Articles by Dr. Maria Montessori, Article No. 1 (Second lecture of the 19th International Montessori Training Course held in London in 1933). The following transcript of the lecture appeared in the January, 1999 issue of the "Voice of IMC"

The Two Natures of the Child

I was saying to you that the centre of our pedagogy, the foundation upon which all is based, is the conversion of the child. We used this word "conversion" in a new application. Generally the meaning given to it when speaking of adults is a "change of convictions", finding new bearings as regards the orientation of one's conscience. But, in speaking of the child we mean the revelation of a nature different from one he had previously been known by - a nature so different that thirty years ago, when it was first noticed, some of the journalists who wrote about it used the term "the mew child". What did they mean? Evidently a type of childhood that had not been known before: children who seemed endowed with a different nature. The foundation of all that we are doing therefore consists in being able to distinguish between these two different natures of the child. One of them, the more superficial, the one which we are accustomed to observe in the ordinary circumstances of life is well known to all. It is the nature which is taken into consideration by psychologists as if it were the one and only nature of the child.

And it is exclusively this nature which is taken into consideration by the general trend of pedagogy. But, when we speak of the nature of the child we are referring to that hidden nature which requires special conditions if it is to reveal itself and to develop.

I should like now to sketch for you the two pictures in order to illustrate the difference between their psychological aspects.

Children, as they appear in ordinary circumstances, are distinguished by certain characteristics, for example by disorder in their movements. Because of this, they often break and destroy things. In this type of child there is a restlessness which the adult is unable to dominate. Even he appears to have dominated it, he has not really done so. One can see it by other reactions, the child is disobedient and responds to imposed discipline by bursts of what is generally called naughtiness or by tears. Other characteristics in this general behaviour of childhood are lying and constantly to interfere and attempt to guide them. Then, there is possessiveness. Children are strongly attached to their own belongings: to their toys, etc., and are always ready to fight to safeguard exclusive possession of whatever they are attached to.

Fear and dependence are other features peculiar to this nature. Generally these children are full of fears. They are frightened of the dark, to mention one aspect, and they are extremely dependent on their elders. They constantly seek out someone to help them or to keep them company. This may be interpreted as a natural attachment of an emotional nature. If so, there would be nothing objectionable - on the contrary! But often it is not a case of affection. Often the child who would never like to leave his mother or his brothers, gives the impression of being a creature who is obsessed by the fear of being left alone in the world and who is therefore in continuous need of support.

In the intellectual realm, too, he seems to feel the need of constant help from his elders. He is continuously asking questions and begs adults to tell him stories. As regards stories, such children seem insatiable and the questions they ask about them often reveal anxiety or a restless longing.

Generally these children are incapable of steadiness in any occupation. They cannot fix their attention for any length of time. If the adult wishes to make them do something, he must continually supervise and call back their attention and the children get visibly tired.

As regards work, therefore, such children are considered both lazy and incapable. There is one aspect of their intelligence which is very active: the imagination. One of the most interesting phenomena of the child's mind is personification. The child personifies things around him, changing objects into something living and animated. Because this is so far from representing reality, it is one of the things most appreciated in the child.

These characteristics, and others which I might enumerate, form part of a nature which is not such as to arouse the enthusiasm of the adult to the extent of taking it to be a guide to follow in one's attempt at child-education. But we do know that the educating adult takes each of them into consideration separately, considering some defects to be corrected and others, good points to be cultivated. Among the latter are the imagination, the continuous request for stories, the questions and the attachment to the members of the family.

But, though education represses some and encourages others, all of them are in my opinion symptoms of a "deviated" nature.

