The Montessori Method

The Montessori Method
The Development of a Healthy Pattern of Desire

in Early Childhood
Suzanne Ross
The Raven Foundation, Glenview, Illinois
Perhaps we fail to understand the mimetic nature of desire because we rarely refer
to the rst stages of human development. Every child has appetites, instincts and a
given cultural milieu in which he learns by imitating adults or peers. Imitation and
learning are inseparable.
Ren Girard, Evolution and Conversion
It may be said that we acquire knowledge by using our minds; but the child absorbs
knowledge directly into his psychic life. . . . Impressions do not merely enter his
mind; they form it. They incarnate themselves in him. . . . We have named this type
of mentality, The Absorbent Mind.
Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind
INTRODUCTION
The Montessori Method of early childhood education offers mimetic theory

an avenue to explore healthy patterns of desire in children. Such an investigation emphasizes the unconscious dynamic of mimetic relationships and their
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 19, 2012, pp. 87122. ISSN 1075-7201.
Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.
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rootedness in the body. The absorption of language, cultural norms, and customs by children is more than a metaphor. The child is literally taking the world
into himself through his hands, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. For this physical
exploration of the world to take place, the world must be brought into focus
and remain in view. The centrality of objects for development in early childhood offers a sharp contrast to mimetic rivalry, in which objects become less
important than the rivalry itself. Dr. Maria Montessoris model of education
provides a blueprint for children to have mediated but intense object relationships by training teachers to perform benign or withdrawn mediation. Teachers thus initiate the possibility for a shared admiration of the object, thereby
opening up the opportunity for the child to have direct interaction with the
material world. In this way, children are inducted into a healthy pattern of desire
in which acquisitive desire remains uid, models remain luminous, and objects
remain in view.
Dr. Montessoris claim that her educational method would become the
foundation for a more peaceful world is difcult to test. It does however invite
an investigation by mimetic theorists. With its understanding of the dynamics
of rivalry, mimetic theory can diagnose where the Montessori Method is liable
to fail. What the Montessori education system offers mimetic theory is a living
laboratory in which to study the intentional development of healthy patterns of
desire. Such a dialogue will be fruitful for both.
DR. MARIA MONTESSORI
Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle, Italy, in 1870 and came of age at a
time when humanity seemed on the verge of its greatest achievement since the
foundation of human culture, that of ending war. The extraordinary progress in
medicine, science, sociology, and psychology seemed to promise that all human
ills, even war itself, would succumb to the inevitable march out of the primitive
past toward a harmonious future of universal peace. Evolutionary theory was
interpreted by some to mean that nature naturally progressed from the ugly and
brutish to the beautiful and wise. Criminals and the insane were considered
throwbacks to a primitive stage of humanity that we were rapidly, inevitably
leaving behind. Beauty, dened as the perfection of European features, seemed
an achievement within reach of the entire world population. When the war to
end all wars erupted and then was followed by a second paroxysm of violence
and death, the hope for universal peace seemed betrayed. What the dreamers
had failed to take into account was just how difcult it would be for humanity to
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renounce the violence that had been so successfully hidden since the foundation of the world.1
Difcult but perhaps not impossible. Maria Montessori became convinced
that the only way to achieve universal peace was to attack the problem at its
source, which she held to be the individual. Why do people choose again and
again to go to war in the face of overwhelming evidence that war is not in anyones interest? Leaders may declare war but citizens follow with the greatest
enthusiasm, as if they were going to a joyful event and not to their deaths or
to cause the death of others. For the practical and scientic Dr. Montessori,
this seemed to indicate abnormal behavior. Normal people, free to make unrestrained decisions, would naturally choose peace by peaceful means. That they
continued to choose war meant they were in need of treatment, specically,
pedagogical treatment.
For Dr. Montessori, conict, violence, and war were symptoms of a diseased society. Human nature allowed to follow a natural pattern of development would yield a different form of social organization2 than the one she
saw succumb to patterns of self-destructive behavior. Men are not yet ready,
she said, to shape their own destinies; to control and direct world events, of
whichinsteadthey become the victims.3 All the grand achievements of science will do nothing to alter this condition because Deviated men, who seek
to obtain power and authority, can become obsessed with any good, which is
then transformed into something dangerous before it can be rightly used. This
is why any good, any discovery, or invention, can increase the ills that afict the
world.4 The only way to normalize society, then, is to normalize the individuals
that make up that society, and that can only be accomplished through education resulting in a slow and steady emergence of a new world in the midst of the
old, the gradual appearance of the world of the child and adolescent.5
Two related ideas are striking about Dr. Montessoris analysis. One is the
view that violence and war are not natural occurrences but aberrant outcomes
of aberrant educational and child-rearing practices. Education and child-rearing
that did not interfere with normal development would allow the nature of
humanity to reveal itself as peaceful and motivated by work for the improvement
of all of society, not just for personal gain. Its important to note that Montessoris
pedagogy was not epistemological. It was not knowledge that would bring peace,
but a radically altered method of psychological formation, one that began with
an acknowledgment of the inherent goodness of humanity. Therefore, not fearful
of what she would nd lurking inside the psyches of her small charges, Montessori worked condently to allow children to be fully and authentically themselves. Rather than a direct frontal assault on the political parties and individuals
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she might nd guilty of warmongering, hers was a quiet, long-term approach of

building up a new society composed of new human beings in the midst of the
old, so that the old would simply and inevitably fade away.
The other idea, also seemingly part of the optimism of her time, is her faith
in the inherent goodness of innovations in technology, science, and medicine.
It is not that these inventions are neutral and can be used either for good or ill
but that they are good in their essence. Such goodness can be made manifest by
good human beings or corrupted by contact with evil ones. Goodness and evil
are real for Montessori, as real as the concrete manipulatives on the shelves of
her Childrens Houses, as real as the small hands working earnestly with them.
But goodness is a quality of creation, while evil is born when human beings
stray from their essential natures. Evil is something that happens and can be
undone; goodness is something that is.
While this view of the inherent goodness of mankind and innovation or
progress is often, and perhaps fairly, criticized as nave, I hesitate to make the
same accusation against Dr. Montessori. Though her notion of human benevolence seems right out of discredited late nineteenth-century idealism, neither
her early experience as a doctor working among the poorest of society, which
exposed her to the worst that could afict human beings and that human beings
could inict on one another, nor the grand historical events that intersected
with the span of her life managed to disabuse her of her faith. As a young professional, she encountered the ravages of poverty, social misery, economic
poverty, lack of nourishment.6 Diseases aficting her patients included malaria,
syphilis, typhus, and dysentery7 and were, in her mind, the result of neglect and
lack of resources for proper sanitation and health care. In the hospitals where
she interned and worked as a doctor, the mentally decient, juvenile delinquents, and the abnormal of all ages were institutionalized and treated like
criminals. The treatment she advocated instead of incarceration was hygiene
and education.8 I, however, differed from my colleagues in that I felt that mental deciency presented chiey a pedagogical, rather than a medical, problem.9
And because of her renown in Italy (in 1918 Pope Benedict XV received her
in a private audience, after which he ordered her works to be included in the
Vatican library), she had her own unpleasant experience with the realities of
power politics.
