This issue’s “Question and Answer” feature has been taken directly from the Daily Telegraph (London), which reported on 29 January 1936, that “The mind of the child, particularly its development during the first eight years was discussed by delegates attending the fourth biennial conference on mental health at Westminster today. Among the speakers was Dr. Maria Montessori, founder of the famous Montessori system of education, which has revolutionized child education. In a paper on “Those First Eight Years” Dr. Montessori dealt with the differences between child activities and those of the adult.”
Question: ‘Why does a child scrub a table?’
Answer: ‘To make it clean?’ ‘Wrong’, says Dr. Montessori and explains. “A child’s object in scrubbing a table for example”, she said, “is not, strange to say, to get it clean. His real object is to scrub because the intense urge of a sensitive period will cause him to go on repeating a given action till, he has mastered it, but the adult’s patience wears thin in the process.”
This characteristic is of the greatest importance for understanding the difference between adult and child psychology. The bored adult who says “You’ve done enough of that, now stop” is pronouncing sentence of death on the hidden life of the child’s development.
The child who has been thwarted in one of its sensitive periods, prevented from behaving in accordance with its inner promptings, has lost and lost forever that particular chance of natural growth.
When something in the environment frustrates the inner functioning of the child, the existence of a sensitive period may be testified by violent reactions, uncontrollable distress with no apparent cause, which we class as temper, tantrums or naughtiness.
An inner need at its tensest meeting with opposition is the cause of this trouble and perturbation. It is the appeal and defence of the thwarted creature, and is a state comparable to the sudden rise of temperature without adequate pathological cause which is a feature of childhood’s ailments.
Dr. Montessori said it was therefore essential that we should investigate the causes of all naughtiness on the part of children and of behaviour which we dubbed caprice merely because we found it inexplicable.
AMI Communications – 2005/1, page 40-41