We, Montessorians, state that in childhood another and more profound nature exists. It is the one shown by the "converted child". The characteristics of this nature are quite different. Among them there is love of work upon which the child's mind concentrates. This concentration takes the form of repeating again and again the same exercises. And there is order in movement. The two go together, for one sees there is meticulous exactness in the child's movement which is exerted in actions which are not only continued but repeated. There is one additional peculiarity in the fact that this orderly activity, long as it may last, seems to take place without causing the child any fatigue. Another characteristic of this nature is the independence from the adult; the capacity of the child to act for himself, striving for exactness in what he does. Other phenomena are respect for the belongings of others and a love and an interest in external objects, so intense that we have called it "love on the environment". It is a love inspired by knowledge, however, and not by desire of possession. As a result of this there is no strife among these children. On the contrary, they develop a calm and loving disposition and thus the possibility of mutual association. A fact which created great astonishment when it was first witnessed and still does now, is that as long as these conditions prevail the children refuse toys, sweetmeats and prizes. Also, they do not ask for the help of the adult or for an excessive number of stories or feel the continuous need of asking questions. Other phenomena which seem to have no relation with any special reason for their happening are the disappearance of fear and of lying.

Here then are the characteristics which correspond to these two natures. They are parallel. On the one one hand there is indulging in excessive imagination expressing withdrawal from reality and on the other, in the deeper nature, attachment to the environment and interest in exact knowledge of the objects therein. On the one hand, disorderly noisy movements, on the other quiet, calm action. On the one plane dependence on the adult and on the other independence. In the superficial nature we find laziness. In the deeper nature we find love of work, concentration and persistence in work.

It might be of interest to know the conditions under which these two different natures manifest themselves. Those which produce the tendencies belonging to the superficial nature are those which generally exist. One must realize that to awaken the ones belonging to the deeper nature one should not have made a pre-established plan, because they were unknown and therefore no one could set out in search of them. It was necessary that, for causes not entirely due to chance, these manifestations should get the possibility to appear. To understand what happened one must have a vision of two different processes to arrive at psychological knowledge. One is research. This involves a psychologist who wants to investigate a certain aspect and sets out to do so. He knows beforehand what he wants and proceeds in his investigation by one method or another.

The other is discovery. Discovery concerns something which, though already in existence, for one reason or another has remained hidden from human consciousness. In this case it was the discovery of the deeper nature of the child, for when the right conditions were established, the result was the spontaneous appearance of characteristics which revealed not a portion of but a whole personality.

I must affirm once again that they were not the consequence of a determined and pre-established plan of education. They were not the outcome of any fixed method. On the contrary, what is called the Montessori Method resulted from the discovery of tendencies which previously had had no possibility of permanent manifestation. People insist that I made the method, but this is not so. Certainly I had my part in it, but allow me to illustrate what happened by a comparison.

We might compare what took place to the process which evolves in a photographic camera where there is a sensitive plate. Upon the latter the picture of an external object is impressed. Obviously there must be a certain sensitivity in the plate in order that this image may remain impressed, but the image is not created by the plate. It is the image of an object which has its own form, its own characteristics. I was the plate. My preparation had made me receptive, and I will admit that in me there was also a camera prepared. In myself, I may say, there was a certain mechanism which was prepared, a scientific mechanism. But the fact remains that the psychological picture, which may be permanently registered or not, has nothing to do with the machine. It is not the machine that creates the object, it registers its image. This image formed in the plate is but a photograph of something that this nature of the child might not have been visible to everyone, this does not mean that the deeper nature came to exist owing to me, because I, who happened to be the machine, registered it. It is a complete whole which has its own spontaneous existence. The phenomena, therefore, do not depend for their existence upon the one who discovers them. It is only the recognition of the facts that depends upon the discoverer's power of perceiving them.

One who discovers electricity has not created electricity. What the discoverer has the power to do is to reproduce the conditions for the repetition of the phenomena he has seen. He does so because he understands what produces them. This is what happened to me. Once seen, these psychological phenomena could not be passed by. They made such an impression upon me that I was filled with the desire to see if it was possible to have them repeated.

I am certainly not the only one who has been touched by these phenomena. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of unknown people must have seen them. I wish to quote the example of two who are famous in the field of pedagogy. Pestalozzi is one of them. In his school at Stanz he saw similar phenomena.