After a personal audience with Dr. Montessori in 1924, Benito Mussolini
endorsed the establishment of Montessoris system of education in Italy.10 Mussolini was most likely taking full political advantage of his association with the
woman who had only a year earlier addressed the League of Nations in Geneva
on the subject of Education and Peace. She has been much criticized over
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the years for her association with Mussolini, though she defended herself by
insisting that she was not making a political statement, only accepting an offer
to implement her educational program. But ten years later, Mussolini was no
longer willing to give her free rein in the schools he was providing for her. When
he insisted that the schoolboys in his Fascist youth organization wear their uniforms and give the Fascist salute in class, Montessori withdrew that very day
from her association with his government.11
Despite her repeated and persistent contact with the realities of suffering
and evil, Montessori retained her faith in the fundamental goodness of human
nature. The metaphor she returned to again and again was one of liberation.
Humanity was in bondage to learned behavior that was a betrayal of humans
better selves, their normal selves. The metaphor used by mimetic theory of
blindness induced by the sacricial system is another way of saying the same
thing. Blind to the suffering they cause themselves and others, Montessori
believed, human beings were in need of a cure both spiritual and physical, a
cure she had discovered in her particular method of childhood education. She
became a woman on a mission to save humanity one child at a time.
THE DISCOVERY
In 1906, a group of investors in a building project in San Lorenzo, a slum district of Rome, approached the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Rome for help. Dr. Maria Montessori, the rst woman in Italy
to receive a doctorate of medicine, was already well known throughout the
country as an advocate for the education of delinquent and mentally decient
children, a radical concept at the time as these children were considered to be
congenitally defective and unteachable. She wrote (emphasis here and hereafter
in the original):
As a general rule, a bad child should be taken to see a physician, because it is almost
certain that he is a sick child. But the treatment of such maladies is very often mainly
pedagogical; curative pedagogy, however, must absolutely abolish punishment.12
Eight years earlier, at the age of 28, she had been appointed co-director of the
State Orthophrenic School for mentally retarded children in Rome. Following
on the work of the French doctors-turned-educators Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard
and Edouard Seguin,13 she treated the children with medical care, special educational methods, and her distinctive ingredient, love.
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The tenants in the San Lorenzo slum project were working-class families
who left their children under seven years old at home and unsupervised during
the workday. Though too young to attend school, they were plenty old enough
to get into mischief.14 The problem facing the investors was that there were
about 50 of these children defacing the newly renovated buildings and committing petty acts of vandalism. They decided that hiring a woman to supervise
the children on site would be cheaper than repairing the damage done to the
buildings, and so they invited the famous Dr. Montessori to oversee the center.
Because many of her so-called decient children had, under her tutelage, surpassed the academic level of their peers in the standard schools, she had been
looking for an opportunity to test her educational methods on normal children.
She quickly accepted the offer. Within two years, what became known as the
miracle of San Lorenzo radically altered the perception of the inner life and
educational potential of young children.
What visitors saw at San Lorenzo was all 50 of these three- to seven-yearold children, quietly, happily, politely, and intently engaged in working with the
didactic materials that provide the basic curriculum in the Montessori classroom.
Even more unexpected was that these children from the lower classes were reading and writing, and when asked who taught them to do such things they would
answer, Taught me? No one has taught!15 There were two unusual features that
ipped conventional classroom methodology on its head. First, the children
were working independently. That is, they were free to choose what material they
wanted to work with and for how long before they put it away themselves. And
second, amidst all of this purposeful activity, the teacher was not easily found.
The classroom furniture was child-sized, a Montessori innovation, and so one
might think it would be easy to spot an adult who, even if a woman of short
stature, would tower above the three-foot-high shelves, tables, and children, but
no towering gure appeared. At the very least, one would expect to nd the adult
teacher at the front of the room, but there was no front to speak of.
Eventually, classroom visitors would locate the teacher squatting in conversation with a child or sitting on the oor demonstrating a didactic material
or most often, seated on a child-sized chair in an out-of-the-way spot, notebook
in hand, observing the activity in the room. At a time when education was not
thought possible before the age of six, and when education itself consisted
of teachers delivering lectures to children seated immobile on adult-sized
benches, which were xed with bolts to the oor, it was hard to know what
exactly to make of it all. Yet here was the miracle: underprivileged children of an
apparently unteachable age, reading, writing, and conducting themselves with a
purposeful self-discipline that adults could rightly envy.
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What Dr. Montessori had discovered through observation was what she
called the inner life of the child, something that was not thought to exist, possibly because it was so different from adult life that it could pass unnoticed. What
children were doing beneath adult noses was nothing less than the greatest of
educational feats: they were absorbing the culture into which they were born
and accomplishing the impressive work of inner formation. She comments
that All that we ourselves are has been made by the child, by the child we were
in the rst two years of life.16 She observed that by the age of two or three an
infant had progressed from a being without the capacity for mobility, speech,
or intention to someone more or less competent in his native language, with
his own volition and the physical ability to act on it, and asked the question few
were asking: How had the helpless child accomplished this? Not with the help
of classroom lectures, to be sure. Montessori pointed out that no one taught
children language, yet even the most culturally impoverished child became
procient in vocabulary and grammar.
From this insight, her teaching method developed:
Only after repeated experiments did we conclude with certainty that all children
are endowed with this capacity to absorb culture. . . . And so we discovered that
education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process
which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to
words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The
teachers task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural
activity in a special environment made for the child.17
In this short statement we encounter the principles that formed her method for
educating young children: learning dened as a natural process, the necessity
of spontaneous activity, a prepared environment, and the transformation of the
teacher from a classroom star to an actor in a supporting role.
Montessori developed her method at the turn of the twentieth century,
when anthropology was wrestling with the impact of evolutionary theory. From
Darwins theory of human origins emerged all manner of applications to biology and sociology, most infamously in racial typing as exemplied in the work
of Montessoris own teacher Giuseppe Sergi and in the criminal social theories
of Cesare Lombroso. Like all scientists of her time, she had to contend with
the work of Lombroso or risk irrelevancy. She speaks admiringly of both men,
admitting her indebtedness to them while praising their contributions to modern science without qualication, yet her conclusions take an unexpected turn.
Giuseppe Sergis research was focused on the study of the normal
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individual, in contrast to the contemporary passion for abnormality. Neither

he nor Montessori believed that the study of abnormality was a waste of time.
Montessoris own research in education was greatly inuenced by Itard and
Seguin, two men who developed remarkably effective techniques for the education of the deaf, mute, and mentally decient. But it was the education of the
masses of normal children that captured their attention and became the goal
driving their research.
Montessori closely followed Sergis methods of physical measurements to
determine racial types and conducted her own investigation of the racial characteristics of the women of Latium, which led her to conclude that
in Castelli Romani there exists in an almost pure state a dark-haired race, short of
stature, slender, elegantly modelled [sic] in gure and in prole, and showing within
the limits of mesatiscelia a brachyscelous tendency, in contrast with another race,
tall, fair, massive, of coarse build, which within the limits of mesatiscelia shows a
macroscelous tendency, and which is found in almost pure groups around the locality of Orte, that is, on the boundaries of Umbria.18
From our vantage point in history, knowing the way that racial typing led to
the ruthless quest for racial purity in fascist Germany, Montessoris research
appears not only outdated but dangerous. But neither Montessori nor Sergi
applied their theories to such purposes. Pupil and student were engaged in an
intellectual journey to challenge abstract philosophical ideas about humanity
with objective information gathered through the use of scientic methods. Just
as the archeologist would take the measurements of unearthed skulls, so those
engaged in the study of living human beings must also take the measurements
of skull, chest, stature, and so forth. The aim was to develop educational methods that conformed to the reality of human physical and mental life. Neither
Montessori nor Sergi, however, made the mistake of equating their methods
of physical measurement with pedagogy itself. Here Montessori quotes her
teacher on the subject:
This is precisely the new development of pedagogy that goes under the name of
scientic: in order to educate, it is essential to know those who are to be educated.
