immensely hard to understand.
But each child is a window into the origins of this grandeur.
It is not always imperative to see big things, but it is of paramount importance to see the beginnings of things. At their origins there are little glimmers that can be recognized as soon as something new is developing. (Education and Peace)
Beginnings are in a way simpler, and all the more important for their simplicity. Each child is precious as a clear instance of unspoiled human potential, and so it is with the germs of promising projects and plans.
3. “…we cannot know the new…”
Montessori often found that she had to supersede her own work. For a long time she had used a certain form of alphabetic material, fashioned beautifully out of wood and metal, as an initial introduction to the alphabet for children. For a period she found herself unable to produce or commission one, and so, as a last ditch effort to have at least something, she cut the letters herself out of sandpaper.
She immediately found that these roughly cut and colored sandpaper letters were superior as an introduction to letters. Reflecting, she wrote that:
We want the old because we cannot know the new, and we always look for the grandiosity, which lies in things that are already passé, without recognizing in the humble simplicity of new beginnings the germ that will have to develop in the future. (The Discovery of the Child)
Part of the point of a fresh start is to force oneself to look at things fresh and not be shackled to the past. The past is alluring because it is more known, more fully and intricately developed, more realized. To exceed that in the future, it is often necessary to put that aside and look for something new which could yet exceed the old, if only we help it develop.
2023 is set to be a year of beginnings for me. I have a second child on the way within the next couple of weeks. It will be my first full year in Austin, after many in New York. It will be my eighth (!) year at Higher Ground—but to me, it still feels like a new beginning. Every year working, learning, and growing with you all underscores that.
And every New Year is a beginning within a beginning. It’s an opportunity to look at our work as the “little glimmers” that we “see at the beginnings of things”—to be proud of what we’ve done but to not be content with “things that are already passé”—to see our collaboration as “a great act, the fruits and comfort of which will sooner or later make themselves felt”. We are organizationally young, radicalism in education is historically young, and the best is yet to come.
Have a great weekend and a happy New Year,
Matt Bateman
Executive Director, Montessori