Montessori pedagogy and new media

Guten Morgen! Ich bin Mario Valle aus der Schweiz, ich spreche nur wenig Deutsch, so werde ich Englisch mit Jörgs Übersetzung sprechen.

Good morning! Today I will cover a hot theme: digital technology in the Montessori education.

A more and more frequent scene, isn’t it? Parents handing tablets and smartphones to babies who don’t even know how to scratch an ear.

And schools that pride themselves on having introduced digital technology to the extreme. Years ago I accepted both situations without problems because …

… I work at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, with some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world …

… and where I collaborate with a special kind of children: scientists, who are as curious and inquisitive as children.

I started asking myself questions when I enrolled my son in a Montessori school. Enrolment on trust, I must say, because at that time I didn’t know anything about Montessori. My main concern was how a technology-free school could prepare kids for the future. Well, not entirely technology-free, …

… there were a computer connected to internet, but the kids weren’t queuing to use it. The line was instead in front …

… of this old mechanical typewriter. Why?

So this started my scientific investigation, started at the source, that is, …

… trying to understand what Maria Montessori thought of the technology of her time.

First of all, I noted that Maria Montessori was no stranger to the scientific and technological world of her time, as evidenced by her school curriculum. In fact, from 1883 she attended the Royal Technical School “Michelangelo Buonarroti”. Then, to continue her studies in mathematics and science, she moved to the Royal Technical Institute “Leonardo da Vinci” After graduating, she enrolled in the faculty of Physical, Natural and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Rome.

When Maria Montessori became known internationally, she was held in high regard by the leading scientists and technologists of her time. Among her supporters we have Thomas Alva Edison, probably the most famous technologist and entrepreneur of the time and …

… Alexander Graham Bell, who in 1913 with his wife Mabel founded the “Montessori Educational Association” in their home in Washington, DC.

Quite recently a draft has come to light in the archives, written by Maria Montessori probably in 1947, titled: “Introduction on the Use of Mechanical Aids” as a preface to an Indian book on technologies in school. The introduction to the text gives us an idea of how Montessori viewed technology: “Montessori was fascinated by the technology of her time, which absolutely delighted her and where she recognised opportunities to unite our world, and saw means by which an interconnected world society could be supportive of others, and thus advance humankind”. In the text the Doctor remarks …

… the importance that technology will have in schools, but strongly reaffirms that primacy, without exception, must be given to the development of the complete child and observes that technological tools are not always up to the task.

The same ideas are found in other texts, for example in “From Childhood to Adolescence” she celebrates the technical and scientific advances of humankind, but emphasizing again the importance of the development of the person before the use of the machines.

To clarify my ideas, I went to ask to Grazia Honegger Fresco, that was one of the last direct students of Maria Montessori, what Montessori would have done with digital technology.

Grazia answered: “Maria Montessori was very curious, she would certainly have tried and studied what could be done with computers and social networks. Curious but concrete. She would have used these materials in the manner of all other materials: free choice, individualization, self-correction, and so on”. Certainly the world has changed since the time of Maria Montessori, children no longer seem the same and, like us, they are immersed in the most diverse technologies from morning to evening. Therefore, I think it is more effective to start, not from …

… imaginative questions like “What would Maria Montessori say about the iPad?”, but from the ideas that come behind …

… all the materials and all the educational practices that we find in a Montessori school.

Let’s start with a fundamental question: is the brain of today’s children different from the one of the children that Maria Montessori studied? Are they an evolution of our species or not?

Renilde Montessori, Maria’s granddaughter, clarifies in an interview: “Many parents ask the same question, that is, they ask if the “useful toys” invented by Maria Montessori at the beginning of the century are not a bit old-fashioned, in comparison with the progress that the human species seems to have made since then. The answer is no. The materials and toys are the result of choices made by the children with whom Maria worked for fifty years, and the children have not changed. It is very difficult to explain to parents that the human species has been unchanged for thousands of years, and that the universal child does not change, despite external changes”. Science says exactly this, …

… that the human brain did not have time to evolve in the very short time span in which we rely on technologies. Even writing, a highly respected technology, took place in a blink of an eye on an evolutionary time scale.

But it is equally certain that the brain changes with exercise. The areas in control of a pianist’s fingers enlarge as she practices, as this study demonstrates. It is also obvious that the human brain is modified in the same way by the use of smartphones and tablets, in particular by the rapid and frequent movement of the fingers on the screen. Since it is the same type of brain modification due to exercise, I would not call it a technology-related effect or even an evolution of the brain.