Taking measurements of the head, the stature, etc. (in other words, applying the
anthropological method), is, to be sure, not in itself the practice of pedagogy, says
Sergi, in speaking of what the biological sciences have contributed to this branch
of learning during the nineteenth century, But it does mean that we are following
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the path that leads to pedagogy, because we cannot educate anyone until we know
him thoroughly.19
Montessori learned from Sergi that the purpose of taking all those measurements was not to develop grand, generalized theories of racial types or even
of humanity but to enable the educator to thoroughly know each and every
individual pupil. This is the principle that became Montessoris guiding light
and is known in her teacher education courses as following the child.
Similarly, she drew her own conclusions from Lombrosos popular theory
that there was the existence of a hereditary, or atavistic, class of criminals who
are in effect biological throwbacks to a more primitive stage of human evolution. Lombroso contended that such criminals exhibit a higher percentage of
physical and mental anomalies than do noncriminals. Among these anomalies,
which he termed stigmata, were various unusual skull sizes and asymmetries of
the facial bones.20
While this theory has since been discredited in favor of an emphasis on
environmental factors, Montessori shared Lombrosos enthusiasm for the social
benets his theory inaugurated. She compared his work to the liberating effects
of the great Italian hero of unication, Giuseppe Garibaldi:
Garibaldi redeems an oppressed people and saves the oppressors from the burden
of being unjust and tyrannical, through a work of humanity which has no national
boundary; Lombroso, by means of his new scientic and moral principle, effects
a world-wide redemption of a despised and outcast class, and saves us from the
iniquitous burden of social vengeance. Two great deeds of heroism, one of the heart
and the other of the brain; two great works of redemption.21
Montessori was in sympathy with the way Lombrosos theory could be used
to limit social vengeance by removing blame for behavior that was beyond
the criminals conscious control. In her analysis of Lombroso, she accepted that
there was no doubt a correlation between physical and psychic anomalies, but
she questioned whether all the physical abnormalities Lombroso was dealing
with were of a racial or unalterable type. She says, What science wishes to-day
to correct is the atavistic interpretation of stigmata and of types of degenerates.22
This led her to a study of the inuences on each person, both hereditary and
environmental, in order to better distinguish the ones that must be accepted
as limitations of the child from those that are subject to cure or inuence from
medicine or education. Heres how Montessori puts it:
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The child, like every other individual, represents an effect of multifold causes: he is
a product of heredity (biological product) and a product of society (social product).
The characteristics of his ancestors, their maladies, their vices, their degeneration,
live again in the result of the conception which has produced a new individual: and
this individual, whether stronger or weaker, must pass through various obstacles
in the course of his intrauterine life and his external life. The sufferings and the
mistakes of his mother are reected in him. The maladies which attack him may
leave upon him permanent traces. Finally, the social environment receives the
child at birth, either as a favoured son or as an unfortunate, and leads him through
paths that certainly must inuence his complex development.23
Montessoris meta-level conclusions were twofold and would have far reaching
implications for the practice of education. First, she concluded that all children
until the age of about seven possessed an absorbent mind, which endowed
them with an instinctual capacity to absorb the inuences and content of their
environment. It is during the absorbent mind stage of life that the most important learning of a persons life takes place and upon which the measure of his
life rests. This being the case, she asked what adults could do to support this
marvelous, independently unfolding life. Education could and should begin at
a much younger age than previously thought, perhaps as early as two years old,
but it would be education in a form not yet imagined. No longer could teachers mistakenly operate as if learning depended on them. Learning took place
independently of instruction.
Second, she concluded that aside from the shared characteristic of their
absorbent minds, all children were different, exactly because of the diversity
of environmental inuences they were busily incorporating into their selves.
Her pedagogical method took these realities into account, concluding that a
universal curriculum was no longer possible. That is, the teacher could no
longer decide ahead of time on the content of that days lesson and deliver it
as a Shakespearean soliloquy. The classroom environment and the role of the
teacher would be redesigned to conform with these scientic discoveries.
THE ABSORBENT MIND
While she does not rely on the terms imitation or mimetic, it seems Montessori was encountering in her observations evidence for the theory of human
learning through imitation. In his book chronicling developments in mirror neuron research, Marco Iacoboni describes the effect on developmental
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psychology in the 1970s of Andrew Meltzoff s experiments with imitation

in newborns. Infants as young as 41 minutes old imitated the gestures of the
experimenters, providing Meltzoff with evidence suggesting that humans come
into this world wired for imitation. Iacoboni argues:
This evidence was revolutionary, because dogma held that babies learn to imitate in
the second year of life, a belief originating in the work of Jean Piaget, probably the
most inuential gure ever in the eld of developmental psychology. In effect, the
Piaget school implicitly suggested that babies learn to imitate, but Meltzoff s data
suggested that they may actually learn by imitating.24
Working many years before the discovery of mirror neurons and so of course
unaware of them, Montessori nevertheless appeared to be hypothesizing
their existence. In her book, The Absorbent Mind, rst published in 1949, she
describes at length her theory of the acquisition of language as an interplay
between the nerve centers involved in the hearing of speech and the muscular
mechanisms involved in production. The rst she called a sensorial center, the
latter a motor center. She wonders why it is that children seem to hear and
understand language well in advance of being able to produce it. She thinks it
is due to more than simple differences in the rates of physical development of
these centers. It can only be because the sounds heard by the child provoke the
delicate movements necessary to reproduce them.25
Not just the sense of hearing, but sight as well, prepares the child to speak.
At four months (some put it earlier and I am inclined to agree) the babe becomes
aware that this mysterious music which surrounds him and touches him so deeply,
comes from the human mouth. The mouth and lips produce it by their movement.
Seldom does anyone notice how closely the baby watches the lips of a person speaking; he looks at them most intently and tries to imitate the movements.26
The experiments of the inuential French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot with

hypnosis resonated with Montessoris concept of the absorbent mind, as it demonstrated an extreme case of the inuence of others on the formation of identity.
She explains that Charcot showed that through hypnosis a substitution could
be made in the personalities of individuals subject to hysteria . . . [undermining]
what had been previously regarded as one of the most basic features of human
nature, namely, that a man is master of his own actions.27 She goes on to caution
adults against insinuating their will into the mind of the child so that the child in
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effect becomes a puppet of the adult. She felt children were especially susceptible
to this hypnotic effect because of an exaggeration of an inner sensibility which
assists with [their] psychic growth and which may be called the love of the environment,28 an environment that is both material and social. We detect a kinship
between inner sensibility and mimeticism, but though keenly alert to the
imitative and suggestible nature of children, Montessori did not grasp that this
capacity did not end with childhood but was an essential aspect of human nature.
