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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: Jan 19 2010 at 3:48pm | IP Logged
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Charlotte Mason herself strongly criticized the Classical educators of her day, while many today would see her curriculum used as highly Classical. It is a word given to many interpretations.
There are a few threads I recall from the past where we discussed finding a suitable definition for a Classical education, but I'm having trouble finding it. Still looking, though.
As a parallel, I am reminded of some of the argument Tracy Lee Simmons give for the study of Latin---that it develops logic in the same way that Algebra/Higher math does, but with the element of feeding the soul as well. Some parents will inevitably choose to develop the mind with math and feed the soul through other means.
I wonder if Montessori can be seen in a similar light--not in conflict with a Classical education, but not complete in offering all that a Classical education is purported to offer.
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Eleanor
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| Posted: Jan 19 2010 at 5:32pm | IP Logged
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I agree that definitions are a problem. By "traditional classical education," I'm referring to those methods that attempt to recapture the style of learning that was the standard for centuries of Catholic history. They tend to focus on the rigorous study of a few core subjects, such as Latin, Greek, logic, and rhetoric ("multum non multa") -- cf. the link to the Ratio Studiorum that Willa posted. This is in contrast to the "Dorothy Sayers-influenced" programs, which tend to look at grammar, logic, and rhetoric as a series of "stages" rather than subjects, and put more emphasis on other subjects such as science, English language arts, and history, with much less emphasis on logic and classical languages.
Anyway... my copy of Montessori's The Child in the Church just arrived at the door (somewhat damp from the rain, but with all the pages intact), and I'm going to spend a good long while savoring it. 
Thanks to everyone for the interesting discussion so far.
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Willa
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| Posted: Jan 19 2010 at 10:50pm | IP Logged
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Eleanor wrote:
Of course, we can also just ignore these kinds of questions, and choose whatever combination of methods seems right to us, based on our own criteria. But for those of us who like to dig deeper and look at the underlying philosophies, to see how they fit in the context of our revealed faith and the natural law, it seems like this board is a place where we can do that.  |
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Yes, this is true, so long as we keep them general. There is a distinction between holding a question up for survey and holding a person's position up for critique, and it's not within our forum's parameters to do the latter.
Personally I usually place just as much weight on a person's opinion in these subjects as I think their opinions deserve  . For me a wise homeschool mom's opinion could carry a lot of weight for that reason. Education is an applied art. Consulting multiple sources within the framework of Church teaching, as Lindsay said, is probably a prudent strategy since no one has a direct revelation on the subject.
In the end, the Church has spoken very little on the fixed details of education beyond (and most of this is directed towards Catholic schools as a whole, not to individual parents):
Education is primarily the right and responsibility of the parents (and the overall responsibility of the Church to support them in their efforts).
Avoid naturalism... .acting in education as if this world was all there was.
Teach your kids their faith and/or delegate their further education to sources that will teach in a trustworthy manner.
Don't quickly abandon our rich educational heritage.
But it's permissible to take what is good in the new methods, using proper discernment.
Preserve Latin.
Restore Catholic philosophy and particularly Thomistic philosophy : ).
Not very specific, and I imagine that is for good reason, because of the time/talent/treasure differences that LeeAnn mentioned. And there is also the variable of the society we happen to live in. The Church gives us general principles, but not much detail of application.
Certainly our classical heritage should not be lightly abandoned, and efforts to preserve it are most valuable. But we live in an age where education isn't simply for the wealthiest or most intellectually gifted, but for everybody. I think some more modern pioneers like Montessori and Charlotte Mason were responding to that new call to provide a liberal education for everybody. We're still sort of in the middle of seeing where that will go and how it will work out.
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Eleanor
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| Posted: Jan 20 2010 at 1:30am | IP Logged
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I agree that the Church leaves this pretty wide open. We can favor different systems of education, just as we can favor different forms of government, or different ways of disciplining our children. But in the latter two cases, some of the systems are mutually exclusive. I'd imagine that the same might be true of education.
So I guess my question wasn't really "are both A and B within the bounds of what's allowed for Catholics," but rather, "would it make sense for someone to favor both A and B, and even to implement them simultaneously? Or would that be like trying to have a republic led by an absolute monarch, with some parliamentary democracy thrown in?"
(Now THOSE are some elections that would be worth watching! Imagine the unit study possibilities...  )
In order to figure this out, I think we'd first need to come up with a list of the essential characteristics of Montessori education (which would be somewhat do-able), as well as a list of the essential characteristics of traditional classical education (which should in theory be possible, though I'm not sure where to start).
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Willa
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| Posted: Jan 20 2010 at 10:56am | IP Logged
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Eleanor wrote:
So I guess my question wasn't really "are both A and B within the bounds of what's allowed for Catholics," but rather, "would it make sense for someone to favor both A and B, and even to implement them simultaneously?
