If there was one thing Maria Montessori hated, it was play. She also disapproved of toys, fairy tales and fantasy. This came as a surprise to me. I had the impression – from the hippyish reputation of modern Montessori schools – that the essence of the Montessori method was ‘learning through play’. Indeed, this is the way her philosophy is often summarised, including by her admirers. When you read her own words, however, you realise that the foundation of Montessori’s methods was a belief in work: effortful, concentrated, purposeful work. In her view, the work of children was more focused than the work of adults. Many adults were lazy, working only because they were paid to and doing as little as possible. But in her schools, she wrote, ‘we observe something strange: left to themselves, the children work ceaselessly … and after long and continuous activity, the children’s capacity for work does not appear to diminish but to improve.’ The fierce concentration Montessori observed in children had much in common with what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called ‘flow’: the state of being completely absorbed in an activity for its own sake. More recently, some psychologists studying children on the ADHD and autistic spectrums have used the word ‘hyperfocus’. For Montessori, this phenomenon was something that all children were capable of, as creatures of God.
Montessori’s educational theory is both less playful than one might assume and, as Cristina de Stefano’s biography shows, more deeply rooted in Catholicism. She wrote that the task of education was to find in the child ‘the true spirit of man, the design of the Creator: the scientific and religious truth’. She often contrasted her own methods with those of the German education theorist Friedrich Froebel, who died in 1852 (Montessori was born in 1870). Froebel coined the word ‘Kindergarten’ in 1840 to describe preschool establishments where children would spend their days at play. He created a series of sets of objects called ‘play gifts’ (Spielgaben) suitable for children of different ages. For example, ‘gift one’ consisted of balls of coloured yarn and ‘gift three’ consisted of eight identical wooden cubes. Many of Froebel’s gifts were the same objects Montessori used in her schools. The difference was the meaning assigned to them. Froebel thought a child should be encouraged to arrange a set of toy bricks as if they were horses and a stable, and then to rearrange them as a church. To Montessori, such fancies could only result in ‘mental confusion’ and even ‘savagery’ on the part of the child. For her, a brick was a brick was a brick and it was liberating for a child not to have to pretend otherwise.