However, with her theory of the absorbent mind she was postulating the
existence of an inborn mechanism for the acquisition of culture through interaction with the environment, that is, through imitation, and that it is through this
process that the child develops a self. It is surprising that Jean Piaget, referenced
above by Iacoboni, was a leading advocate of imitation as a learned behavior:
surprising because he was a student and admirer of Maria Montessori and it
was her discovery of developmental periods that he developed into his more
academically acceptable theory. At one time the president of the Swiss Montessori Society, Piaget nevertheless abandoned Montessoris insight with regard
to the absorbent mind, with its clear recognition of the inborn mechanism of
imitation, in favor of a less radical theory of childhood learning.29
We can observe Montessoris sense of wonder at the accomplishments of
the absorbent mind in this passage: The child is not born with a little knowledge, a little memory, a little will power, which have only to grow as time goes
on. . . . we are not dealing with something that develops, but with a fact of formation; something nonexistent has to be produced, starting from nothing.30 And
so she concluded that the childs intelligence is not of the same kind as ours.31
Setting aside the concluding remark of this passage for a moment, this
description of the childs formation is completely in accordance with mimetic
theory. To put it briey, Montessori believed that the child was not learning so
much as becoming. Montessori never lost sight of this indirect purpose behind
all of childrens direct interaction with their environment. In her introduction
to the Montessori Method, Paula Polk Lillard says this about the Practical Life
area of the classroom (see The Prepared Environment Section for more on
Practical Life):
Although the [Practical Life] exercises are skill oriented in the sense that they
involve washing a table or shining ones shoes, their purpose is not to master these
tasks for their own sake. It is rather to aid the inner construction of discipline, organization, independence and self-esteem through concentration on a precise and
completed cycle of activity.32
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Montessori called this aim the normalization of the child. Normalization

occurs as children acquire the skills to interact with their environment through
interaction with their environment.
Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes about
through his movements. In the development of speech, for example, we see a growing
power of understanding go side by side with an extended use of muscles by which
he forms sounds and words. . . . Movement helps the development of mind, and this
nds renewed expression in further movement and activity. It follows that we are
dealing with a cycle, because mind and movement are parts of the same entity.33
Montessori would recognize the absorbent mind in James Alisons description

of mimeticism as involving the less recognizable ways in which we are constituted as human beings by receiving physical being, a sense of being, gestures,
memory, language and consciousness through being drawn into imitation of
others.34 The Montessori Method relies on the fact that the same mechanism
that draws us into imitation of others also draws children into engagement with
the physical world. For Montessori, a failure to recognize that the childs fascination with objects is never an end in itself will handicap and perhaps doom the
efforts of educators.
This drive to become is what Girard refers to as metaphysical desire, the
desire to be by way of possessing the being of the other. In Genesis of Desire,
Jean-Michel Oughourlian likens human mimeticism to a psychological movement toward the other that has all the force of a gravitational pull. This draw
toward the other enables a self to be received in imitation of the other over time.
James Alison, referring to Oughourlian, concludes that Repetition in time
enables the memory to be born, thus making possible language and enabling
the human to be kept together as one person throughout his or her life history
... that is, it leads to psychogenesis, or the birth of the human psyche.35 Montessori observes that the child absorbs the life going on about him and becomes
one with it. . . . his mind ends by resembling the environment itself. Children
become like the things they love.36
But Alison also points out the double valence of this draw:
Of course, like gravity, it is a principle of both attraction and repulsion. At rst we
are drawn to imitate a model and learn from it, but soon we imitate gestures that
lead to rivalry, taking the same object as the model. Our model becomes our rival,
and we dene ourselves over against another. So mimesis is both the condition for
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our attraction toward others and our separation from them, leading to the construction of our individuality and identity.37
The same mechanism leads both to the birth of the individual and to rivalry.
Mimetic theory recognizes two types of mediation to describe this phenomenon. External mediation is the condition for learning from a model that is
removed by social, temporal, or physical distance from the admiring subject.
This distance is a buffer against rivalry. Internal mediation occurs when distance
is collapsed and model and subject are close enough to enter into competition
for a mediated object. What triggers the descent from external to internal
mediation, from learning into rivalry? Ren Girard describes it this way:
The mimetic quality of childhood desire is universally recognized. Adult desire
is virtually identical, except that (most strikingly in our own culture) the adult is
generally ashamed to imitate others for fear of revealing his lack of being. The adult
likes to assert his independence and to offer himself as a model to others; he invariably falls back on the formula, Imitate me! in order to conceal his own lack of
originality.38
And again:
A mimetic crisis is always a crisis of undifferentiation that erupts when the roles of
subject and model are reduced to that of rivals. Its the disappearance of the object
which makes it possible.39
This connection between the denial of the imitation and the disappearance of
the object is pertinent to Montessoris emphasis on directing the childs attention toward the didactic materials through a benign or withdrawn mediation.
During a presentation, the mode of interaction is implicitly one of imitation.
The teacher is openly modeling a focused engagement with the material for
the child to imitate. Then the teacher withdraws, allowing the child to take her
place. The moment of withdrawal is made possible because the teachers attention toward the material has been absorbed or internalized by the child. The
admiration the teacher modeled for the object is now also the childs. The object
has been brought into the childs view, but rather than become rivals for its possession, teacher and child share it freely. It is the childs open imitation and the
teachers respect for it that makes the withdrawn mediation possible.
As Girard points out, it is not that the childs intelligence is not the same
as ours or that there is a fundamental difference between childhood and adult
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desire, or between the need for both to acquire being. The simple difference is
in the relationship to ones own mimetic desire, and it is that difference that distorts the relationship to the object. Adult shame leads to false insistence on the
priority of ones own desire, generating rivalry in adults. As the rivalry escalates,
the object recedes from view and the attraction between the rivals radiates with
more power than the feeble interest in the object that precipitated the binding
of the rivals together.
What Montessori observed and Girard described above is that children
are not born ashamed of their mimeticism. Shame is learned from and through
interaction with shamed models. Without shame, children do not become their
own stumbling blocks, and this opens up the possibility for a different, healthy
relationship to objects. In the withdrawn mediation of a presentation, rivalry
is avoided because imitation is honored, allowing the didactic material to be
introduced into the childs world as an object of shared fascination.
THE PREPARED ENVIRONMENT
Montessoris mission was to create an environment that would support this

unfolding project whose methodology was unabashed imitation. As was quoted
earlier, Montessori believed that education is not acquired by listening to
words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment.
It follows, therefore, that it is essential that the objects of the environment do
not recede from view but rather are allowed to become a benecial focus of
attention. This attention toward the object is both mediated and in some sense
instinctual, as it is the drive of the child to become that is being expressed. The
role of the teacher as mediator in this environment will be discussed in the next
section. Let us turn to the objects of the environment themselves and the mode
of the childs interaction with them.
Montessoris deep respect for the work of the child is evidenced in many
ways, rst among which and most appreciated by children is the fact that she
referred to the materials as works and the use of them as work, not play. A
childs longing for respect is as deep as an adults, and as mimetic theory states,
a facility with the materials is not the ultimate object of the childs desire. The
true object of desire is to be an adult and so to possess the admiration that
adults seem to possess. Montessori recognized the depth of that longing to be as
procient as adults and construed support of that longing as the educators task.
She describes the following incident, which illustrates how she demonstrated
her respect and how it was received by the children:
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One day I decided to give the children a slightly humorous lesson on how to
blow their noses. After I had shown them different ways to use a handkerchief, I
ended by indicating how it could be done as unobtrusively as possible. I took out
my handkerchief in such a way that they could hardly see it and blew my nose as
softly as I could. The children watched me in rapt attention but failed to laugh.