In order to figure this out, I think we'd first need to come up with a list of the essential characteristics of Montessori education (which would be somewhat do-able), as well as a list of the essential characteristics of traditional classical education (which should in theory be possible, though I'm not sure where to start). |
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You don't ask for much
I probably don't know enough about Montessori -- for some reason I find her books very difficult going. I don't think I have a scientific mind.
Traditional classical education -- I know more about, at least the way it looked before the Jesuit Suppression. It's a favorite thing to read about for me.
The basic concept is "eloquentia perfecta" which in those days meant careful, rigorous teaching in Latin logic and rhetoric (also, later, Greek and for seminarians, Hebrew). Perfect eloquence included not just effective style but also high content -- the articulate man had to be a good man or his rhetoric was essentially problematic. The Jesuits held to an ideal of "Christian perfection here below" by which they meant that everything that could be excellent in a man, SHOULD be as far as possible. But "all for the greater glory for God" which was their motto -- so the natural perfections of reasoning and expression were ordered towards distinguished service of our Lord. The highest service, as LeeAnn mentioned, was missionary work in the priesthood and this has always been a Jesuit distinctive (of course, back then we are talking specifically about the education of boys).
I did a quick look at the Google books repository for thinking about Montessori's work by her Catholic contemporaries. If you go there and search for Montessori Catholic you can find a few periodicals from the turn of the century that mention her endeavours.
A couple of Catholic reviews of her books mentioned a concern that she placed too much emphasis on freedom and the natural goodness of children.
Another journal by a Jesuit mentioned that "those in Catholic schools" usually take an attitude of "watchful waiting" towards new ideas of pedagogy. They wait to see what will come of it and then adopt what seems viable into their own programs.
Most of the Catholic commentaries seemed to think that Montessori in kindergarten and Montessori through junior high would be two different things. In other words, they could see Montessori as a contribution to the relatively recent (back then) idea of "Child-gardens" for the care and development of pre-grammar age children.... in the tradition of Pestalozzi, Froebel and others like that. But they had more hesitation about continuing it when the child reached the ordinary school age.
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Eleanor
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| Posted: Jan 20 2010 at 2:23pm | IP Logged
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What can I say... I like to think big.
Thanks for all this thoughtful sharing of your learning about Jesuit education. We have the Kolbe booklet on "Ignatian Education in the Home," but I couldn't really make head nor tail of what it was getting at. 
Thanks also for pointing out those articles; I didn't know that the Jesuits had a run-in with Montessori in Ireland (they sure are a feisty bunch!). I'd like to learn more about the details of that. I did find an article from 1924 that suggests that this negative view was by no means universal, even at the time. But they've only made page 1 available. If someone has access to the whole thing, can you please tell us how it turned out?
It does seem very common for commentators (then and now) to downplay her method as little more than a cute way to keep young children occupied. That's clearly not what she had in mind, though -- nor would it give us anywhere near the full benefit of her work. For instance, in a speech given on the centenary of her birth, Pope Paul VI specifically mentioned the value of her work for adolescents. As with the catechetical method, the high school program was never fully developed in her lifetime, but she did provide the outline and talk about the underlying reasons for it.
Pope John Paul II made reference to Paul VI's speech in a 1995 Angelus address, on the subject of woman's special contribution to society. I've only been able to find it in Italian, but if the machine translation is to be believed, he says that it was her feminine nature and spiritual sensitivity that allowed her to have these new insights about the child, and thus to contribute to the advancement of the culture. "Unfortunately, looking objectively the historical reality, it is clear, with bitterness, that even at this level, women have suffered from systematic exclusion."
Certainly, traditional Jesuit education was heavily masculine -- and though there's much value in that, perhaps something was missing.
Now I've gone and done it. Those Irish sons of St. Ignatius will surely arise from the grave and chase after me, flaming torches in hand. "Be off with ye, Jezebel! Leave the thinkin' to us!" (Or, as John Wayne said in The Quiet Man, "Woman of the house, where's me tay???" )
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Willa
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| Posted: Jan 20 2010 at 4:21pm | IP Logged
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Wow, thanks for that link to Pope Paul VI's address. I liked this bit:
Quote:
This is a time when educators are unsure about what methods to use and have even come to wonder about the use of what they are doing. But Maria Montessori reminds us that there is nothing more exalting than to give aid to a human person and to go along with him in all the richness of [his/her] being, which has been created in God's image, was redeemed in the blood of Christ, and together with all God's children is called to enter into the depths of [God's] trinitarian life, for eternity.
