“Adults have taken it for granted that children are sensible only to gaudy objects, bright colors, and shrill sounds, and they make use of these to attract a child’s attention. We have all noticed how children are attracted by songs, by the tolling of bells, by flags fluttering in the wind, by brilliant lights, and so forth. But these violent attractions are external and transitory, and can be more of a distraction than boon. We might make the comparison with our own way of acting. If we are busy reading an interesting book and suddenly hear a loud band passing by in the street, we get up and go to the window to see what is happening. If we were to see someone act in this way, we would hardly conclude that men are particularly attracted by loud sounds. And yet we make this conclusion about little children. The fact that a strong, external stimulus catches a child’s attention is merely incidental and has no real relation with the inner life of the child which is responsible for his development. We can perceive evidence of a child’s inner life in the way he immerses himself in the fixed contemplation of minute things that are of no concern to us. But one who is attracted by the smallness of an object and focuses his attention upon it does so, not because it has made a striking impression upon him, but simply because his contemplation of it is an expression of an affectionate understanding.”
Category Archives: Paideia
Reverence before the mystery of creation
“Our attitude towards the newborn child should not be one of compassion but rather of reverence before the mystery of creation, that a spiritual being has been confined within limits perceptible to us.”
“But if in the child are to be found the makings of the man, it is in the child also that the future welfare of the race is to be found”
-Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood
Peter Maurin
So I just finished The Long Loneliness which is a kind of autobiography Dorthy Day wrote back in the fifties. I highly recommend it, first of all. The first section about her early life is fascinating, the section about the birth of her daughter is moving (and should be required reading for mothers), and her depiction of Peter Maurin, who practically drove her to start the Catholic Worker movement, left me wondering why he hasn’t been canonized yet. There will be much, much more on The Long Loneliness as I re-read it in the coming months, but we started looking again at Maurin’s Easy Essays, and here is one for a taste. I suspect a similar feeling of unconnectedness to my experience in the world is what has caused me to drift away from my interest in formalized theology. (No offence intended, studiers of formalized theology, it’s just that I have found God more easily in my garden than in Aquinas lately.)
Body talk
There are schools of thought which encourage children be fed by having several different foods (including dessert!) set before them at the beginning of a meal, and the child will naturally choose the foods which his body happens to need at the moment (and not necessarily dessert). The thought is that a small child, not yet driven by mere routine, not having been taught simply to finish his plate, is still connected to voice of her body. We haven’t implemented this totally into Lucy’s world, but we don’t force her to make a “happy plate” either.
Release from solitude
Allow me a lenghty quote, and a few (less lenghty) comments. ? Is it me, or does anyone else wonder why it is taking so many Americans so long to realize some of the things Montessori mentions below? ? (More on this later – I think I can combine some of my readings!)
“But let us think, for a moment, of the many peoples of the world who live at different cultural levels from our own. ? In the matter of child rearing, almost all of these seem to be more enlightened than ourselves–with all our Western ultramodern ideals. ?