I wondered why, but I had hardly nished my demonstration when they broke
out into applause that resembled a long repressed ovation in a theater. . . . It then
occurred to me that I had perhaps touched a sensitive spot in their little social
world. Children have a particular difculty in blowing their noses. Since they are
constantly being scolded on this score, they are sensitive about it. The shouts they
hear and the insulting epithets that are hurled at them hurt their feelings . . . But
no one really teaches them how to blow their noses. When I tried to do so . . . their
applause indicated that I had not only treated them with justice but had enabled
them to get a new standing in society. 40
Montessori deeply respected not only their desire to become adults but the process of becoming itself, the overt operation of their metaphysical desire. This
led to a central principle, that of the childs freedom to make use of the didactic
materials, and Montessoris goal of eliminating all obstacles, whether material
or human, that might interfere with this natural process. Because the child is
not ashamed of his mimeticism but openly seeks to perfect himself in imitation
of his models, freedom was essential so that the childs interest in a didactic
material could be allowed to run its natural course. Who but the child was t
to assess whether that limit had been reached? If a child returned to a material
repeatedly, this was a sign of the importance his work with that material had.
Repetition is essential for learning. To interrupt it with adult notions of what
was enough was to impose articial restrictions on a childs development. This
would result in temper tantrums, pouting, ts of crying, and loud demands,
which Montessori considered to be perfectly understandable responses to the
disrespect shown to the child by the interruption.
Often what we call naughtiness on the part of the individual child is rebellion against
our own mistakes in educating him. The coercive means that we adopt toward
children are what destroy their natural tranquility. A healthy child, in his moments
of freedom, succeeds in escaping from the toys inicted upon him by his parents
and in securing some object that arouses the investigating instinct of his mind: a
worm, an insect, some pebbles, and so forth; he is silent, tranquil, and attentive. If
the child is not well, or if his mother obliges him to remain seated in a chair, playing
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with a doll, he becomes restless, cries, or gives way to convulsive outbursts (bad
temper). The mother believes that educating her child means forcing him to do
what is pleasing to her, however far she may be from knowing what the childs
real needs are, and unfortunately we must make the same statement regarding the
schoolteachers! Then, in order to make him yield to coercion, the mother punishes
the child when he rebels and rewards him when he is obedient. By this method we
drive a child by force along paths that are not natural to him.41
Rather than drive a child by force, Montessori insisted on freedom of

movement and unrestricted access to the materials. This also served a second,
equally important function, which was to make space for the unique expressions of the individual child to be observed by the attentive adult. In this way,
the child was communicating her true and unadulterated development stage to
any adult who cared enough to learn the truth about the blossoming individual
in his care.
Highly reective of Montessoris understanding that imitation and repetition were at the heart of childhood learning was the manner in which materials
were to be presented to a child. Here the adult must demonstrate a delicate
sensitivity to the balance required between following the childs interest and
providing the support he needs to be successful at the task he has chosen. The
best way to explain this process is by way of example, so we can turn to a general
introduction to the Montessori classroom.
The classroom is divided into ve areas: Practical Life, Sensorial, Language,
Mathematics, and Science. Most Montessori classrooms also have a sixth area,
devoted to cultural activities such as art, history, and music. Our example will
take place in the Practical Life area of the classroom, which is the entry point
for the youngest of the students, the three-year-olds. All Montessori classrooms
are designed to accommodate three-year developmental periods; thus the preschool room is for three- to six-year-olds. The Practical Life area is divided into
four types of activities to assist the child in performing everyday skills with the
adeptness they so admire in adults.
Elementary Movements. These are activities that are demonstrated in precise
lessons by the teacher to individual children, small groups, or the entire
class during circle time. They include walking, sitting, and standing from a
chair, pouring water, folding a napkin, and opening and closing doors. Also
in this area are materials on the shelf for the development of ne motor
skills, including pouring work, using tweezers and scissors, sorting activities, and spooning.
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Care of Self. These involve materials that can be taken off the shelf and used
to provide practice with personal tasks such as hand washing, buttoning,
tying shoelaces. Group or individual lessons include hanging up a coat and
using the bathroom.
Care of Environment. Like care of self, these involve specic materials
designed for perfecting skills such as table scrubbing, mirror cleaning, setting a table, clothes washing, dishwashing, and ower arranging.
Care of Others (also known as Grace and Courtesy). Like Elementary
Movements, these are demonstrated by the teacher and include greeting,
asking for help, waiting, how to interrupt, apologizing, how to cough or
sneeze, and table manners.
Imagine the teacher observing a three-year-old approaching the pouring work in the Elementary Movements area. The material is a tray just large
enough to hold two small glass pitchers and a small cloth for wiping up drips.
One of the pitchers is two-thirds full of water. The child may demonstrate his
interest by touching the work on the shelf, watching another child using it, or
actually taking it off the shelf and experimenting with it without rst receiving
the instruction from the teacher. This demonstration of interest is a moment
of vulnerability for the child. If the teacher is too abrupt or disrespectful, the
child may respond with shame, as if he has been chastised, and may interpret his
display of interest as a transgression. Observing the childs interest, however it is
demonstrated, is the rst step in the teachers interaction. Step two is nding an
opportune time to provide the required demonstration that does not disrespect
the child, which most often means when the childs attention is elsewhere but
not fully engaged.
The demonstration consists of two parts: the demonstration itself, in which
the child observes the teachers use of the material, followed by the childs use
of the material on his own. The demonstration is conducted in silence and is
halted if the childs attention wanders or if the teacher needs to speak for some
reason. It is resumed only when the original condition of silent attentiveness on
the part of both teacher and student has been restored. Indeed, one of the most
important things that the teacher is demonstrating is attentiveness and focus on
the task at hand.
Most behavior carried out by adults happens so fast that children cannot
actually see the various movements we are making to accomplish this or that
everyday feat. Each demonstration of a Montessori material consists of the slow
modeling of deliberately isolated smaller movements that, combined, make
the larger task possible. Lets continue with the example of water pouring. The
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teacher approaches the child and says, Mary, may I show you something?
If Mary agrees, the teacher leads her to the water pouring activity, says This
is water pouring, and carefully takes it off the shelf, placing it on one of the
child-sized tables. The teacher sits in the chair with the child on her left (if she
is right handed), says, First I will do it, and then it will be your turn, and then
proceeds with the demonstration following these steps:
1. Place ngers of left hand into handle of empty pitcher, thumb resting on
top of handle.
2. Place ngers of right hand into handle of lled pitcher, thumb resting on
top of handle.
3. Lift empty pitcher slightly off tray with left hand.
4. Lift lled pitcher slightly higher.
5. Pour water using entire arm.
6. Pause, waiting for the last drop.
7. Set full pitcher down on tray.
8. Pick up drip cloth and wipe any water from spout of empty pitcher.
9. Lower pitcher to tray and release.
10. Put drip cloth down on tray.
11. With left hand grasping the top left corner of tray and right hand grasping
near right corner, turn tray one-quarter turn counter-clockwise.