Instead of breaking up into empiricism, education which is worthy of the name rests upon sure principles and is deployed through development of the best potentialities in the child and the adolescent, who will gradually discover for themselves those human and religious values persuasive examples of which are given to them by their educators. "Do not despise even one of these little ones", Jesus tells us, "for in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 18, 10). |
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I found this short article about Montessori's relation with various other Popes
I also found this about a Montessori parochial school, this about Christendom graduate school starting a MOntessori training program
I guess not exactly connected, but since I found them I thought I'd share!
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Willa
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Eleanor
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| Posted: Jan 20 2010 at 5:19pm | IP Logged
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Yes, she had many positive contacts with the popes in her lifetime.
I'm going to sign off now, to turn my attention back to The Child in the Church and the children in our domestic church. I'd recommend the book for anyone who's at all interested in this subject. It's worth the price just for the chapter by E. M. Standing on the liturgy, which also uses "sensible signs" to teach us about intangible realities (though supernatural rather than natural ones).
"In fact, I believe that one can truly say that the great value in the Montessori Method lies precisely in this -- that it has rediscovered and put into practice in a wide field that pedagogical method which the Church in her millennial wisdom has always used."
Thanks for helping me to clarify my thoughts on this subject. I think we're ready to move forward with plans for next year. 
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Eleanor
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| Posted: Oct 15 2013 at 4:36pm | IP Logged
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So... I really have spent much of the last four years thinking about this.
I've realized that there are two fundamentally different patterns that are both being referred to as "traditional classical education."
And the difference has a lot to do with how we look at dialectic.
Is it a sort of tool kit that's necessary for advanced and specialized studies (e.g., in Scholastic philosophy and theology)?
Or should it be seen as the basis of all our studies -- and, indeed, all our communication -- such that we have no business writing or speaking, if we haven't studied dialectic first?
From everything I've read, it seems that the Jesuits, and the monastic schools of East and West, based their systems of education on the first understanding. So did the original Catholic colleges in North America, such as the ones run by the Franciscans in Mexico.
Their foundational course tended to have several years of grammar, then a few years of humanities and rhetoric. Their ideal was to develop wisdom and eloquence through the reading, analysis, and imitation of classic texts. In other words, the "classical course" was literary, not philosophical. This ran from ages 12 through 18 -- roughly middle school, high school and the first year or so of college. Dialectic was studied as a preparation for philosophy, which tended to come after age 18.
By contrast, the medieval universities of the 12th and 13th centuries would have gone with the second answer above. In other words, they saw formal dialectic as a basic skill that should be taught as soon as possible. Dorothy Sayers based her plan on theirs. So did CLAA, when they started. (I haven't looked closely at their program in years, and I know the founder has changed quite a few things since then -- the attitude to sports, brick & mortar schools, etc. But I'd be surprised if he changed this part, since it was so central to their claims.)
I don't have to have Maria Montessori here to know which of the above models makes more sense to her. And it makes more sense to me, too.
It seems to me that this also relates to the current situation in the Church with regard to phenomenology and scholasticism. Scholasticism is great in its place, as the Church's official method of theological formulations, but that doesn't mean it's the only system of philosophy that can be useful to us. Blessed John Paul II, St. Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and others have used phenomenology -- not to formulate doctrines, but to shed new light on them, and make them more accessible to many.
I think part of the problem here is that so many of the modern popularizers of "classical education" have been coming at this from a non-Catholic mindset. More specifically, many of them -- including the founder of CLAA, the author who popularized the "Sayers Model," and at least one of the authors of "The Well-Trained Mind" -- are from Reformed Protestant backgrounds. Although their approaches are different on the surface, they seem to me to share the assumption that all of us, as far as our intelligence allows, should have the kind of training that allows us to make decisions about the interpretation of Scripture and theological principles, and other big questions of our faith.
The thing is, the Church has never advocated this. From a Catholic perspective, it's actually pretty absurd to think of a billion armchair philosophers and theologians. But what most of us do need -- in our families, in our parishes, and in our communities -- is a sharing in the tradition of "wisdom and eloquence." In other words, we're called to express the truths that have been handed down to us, and that we perceive in our environment. And we're called to do this in charity, and with beauty. Even little children can do this in their way. Many times, they do it much better than big people. This is what Montessori discovered.
If you go back and read her writings from the perspective of wisdom and eloquence -- developing the good man who speaks well -- it's very clear that her goals are compatible with those of traditional Christian classical education. Many of her methods also tend toward the specific pedagogies of the monastics, and of the Jesuits and other humanists. She never developed these methods fully, but there are a lot of riches there.
Coming at this from a different direction -- I've also learned that the Jesuit way of teaching Latin and Greek literature can be adapted to the vernacular languages, and also to younger children. This is the normal way of teaching language arts in some other countries, in which the public schools were influenced by Catholic traditions.
My children are clamoring for pearls and caviar here. I would love to talk specifics later.
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4Real Forums : Philosophy of Education
Topic: Montessori & traditional classical ed