One sign of these changes is certainly the Flynn effect, the increase in the average intelligence quotient (IQ) of the population observed by James Flynn over the years, growing around three points per decade. The effect most likely derives from a greater ability to solve logical and abstract problems, frequent in today’s social and cultural environment.

All right, then? Not really, because …

…the effect has been reversing since 1990, as this study found. But worse, …

… also creativity started diminish in the same years, at least in the States.

Given these effects on the human mind, it’s easy for the media to shoot headlines, like “Digital Dementia” or “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” or say everything and the opposite of everything about the consequences or benefits of technology for our children, while ignoring the most serious scientific research.

For those reasons it is better if we return to consider …

… the relationship between mind and technology. We can start from the most important aspect: …

… the movement. It is common experience that children never stand still. But is it really such a reprehensible activity? No, absolutely not. Movement is an integral part of our cognitive abilities and the basis of the development of the mind, …

… as many studies have demonstrated while re-evaluating the function and importance of motor areas in the physiology of the brain.

Studies that have shown that: “The same rigid boundary between perceptual, cognitive and motor processes end up by turning out to be largely artificial: not only does perception appear immersed in the dynamics of action, resulting more articulated and composite than in the past it was thought, but the brain that acts is also and above all a brain that understands”, as Giacomo Rizzolatti, the discoverer of the mirror neurons, summarizes. Note that …

… Maria Montessori understood the close connection of the movement with the development of the mind exactly fifty years before Rizzolatti.

And where is the movement here? There is a lot of technology, but the movement essential for the children development is totally missing.

Let’s move on to another aspect. In a Montessori school, children don’t stay fixed to their place. What you see here is quite common. Instead, in a traditional school the teacher would surely have thundered: “Go back to your desk! You are disturbing others!” But the little girl who is watching here is working hard, as a neurophysiological discovery of the 90s tells us, …

… that of mirror neurons. These neurons are motor neurons that are activated when we perform an action, but also when we look at the same action performed by others. This means that when we look at an action we are really simulating the same action internally, …

… as in a multi-age group like the one we see here. The yellow-dressed child is really working and learning just by moving among the other children and imitating them internally. Even the presentation of a material by the teacher is designed, with the analysis of movement, slowness and pauses, precisely to facilitate the work of mirror neurons in capturing new movements.

With touch technologies, where are the gestures to imitate? Reducing them to tap and swipe prevent the child to access a powerful form of learning.

In concrete terms, what does all this imply on the activities of the school? I don’t say we have to ban digital technology from Montessori schools. I say we have to put it in the right place with the right priority and timing.

There are many tasks that stimulate the children better than a tablet. For example, instead of letting them draw on a tablet, …

… let’s teach them to think with their hands, as can be clearly seen in the MindMap technique, where we use texts, colors, symbols, arrows and anything else drawn by hand to stimulate our brain associative capabilities.

Going back to real computers, I show you the work of two Italian teachers that have created a “Computer nomenclature” on the line of …

… the traditional ones.

They have added the computer history line to the well-known one and created a new material: “Build a computer”. Note that dissecting a computer has the added benefit of removing the magical aura that many put around the digital technology.

All this is covered in depth in my book “Montessori-Pädagogik und neue Technologien” translated from Italian by Wolfgang Wedekind.

There is little doubt that technology should be introduced to schools. As early as 1947 Maria Montessori wrote: “I believe, however, that the introduction of mechanical aids will become a general need in the schools of the future”. Not so much to enhance learning, but because children are immersed in technology outside school and the school must not give up its educational and guiding purpose in this area as well.

But when to introduce them?

To understand when makes sense to introduce technology in the life of our children, I ask for help to these diagrams conceived by Maria Montessori for the training course held in Perugia in 1950. Sure, Montessori teachers and trainers here can explain them in great detail. However, I would like to focus on two things that impressed me.

The first one concerns the label placed next to the “bulb” to identify the period up to six years: “human formation” or, as we would say today, “formation of the person”. Maria Montessori argued very clearly that the first six years of life are the time when children explore the world around them, thus developing the basis of intelligence. It is in these years and above all in the “thousand days that count”, the first three years of life, that the prerequisites for personality are laid. In this time…

… “the child learns by means of his own activity and if given an opportunity to learn actively he develops his character and personality too”, as Maria Montessori wrote in the aforementioned text “Introduction on the Use of Mechanical Aids”. Let’s now move on to the other diagram.

As far as we are concerned, around the age of six an important process starts, the conquest of abstraction. Before that age, the child struggles to distinguish what is real from what exists only in his mind, such as …

… this little girl who wipes the tears of a television character. Tender scene, but a scene that makes us reflect on how certain technology offers a vision “under glass” of a virtual world.