12. Release hands.
13. Reposition hands as in step 11 and repeat one-quarter turn.
14. Repeat steps 1 through 10.
15. Check tray for any spills and use back-up materials for clean up as needed.
Once the demonstration is complete, the teacher rises from the chair and
gestures for the child to take her place. She says, When you are through, come
get me and Ill show you how to put this work away. Then the teacher leaves
the area in which the child is working and observes the child without the childs
being aware of it. When the child has spent as much time as desired with the
material, the teacher demonstrates cleaning up and returning the material to
the spot on the shelf where it belongs in a condition that enables someone else
to use it.
What is happening here is that the child is learning rst by watching and
then by doing. This is a critical component in all Montessori education. The
watching, of course, reminds us of the discovery that mirror neurons are both
perception cells and motor cells in one. While watching the pouring demonstration, the child is rehearsing the movements in her brain, and then when using
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the material on her own she is given the chance to perfect those movements so
that they become as natural and unconscious as an adults.
The role of the educator, then, is not to draw attention to her own perfection or make a fuss about what a worthy model she is. The mode of presentation
is one of quiet assurance and absolute condence in the childs ability to master
the presented task through careful observation and as much repetition as the
child desires. Montessori relates this method of presentation to the interplay
between observation and movement in the earliest days of the childs life:
In his mental life, the rst thing to awaken is his power to observe what lies about
him, and it is clear that he must come to know the world in which he is about to
move. A work of observation precedes his rst movements, and when he begins to
move he will be guided by what he already knows and has come to perceive. Getting ones bearings and moving are both dependent on a previous degree of mental
development. This is why the newborn child starts by lying motionless. When, later,
he moves, he will be able to follow the guidance of his mind.42
Compare her statement above to this from Iacoboni describing the results
of experiments identifying two types of mirror neurons:
In the real world, as it turns out, neither the monkey nor the human can observe
someone else picking up an apple without also invoking in the brain the motor
plans necessary to snatch that apple themselves (mirror neuron activation). Likewise, neither the monkey nor the human can even look at an apple without also
invoking the motor plans necessary to grab it (canonical neuron activation). In
short, the grasping actions and motor plans necessary to obtain and eat a piece of
fruit are inherently linked to our very understanding of fruit. The ring pattern of
both mirror and canonical neurons in area F5 shows clearly that perception and
action are not separated in the brain. They are simply two sides of the same coin,
inextricably linked to each other.43
Perception, action, appropriationthe sequence of sensory-motor activity

necessary to the development of the self. In childhood, the appropriation of
objects is not a matter of whimsy but an essential element of the childs unfolding life. Using mimetic theory terminology, we would say that acquisitive
mimesis is in this case an unqualied good. Yet Montessori did recognize that
conicts emerge from appropriation. She distinguished between deviations
within individuals and natural conicts arising from competition for limited
resources. The latter are brutish competitive struggles among men desiring to
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enrich themselves and have nothing to do with childhoods purposeful appropriation. Among deviations within individuals she wrote, may be listed the
longing for possessions without reference to the preservation of the individual
or the species. Again, this is not associated with childhood appropriation,
which is essential both for the individual and for the species. She conceived of
this deviated longing for possessions as a base human desire because it did not
include an element of striving for something beyond self-interest. This possessiveness, she said, dominates love, replacing it with hatred.44
Montessori also describes a deviated relationship to objects that results
in children when they have an unsuitable environment, that is, one lled with
objects that serve no useful function in the fulllment of their drive to become.
In this case, she says, the child
is attracted simply to things and desires to possess them. To take something and
keep it is easy and requires little knowledge and love. A childs energies are thus
diverted. Such a child will say, I want it, when he sees a gold watch, even though he
cannot tell time. But then another child will immediately shout, No, I want it, and
the two are ready to ght over the watch, even if this might ruin it. This is the way
in which individuals begin to compete against each other and destroy the objects
they desire to possess.45
This seems to be a description of rivalry with only a vague awareness that the children are imitating each other rather than being drawn to some essential quality
of the watch. Yet Montessoris focus on the object suggests an avenue of exploration. Is it of any value to make a distinction among objects such that some serve a
psychic function and some do not? Does the functional use of the object depend
on the object itself or on the subject using it? Perhaps we nd ourselves in the
dual realm of both children and artists, or perhaps saints, who, free from rivalry
with others, can engage in benign mediation resulting in meditative engagement
with objects in the material world. This is indeed in concert with Montessoris
focus on the necessity of the environment to the unfolding life of the child:
Intellectual exercise is the most pleasing of all to the small child if he is in good health.
Indeed, we already know that children break their toys in order to see how they
are made inside; this shows that the exercise of their intellect interests them more
than playing with an object that is often irrational. But children are not, as is generally believed, naturally destructive; on the contrary, their instinct is to preserve.
This is seen in the way in which they save little objects that they have acquired by
themselves; and in the Childrens Houses, we have also seen it in the way that they
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preserve unharmed even the most trivial scrap of paper, although free to tear it up,
so long as that scrap of paper helps them to exercise their thoughts.46
What we see with the relationship of a child (or an artist or saint) to the necessary object is a successful binding to the mediated object without the interference of being ashamed of the mediation. The mediated object remains in view
without the intrusion of the emotional charge of rivalrous mediation. The
object can be the object in addition to being a representative of the being of an
other. Because children do come into conict over the didactic materials, Montessori classrooms are designed with conict in mind, and teachers are trained
to respond to conicts as teaching moments.
The lessons related to managing conicts are found in the area of Practical
Life known as Care of Others or Grace and Courtesy and are an integral part
of the life of the classroom. The teacher presents them regularly. One vitally
important lesson is how to wait. This is presented to the entire group in the rst
days of the school year. The teacher will ask a child to choose a material and put
it on a carpet (children work on small carpets on the oor as well as tables) in
the center of the circle. The teacher will then explain to the group that she will
demonstrate what to do when you want to use a material that someone else
has. She rises and sits beside the child working and asks, Can I use it now?
Then she tells the child he can give one of two answers. He could say, Yes. I
will put it away and then you can use it, following proper classroom procedure
that requires each child to complete the work cycle before another can use it.
Or he can say, Not now. But Ill let you know when I am done. The teacher
then demonstrates the follow-up question. Can I watch? Ill be very quiet. To
which the child can answer yes or no. If permission is not given, the teacher
demonstrates leaving the area.
Children may negotiate a little longer, but these lessons work to resolve
such disputes. If two children converge nearly simultaneously on a material,
more drama may ensue! There may be tears or hurt feelings, but it is time for
the most vital lesson of all, that of gazing into the eyes of the other. The teacher
does not seek to determine who is in the right. Mimetic theory, if not practical
experience with children, teaches us the futility of such an approach. Rather the
teacher gains the attention of the two children and asks them to look at each
other. Then she asks each child in turn to tell her what he sees in his adversarys
face. The answer may be tears or hes sad or hes mad. Then the teacher asks,
How can you help him feel better? and leads them in a discussion, however
long it may take, for the two to learn to accommodate not only their wish for the
object but their opponents as well. Creative solutions always result. They may
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decide to share or take turns, but surprisingly what often happens is that they
mutually agree on a completely different material that they work on together.