He writes that he saw children performing a piece of work with an astonishing spirit of love - a piece of work he would not have set the children to do because it would not occur to him that it was withing their powers to do it. Pestalozzi marvelled to see these children working and working with such intense joy and making progress so astounding that he could not have deemed it possible. As a modest person who recognized the fact that he had nothing to do with these marvellous results, he wrote that he Pestalozzi, had no part in producing them; he wished to make other people understand that there was an unknown nature in the child.

As a matter of fact, Pestalozzi saw these phenomena only once. They were a passing phase in his school and he did not see them again. But they remained impressed in his soul and he wrote about them in the endeavour to share the new faith he had gained, but he did not know how to reproduce them. So we have the phenomenon and the discoverer, but the discoverer had no power to reproduce the phenomenon, probably due to the fact that he lacked the necessary scientific preparation.

The same may be said in the case of Tolstoy, another famous educator. In his school in Russia, he saw children of illiterate and indigent peasants, who seemed by heredity impervious to school learning, suddenly set aflame with enthusiasm for study. The children forgot that they were hungry and only thought of study. Then this phenomenon disappeared and Tolstoy was unable ever to reproduce it although up to his death this remained his main aspiration.

Such events, distant in history though they are one from the other, give us proof that these revelations of the children are natural phenomena, which generally remain unseen and unknown. This also proves to us that if they remain hidden and unseen, there must be certain conditions which are adverse to their manifestation. The children are generally in conditions that allow only fleeting glimpses of the manifestation of these phenomena of a deeper nature. Moreover, the conditions under which such phenomena can manifest themselves are unknown.

It was partly due to chance, partly to my scientific preparation and previous work which had made me sensitive to receive spontaneous psychological manifestations, that brought me to recognize and reproduce the conditions that allow these manifestations. Since then my endeavour has been to incorporate this deeper nature in the realm of education.

I should like to tell you the conditions in which its manifestations first took place. This first institution housed about forty children of poor illiterate parents: itinery sellers of flowers for example, or porters, etc. These parents were nearly always away from their homes in search of work, so that during the day the children were abandoned to themselves. When we first gathered them together, they had all the characteristics of children in similar conditions: they were timid, afraid of everyone, liable to hide themselves as soon as they saw a stranger. Their ages ran from three to six years. The aim of collecting them was not for purposes of instruction. They were gathered together to stop them from soiling and spoiling the wall of the house. They were entrusted to me not as a teacher, but as a doctor, for the children appeared in need of medical care for malnutrition and similar ailments. However, I was free to educate them also if I was so inclined. Moreover, I had been given means for doing this.

I will now tell you what assistants I chose. No self-respecting teacher would have accepted the task. I, therefore, chose a woman who had once taken a teacher's diploma but who was now a seamstress for working people and later another one who has some elementary studies behind her but who was now repairing furs. Such was the Environment and such were the educational workers. One thing only did I claim from these extraordinary teachers and that was they should do exactly what I told them to do. Having no responsibility for the formal teaching they did not thrust their own personalities upon the children at all. Into this environment I introduced certain criteria, for example, the idea of making these children happy, without preventing or hindering any of their manifestations. On the contrary, I asked these assistants to allow the children to act freely. I brought into this environment some furniture to the size of the children and various objects which I had already used in previous psychological work, such as apparatus for the education of the senses and so on.

We can see what were some of the favourable conditions for spontaneous manifestations. These children were not in any way influenced by their parents, who were away trying to make a few pennies, not by any teacher who wished to teach them. That is to say, they were far removed from any adult who could influence them with any directive. In this way favourable conditions came to be realized. A very rare thing. Though it is often said that parents or teachers should leave the children free, to do it is really another matter.