And now the future. A future that gives us a paradox: we want to prepare our kids for it, but we struggle to imagine what the world will be like when our kids will leave the school system. A world where there will be jobs that we do not even imagine and for which the office as conceived today will no longer make sense. A world where machines will have replaced us in an increasing number of tasks. Not to speak about climate, water and energy crisis. After all, making predictions has never been easy.

In Blade Runner, a cult science fiction movie, there are flying machines, artificial intelligences and cyborgs, but the main character uses a telephone booth to call Rachael, the replicant. The director just was not able to imagine cellular phones. And there is no shortage of examples of …

… totally busted technological predictions like these. Given this, what is the point of defending introduction of digital technologies in school as “preparation for the future”?

Perhaps the solution to the dilemma is the one proposed by Alan Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”, which he did in first person, conceiving, among other things, laptops and modern graphic interfaces.

The strange thing is that the best futurologists are also the least listened to: the children, who sometimes have insights into the future that are not silenced by what we, the adults, think we know about reality.

The innovators of this kind are the ones who will create the future and you, the teachers, have them in front of you at school. Let’s look at some examples.

Google’s founders are often cited as examples of innovators who revolutionized the world. The funny thing is that their technological capabilities are practically never mentioned, instead it is emphasized how …

… they have learned to be self-motivated, questioning what happens in the world, doing things in a slightly different way. However, they are not the only innovators who have come out of Montessori schools. Their teachers have done something special for them? No, the teachers have tried “only” to be good Montessori teachers, I’m convinced. Or …

… the videogame pioneer Will Wright.

For him Montessori was an “imagination amplifier” that prepared him for the creation of “The Sims”, “SimCity”, “Spore” and “Super Mario Bros”. “SimCity comes directly from Montessori … It’s about pure learning at your own pace.” …

… Finally, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who poured into it what he learned at the Montessori school. But if you are tired of seeing examples in the business and technological fields, here is another Montessori alumnus: …

… Julia Child. Chief, famous as much for her fantastic sense of humor as for her culinary skills. Julia has attributed to her Montessori education the birth of her love for discovery, for working with hands and her continuous pursuit of excellence. In my opinion this excerpt from one of her books could be part of every Montessori diploma courses.

So what do kids need to face the future? Or rather, to invent their future?

First, we must forget a vision of school education as a linear process of preparation for the future, as the late Ken Robinson recalled, and realize how much the overall formation of the person is worth compared to grades or school paths. In other words, we should expect a school that educates and not a school that trains in some technology.

I don’t think, therefore, …

… that in the future the person who knows everything is needed. Among other things, in my field, technical knowledge becomes obsolete within six months. For these “know-it-all” persons, Eric Hoffer wrote: …

… “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” …

… Many years before, Doctor Montessori claimed exactly the same: “It is therefore necessary to prepare the human personality for unforeseen eventualities…”.

When thinking on what we should ask to technology at school, I have often observed my colleagues. I admit that it is a rather small and peculiar sample, but it may be a taste of those characteristics that school and education should provide. First of all, I don’t see geniuses or furious mathematicians around me but normal people from various cultures – we come from twenty-six different countries, if I have not forgot anyone – who always want to learn and do not pretend to know everything, they know where and how to find the information they need, are able to mentally navigate complex architectures and interact, collaborate and contribute to the scientific user communities. Some of them come from school backgrounds that are absolutely alien to technology, but with a passion for the world of computers that brought them here. For me all this is another proof that we need education and not primarily technological training.

Another confirmation comes from an unsuspected source: …

… Steve Jobs. In a 1995 interview they asked to him: “Some people say that this new technology is maybe a way to bypass the school problems. Are you optimistic about that?”

Jobs replied: “I absolutely don’t believe that. As you’ve pointed out I’ve helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world and I’m absolutely convinced that is by no means the most important thing.

The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.”

This is the real spring that projects our little ones towards the future! A teacher who guides their approaches to materials and technology. A teacher who observes and gives each child the intellectual nourishment that satisfies his needs, a teacher who, through Maria Montessori’s “useful toys”, helps these inhabitants of the future to create that personality that will make them able to use properly any technology.

And please, don’t feel guilty for not having schools full of technology! Like this funny t-shirt, respond to those who say that Montessori is not suitable for today’s technological world: “I’m a Montessori Teacher. What’s YOUR superpower?”. A Montessori teacher is really a wonder woman (or a superhero) that guides our digital natives to any future that waits for them.

But set your minds at ease, we will never be able to be better than our kids about technology. Instead we forget that we can collaborate, each contributing with what he is good at: them with the fluency in the technological field, we with a future vision on the implications of technology.

Thank you for your loving attention!