In childhood, the gravitational force of mimeticism is drawing the child into
a process of acquisitive mimesis in which the objects do indeed fade from view
but not until they have been incorporated into the childs self. In the classroom,
this is demonstrated by the childs intense engagement with a didactic material
naturally fading and allowing for a free movement to another material. This mediated but nonrivalrous relationship to an object is what mimetic theory would
refer to as a healthy pattern of desire. Healthy desire does not become xated
immovably on one object but is normally so uid in interaction with the ow
of all the desires around us.47 Montessori observes that uidity of desire makes
possible the childs prolonged periods of intense concentration, which she saw
as a preventative against a sentimental and romantic outlook on life. Romantic
adults are engaged in useless activity, itting from thing to thing. They become
admirers of lights, sky . . . but they do not know the light which they admire so
well enough to really love it. The stars that inspire them cannot hold their attention long enough for them to attain the least knowledge of astronomy.48
For Montessori, the natural process of acquisitive mimesis that is part of
the childs absorbent mind, in and of itself, does not necessitate escalation to
extremes. Or as Jean-Michel Oughourlian puts it, Mimetic escalation is not
necessarily something fatal; it can also be the way one hears the call of paradise.49 Conict spirals out of control when desire succumbs to deviations,
that is, to the desire to possess an object for selsh reasons. But Montessori
observed such deviated desire to be the result of authoritative and rivalrous
pedagogical and parenting practices and not the normal expression of childhood desire. Montessoris insistence that children be provided with mediated
and nonrivalrous relationships to the objects in the environment, and that this
is the normal human condition, is the foundation of her hope for the emergence
of truly free adults not bound by deviated desires. Her focus is on supporting
the emerging potential in childhood for an intense relationship with material
objects as the preventative against escalating rivalries. It becomes the foundation for an adult life capable of art, creativity, and peaceful relationships with
the world and others.
TEACHER AS OBSERVANT SERVANT
If, as Montessori believed, children are endowed with the capacity to become
competent adult members of their culture in the form of their absorbent
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minds, what is the role of the teacher in a Montessori classroom? Put simply, it
is to be present in an unobtrusive way. By education must be understood the
active help given to the normal expansion of the life of the child, she wrote.50
Paradoxically, that active help took the form of active restraint on the part of
the teacher on behalf of the liberty of the child. It is necessary rigorously to
avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.51
The spontaneous movements are valued as the expression of the childs inner
drive to learn, and interfering with that expression is the cardinal Montessori
sin. We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at
the time when the child is just beginning to be active: perhaps we suffocate life
itself.52
Montessori was relentlessly critical of the traditional authoritarian teacher
who reserved all freedom and spontaneity for herself. In that case, it is the
teacher who stands as supreme model in front of the classroom, and the children who are consigned to the role of observers. Montessori wished to reverse
this completely, freeing the children from connement to desks and chairs
so that it is they who are spontaneous and free and the teacher who is quietly
observing. She says it succinctly: The pedagogical method of observation has
for its base the liberty of the child; and liberty is activity.53 Rather than children
fearfully acquiescing to the bidding of adults, adults would become loving followers of the child.
Precisely because the teachers function is to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements, they must learn to cultivate and recognize these movements.
The environment must be one in which freedom is possible in order for the
spontaneous movement to be detected by observation. In fact, the single most
important mode of teacher activity is observation. But the natural concern of
the women whom Montessori rst inducted into this methodand the ongoing concern of well-meaning teachers to this dayis the fear of a classroom
spinning out of control. Freedom for children is equated with chaos, disorder,
and the complete loss of safety. One can think of this as the strongman model
of classroom order, with the teacher as strongman and the children comprising various tribes who, if left to their own devices, will deteriorate into an all
against all conict. This is the argument of the powerful tyrant and when made
by teachers or parents is the set-up for the infamous power struggle, which is a
mimetic rivalry between two people separated by the greatest social distance of
all, that of the protector and the dependent.
Montessoris genius was in her recognition that rivalry stunts growth. If a
child is caught up in rivalry with an adult caretaker, the normative relationship
of external mediation is disrupted. It is the childs earnest desire to imitate the
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adult who looms in the childs world as an unassailable model. There is nothing
so alluring to desire as the illusion of self-sufciency, an illusion projected by
the adult to the susceptible child. However, if the model becomes obstacle, not
only is the potential for a healthy relationship to the culture disrupted, but the
model suffers damage as the illusion of self-sufciency is shattered. The object
will certainly recede from view as rivalry takes its place, with profound consequences for the child.
Adults dominate children by virtue of a recognized natural right. To question this right would be the same as attacking a kind of consecrated sovereignty.
If in a primitive community a tyrant represents God, an adult to a child is divinity itself. He is simply beyond discussion. Rather than disobey, a child must
keep silent and adjust himself to everything.
If he does show some resistance, this will rarely be a direct, or even intended, reply
to an adults action. It will rather be a vital defense of his psychic integrity or an
unconscious reaction to oppression.54
The loss of condence in the adults sufciency may cause the child to be worried about his safety, so utterly dependent is he on the adult. Yet he resists,
perhaps out of panic, perhaps hopeful for reassurance. This is the world of
power struggles, of childhood temper tantrums, and unfortunately of adult
resentment. The adult who clings to authoritarian practices has fallen into the
trap of presenting the child with a double bind: imitate me as your model for
adult being, but do not imitate me in my possession of authority over you on
this or that issue. Of course, the more the adult defends her right to authority,
the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the child, who assumes that it must
indeed be the key to becoming a competent adult since it is being defended so
violently.
Yet the proper exercise of adult authority is essential for the physical and
psychological safety of the child. The task of the teacher (and parent) is to
exercise authority without becoming an obstacle to the childs development. A
good classroom example of how to exercise proper teacherly authority is shown
by the transition from the time for individual work to group time. The moment
of the transition is decided and communicated by the teacher to the class, often
with a bell or a dimming of lights and a quiet, perhaps sung, invitation to put
your work away and come to the line. The line is an actual line commonly
drawn with tape in the form of a circle on the oor upon which the children
sit with their teacher for group lessons. This time of transition is fraught with
potential problems, for the cardinal sin is to interrupt spontaneous activity.
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While it is impossible to call the group to the line at a convenient time for all
the children, nevertheless the sensitive teacher gets a sense of the work cycle of
the room and notices when a number of the children are nishing one work and
in the process of choosing another. That is a good moment to call line time. For
those who must be interrupted, a delicate process ensues. Children know that
part of the classroom rule is that they may preserve their work in its unnished
state to take up tomorrow. If that does not satisfy, a child may insist on nishing
her work before joining the line. In this case, it may be that all the children but
one have followed the teachers call.
To insist that the one child obey the call to the line is common in authoritarian classrooms but unthinkable in the well-run Montessori room. Respect for
the child simply removes the option. If the teacher does insist, however, let us
imagine what might happen. First, to handle the justication offered for asserting the teachers authority at this point: it is not fair to the other children who
have obeyed. If disobedience is permitted by one, wont the others imitate it
and then all discipline will be lost? That is a justication from within a rivalrous
relationship. It perceives the teacher in rivalry with the child for power and the
children in rivalry with each other. Within relationships of respect, however, the
issue does not arise, because no one is trying to assert authority over another.
Children simply do not imitate the one child because in reality they all have
chosen to be where they are. The teacher has not forced them to the line but has
invited them to come when they are ready. Those who are on the line are ready;
those not on the line are not ready. There is no contest of wills, only the free
exercise of each individual will.