Then certain little facts happened which impressed me. For example, the children showed a very great love for cleanliness. They had been taught by us how to wash their hands and they went everywhere looking for oppurtunities to do so. This fondness of washing hands was something extraordinary. The mothers came to tell us that when not in school the children rushed out of the house and were gone for long periods. When they went to look for them, they found them at the fountains where Women were washing clothes. They complained that the children wasted all the soap they got hold of in washing their hands and then stood and contemplated them. The strange thing was that this seemed to give the children not only great joy, but they looked around, making intelligent remarks as if they had undergone an inner awakening.

In the school we allowed them to continue to wash and besides we gave them something else to do. We allowed them to clean up around them in the environment. A similar success was achieved. Not only did the children clean the objects around them with great enthusiasm, but a curious thing happened: after they had cleaned the objects, they went on doing so again and again, so much so that the varnish of the furniture suffered. And this activity was accompanied by joy and further awakening of the intelligence. Encouraged by this we dealt with the matter of teaching them to comb their hair and to dress themselves. This was indeed an enormous success. Having learned to button their clothes, they unbuttoned them and re-buttoned them, repeating the process again and again. The same with their hair, they combed their hair, again and again.

For a child in ordinary conditions these activities are difficult to indulge in because we adults have a way of purring an end to "useless" activities. Especially then, when the child's need of activity was not understood, any mother would have said: "Now you are clean, that is enough, stop". But here in the school the children were able to carry out these activities to their full satisfaction. Their behaviour led us to become aware of a fundamental truth, namely that the child works for his inner development and not to reach an exterior aim and that when he has done this work he has not really developed a special ability, but he has developed something in himself. Joy, the lack of timidity, growing intelligence, these were the phenomena which manifested themselves ever more clearly as time went on. Another thing which at the time seemed strange was the need for order which developed in the children. They put everything back in its proper place. There were certain scientific instruments which were difficult for the children to handle, but when the time came for the assistant to put them away, the children tried to do it before her. She evidently did not realize the reason for this, as I found out on one occasion when I happened to be present. She told the children not to touch these objects which had nothing to do with them. I asked her to let the children do as they wanted and I saw that the objects themselves were of no interest to them; it was the order in which they were placed that interested them. Gradually we came to recognize the child's lover for order and witnessed its surprising memory of the exact position of each object.

In time we came to witness what I mentioned in the beginning the "conversion" of the child. These children, who at the beginning of the experiment had been constantly weeping, no longer wept, and they had acquired a certain ease; they were no longer timid, they acted in a frank and open way. People marvelled at the fact that the children of poor working people without culture behaved in such a manner. The parents themselves not only noticed that their children's characteristics had changed, but that they had become more intelligent - so much more intelligent than before, that they asked me if I would teach them to read and write. They were so insistent that I ended by trying. This also met with success. The children were so eager for knowledge that after six months even those of four-and-a-half years had learned to read and to write and the six-year-old had reached a level parallel to that of children of the second class of the elementary schools of the time.

For me, and indeed for the whole world (because the press had spread the news), this seemed a miracle. But there was another event which surprised me even more. Thinking that children might absorb culture little by little was surprising but conceivable. What was inconceivable was that the children improved also in health as if they had undergone a physical cure. They had been anaemic, they continued to be ill-nourished and in spite of it their circulation improved and they became more healthy. Though, at the time, to me as a doctor in medicine the fact seemed incredible, I was made to realize that certain conditions which fulfilled psychic needs evidently had also influence upon the physical body.

This first institution, this tiny embryo of which I speak, developed. Other schools were started in Italy and abroad and it became clear that the child growing in favourable conditions could not only learn much more deeply and rapidly, not only became self-reliant and mentally healthy, but without any other special care his physical condition also became normal. So the time came when doctors recommended our Casa dei Bambini as a sort of health-resort.

It was as if the health and happiness of children were closely linked with the circumstances in which their personality and their intelligence developed. The children's enthusiasm for activity and for study. When fulfilled, not only gave them joy but also bettered their physical conditions. So it became clear that it was not just play, but the work connected with developing according to his inner needs, which lead the child to loftier levels both in the psychic and the physical realms.