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by lotsofpulp
504 days ago
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>Montessori's main contribution is applying scientific methods for education. She is first and foremost and empiricist that led over 50 years of field study on education. The Montessori method is just an outcome of that study. I don’t see how this can be true considering the inability to create falsifiable hypotheses and myriad confounding variables. See the replication crisis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://xkcd.com/435/ |
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She thought that toy and play would great rewards, when she started with the first casa di bambini in Rome in 1907. She had prepared toys and doll house for the children to play with, when they did an exercise she had prepared. Contrary her hypothesis the kids were not interested in the toys, but continued to do the exercises. She removed the toys as kids didn't play with them, not because she didn't like them.
This is something that she did through out her career. When she was managing and teaching disabled kids she noticed a girl that had hard time of using scissors. She then created exercises that helped the girl to master the sub movements that lead to the dexterity that allowed her to use scissors.
The material she developed is so full of the details that you can only see if stop and observe fully. Even though she didn't ran randomized controlled trials she was able to separate many confounding variables.
My point is not to say that Montessori method is the only or even the best method of education, but Maria Montessori has been one of the greatest empiricists of our time. She was a fully trained doctor and kept up with other people's papers and studies during her lifetime. And all things were tested on the children in her schools.
"My intention was to keep in touch with the research of other, but to preserve my independence. The only thing that I considered to be essential was Wundt's maxim that “all methods of experimental psychology can be reduced to one, namely, to carefully recorded observation." -- Maria Montessori
This is also the same feeling that I get from Richard Feynman's writings. He just got it where you can develop mental models and theories and when you need to expose them to real world.