Happy Friday, everyone.
Last week I wrote about how Montessori turns a mathematics education into a tool that a child can use to develop profound virtues of thought and character. This idea, of education as soulcraft, runs throughout Montessori’s thought. She emphasizes in many places that the real aim of education is character:
But the importance of my method does not lie in the organization [e.g. the curriculum, the environment] itself, but in the effects which it produces on the child.…
The results obtained are surprising, for the children have shown a love of work which no one suspected to be in them, and a calm and an orderliness in their movements which, surpassing the limits of correctness have entered into those of “grace.” The spontaneous discipline…constitute[s] the most striking result of our method. (Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook)
What about the practically useful, vocational role of education? In addition to developing healthy mindsets and the traits of citizenship, education has, for at least the last century, been tasked with preparing growing humans for workforce participation.
Montessori considers even this, the most practical function of education, to be primarily a matter of character, of soulcraft, of values and virtues. The question is fundamentally not one of skills—though skills are a crucial part of the picture—but of how to create the sort of person that they can find happiness in work. The capacity to center oneself with good, meaningful, effortful, externally-focused work is largely a matter of habits and values. And, unfortunately, it’s not all that common.
It is commonplace today for a person to be profoundly alienated from the entire domain of work. This is not a Marxist critique about owning one’s labor, nor an aristocratic pining for a life of leisure. It is an observation that, for many people, work is a source of bitterness, not dignity. A seemingly small subset of people find meaning in work, and the rest fail to “find their passion”—a notion that is likely part of the problem—or even resent work in a more general way.
While we still speak here and there of the value of a work ethic, the “ethic” part of this is, for us, obscure. We do not naturally see one’s personal relationship to work as a major moral issue. But, for Montessori, it is one: the people who manage to find meaning in work are not the lucky few who land the good jobs, but the good who manage to build their souls in a certain way.
“All work is noble,” Montessori wrote, “the only ignoble thing is to live without working.” And she was not speaking of high status, white-collar work in the “creative class”, but of all forms of work: “There is a need to realize the value of work in all its forms, whether manual or intellectual.”
Education should be designed around empowering people to imbue work—the whole range of professions, from masonry to engineering, from the arts to the sciences, from social work to banking—with moral value. It is a source of pride, a station in the grand battle against entropy, a way to participate in the human project of shaping the world to our benefit.
Education should offer more general value than the skills acquired on the job or in vocational training—but that general value, the soulcraft aspect of education, is not vocationally inert. It can and should nurture the beliefs and virtues associated with a life of work.
Here are four ways education can help with this:
The content of education can place more emphasis on the biographies that underlie it. There is no item of knowledge in education that is not the result of the work of some past human. Montessori recommended to teachers
that they link the subjects they taught (in the fields of geography, chemistry, physics) to the history of the various discoveries and particularly the story of the lives of men who had contributed to this conquest of progress. As a result, in these schools, a prodigious awakening of sensibility and interest came about on the part of the children who never tired of asking details about the lives of these marvelous beings. They were particularly interested in the difficulties these men had to overcome, the prejudices they had to fight, the privations they had to suffer in order to discover the secrets of the unknown world and of the mysterious forces of nature. (San Remo Lectures)
Education in history should include the history of industrial progress. Material progress is not the only or even the most important kind of progress, but it is the clearest, most concrete, and most pedagogically accessible form of progress; it itself has great moral significance in terms of the achievement of human welfare and is highly relevant to understanding the value of work.
Education should help students learn to find joy in sustained effort. This is best started very young, leveraging the capacity of infants and toddlers to exercise sustained concentration in service of goals. That many of these goals they find interesting and challenging are things that older humans find to literally be “chores”, underscores the characterological opportunity in the early years: to not shy from the effort required by the routines, tasks, and practical work of human life.
We can allow opportunities for real work where possible. This is especially true of older adolescents, who can get jobs—from the entry-level to technical, depending on the teen's skills and circumstances. But scaffolded opportunities can be provided for younger adolescents and elementary students to experience the reality, even the economic reality, of work.
These are not the only four things one can do. There is also how one thinks about school work, independent projects, the division of labor in group work, whether and how students encounter the raising or spending of money, and so on. There are also deep integrations to be made between vocational work and the kind of school work—knowledge work, when done properly—that is needed to master the foundational academic disciplines.
The deep point is that practical skills and curricular knowledge are opportunities for soulcraft, and that soulcraft should have a life of work in view. How a person relates to the economy is one of the governing moral and civic questions of an individual’s life.
What happens when a vocation is treated in a more utilitarian way, as it mostly is? Montessori captured it perfectly in her century-old description of university students, a passage that could just as easily be written today:
The inert child who never worked with his hands, who never had the feeling of being useful and capable of effort, who never found by experience that to live means living socially, and that to think and to create means to make use of a harmony of souls; this type of child…will become pessimistic and melancholy and will seek on the surface of vanity the compensation for a lost paradise.
And thus, a lessened man, he will appear at the gates of the university. And to ask for what? To ask for a profession that will render him capable of making his home in a society in which he is a stranger and which is indifferent to him. He will enter into a society to take part in the functioning of a civilization for which he lacks all feeling. (From Childhood to Adolescence)
This is the vocational problem that education is meant to solve.
Have a great weekend,
Matt Bateman
Executive Director, Montessorium
Great easy! Very thought provoking…
Maria Montessori was very practical person who gave us awesome tools to achieve heights as a human both internally and academically! That too so effortlessly!
But are we really being and also enabling educators to understand that side of it ? Having spent more than 20 years in this field Montessori philosophy is still caught up in “my way”…..”this is how we do it……” etc.
We as Montessorian’s have definitely progressed from Being a snob closed community to being a part of mainstream education system! Still there is a struggle to bring across the core of the philosophy especially to the educators. Providing clarity to new educators in order to create flexible, fun living , happy community.
Tough task to achieve! It’s like walking on the razors edge. It has to be done very subtly. It’s important to maintain the respect for the old as we do it.
Like we say in one of the spiritual organization I am a part of “deepening the roots broadening the vision”!
“Education should be designed around empowering people to imbue work—the whole range of professions, from masonry to engineering, from the arts to the sciences, from social work to banking—with moral value. It is a source of pride, a station in the grand battle against entropy, a way to participate in the human project of shaping the world to our benefit.“
Love this !