If the teacher should insist on the childs compliance, she will be demonstrating a desire for her will to be prime, which desire, of course, the child will
imitate. A contest of wills will ensue in which there can be no winner. It is a loselose situation, for in order to win the adult must disrespect the child and force
her will upon him. The child will be humiliated, and the adult will be exposed as
a petty tyrant. Worse of all, the childs natural unabashed imitation of the adult
will be tainted. Instead of exuberantly imitating, the child may become tentative
and fearful, thus setting up interference with his development. While it is true
that the child does not become his own obstacle, the adult engaging in a power
struggle can provide an obstacle only too well.
In describing the effect on a powerful man of the authoritarian, tyrannical impulse that wastes his energies protecting a worthless object, Montessori
describes a hypothetical case of such a mans reaction of outrage if his child
should drop and break a glass when he might forgive a guest who made a similar
mistake:
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A child, therefore, must notice with a continued sense of frustration that he is the
only one thought to be unreliable and a source of harm. He thus comes to look upon
himself as an inferior being, worth less than the objects he is forbidden to touch. . . .
A father who is grieved that he has not succeeded in arousing a sense of responsibility and self-control in his son is the very one who has destroyed his childs sense of
continuity in his actions and his regard for his own dignity. The child bears within
himself a secret conviction of inferiority and impotence.55
The shift out of the double bind of adult authority is made possible by Montessoris move toward respect for the developmental processes of childhood. The
adult who follows the child is doing so with an attitude of reverence, much as an
acolyte approaches the master teacher. Indeed, the child is the teacher and must
be understood as such. The method of observation is one of eager exploration,
not unlike that of a botanist studying living plants or an astronomer gazing at
the stars. The adult approaches the child in humility because it is only the child
who can teach the adult what curriculum he needs. Paradoxically, it is exactly
this humility that allows the adult to remain an unassailable model for the child.
Humility prevents the descent into rivalry, allowing the adult to remain a luminous model of external mediation.
What an observant teacher might notice is a child circling around the pink
block tower or tentatively touching the movable alphabet. Perhaps a child sits
watching the work of another or is repeatedly choosing shoe polishing. Maybe
each time a child works with a math material, he makes the same mistake. One
child might always invite someone to work with him, and another child might
always work alone, never connecting to another child. All these things tell the
teacher something about what the child needs in the form of the teachers intervention. Any intervention must be preceded by an observation that justies it.
In all other cases, the children are left free to pursue their active engagement
with the materials.
Of course, there are observed activities that are to be discouraged by the
teacher. Montessori understood that liberty must have a shape and structure or
the fears of chaos expressed above would indeed materialize. The liberty of the
child, she wrote,
should have as its limit the collective interest; as its form, what we universally consider
good breeding. We must, therefore, check in the child whatever offends or annoys
others, or whatever tends toward rough or ill-bred acts. But all the rest,every
manifestation having a useful scope,whatever it be, and under whatever form it
expresses itself, must not only be permitted, but must be observed by the teacher. 56
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Suzanne Ross
Teachers must learn to discern the difference between the types of behavior that must be checked and those that are permitted. In fact, the level of
prociency in discernment is the measure of the teacher, and her response is the
proper exercise of authority. No behavior that is harmful, rude, or hurtful is to
be tolerated. The teacher rmly interrupts with a clear instruction, but not with
alarm, not to frighten. Montessori believed that healthy, normal children misbehave not because they are wicked but because they have not yet been taught
the proper way to behave. If a child misbehaves, the onus is on the teacher to
provide the proper correction.
Again, the circle time provides a good example. If a child is unable to sit
quietly and is causing a disruption to the group lesson, the teacher follows a welldened series of interactions with the child. First the teacher says, Mary, its my
turn to talk. When Im nished, Ill let you have a turn. If the behavior continues,
the teacher repeats with a slight escalation, Mary, its my turn to talk. Are you
having trouble not talking to Amy? Maybe youd like to sit next to someone else.
Mary will insist that she does not need to move her place, but most likely she will
again interrupt the group lesson. At the point the teacher says, It looks as if you
are having a hard time not talking to Amy. I can help you nd another place. And
with that the teacher makes a motion as if she is going to get up from her spot on
the circle to help Mary move. That is in 99 out of 100 cases sufcient to solve the
problem, because no child wishes to give up her autonomy.
Please notice that in this interaction the focus is on the classroom rule of
taking turns to speak during circle time and not on an imposition of authority.
The adult is not angry or defensive but acts as if imparting information. It is
as impersonal as a public address systems announcement of the arrival of the
train from Newbury on track 2. In other cases of disruption, perhaps if a child
is disturbing another, the preferred method is one of distraction. The teacher
will approach the offending child with an invitation to look at this interesting
thing or come with the teacher to see how to do an interesting task. If distraction failed, Rita Kramer notes, The only punishment for misbehavior was
inactivitybeing given nothing to do. The obstreperous child was treated like
a sick child and isolated. He soon recovered.57 This description leaves out one
important element on which the recovery depended. Though isolated at a table
or in a chair set off in a corner, the child was oriented so that his fellow students,
working happily and purposefully, were in full view. His recovery was the result
of the inevitable draw back into the group that models for him and so makes
possible his return to healthy behavior.
With regard to correction of the child at work, Montessori designed her
materials so as to make it completely unnecessary. All of her didactic materials,
115
the ones she borrowed directly from Seguin and the ones she developed in
imitation of him, contain an element she calls control of error. That is, if the
child, after observing the presentation by the teacher, in his striving is unable to
be successful at the rst attempt, well, that is only to be expected. Error is part
of learning and is not to be the prompt for an intervention. The material itself
will help the child both notice the error and correct it. If observation leads the
teacher to discern that intervention is needed, she does so by calling the childs
attention not to his error but to the troubling aspect of the material itself. In
what is called the point of interest, the teacher re-demonstrates the material
by saying, Amy, Id like to show you something special about this work. She
then repeats the demonstration, this time pausing or otherwise drawing attention to the spot in the activity that the child needs to be reinforced. Then again,
the child is left to pursue perfection on her own.
There is, therefore, no need for rewards or punishment. In fact, these are
counterproductive. Because children are internally motivated to learn, rewards
are insulting. And the only effect of punishment for error would be to draw the
childs attention to what is going wrong rather than to engage him in the imitation of right behavior:
Rewards and punishments furnish us with the needed scourge to enforce submission from these marvelously active minds; we encourage them with rewards! to
what end? to winning the prize! Well, by doing so we make the child lose sight of
his real goal, which is knowledge, liberty and work, in order to dazzle him with a
prize which, considered morally, is vanity, and considered materially is a few grains
of metal. We inict punishments in order to conquer nature, which is in rebellion,
not against what is good and beautiful, not against the purpose of life, but against us,
because we are tyrants instead of guides. . . .
The small boys and girls in our Childrens Houses are of their own accord
distrustful of rewards; they despise the little medals, intended to be pinned upon
the breast as marks of distinction, and instead they actively search for objects of
study through which, without any guidance from the teacher, they may model and
judge and correct themselves, and thus work toward perfection.
As to punishments, they are depressing in effect, and they are inicted upon
children who are already depressed!58
Whether observing, intervening, or correcting, Montessori advocates a relationship of love instead of rivalry. Her discourses on love as the essential ingredient
for proper teaching are many and often unexpectedly interrupt her scientic
treatises. Roel Kaptein in his discussion of relationships of rivalry says that In
Suzanne Ross
116
order to be able to teach and learn we need another relationship, one in which
the model is only a model and does not become a rival or an obstacle. In other
words, the relationship must be a free onefree of the mimesis of desire. Relationships can only be free if everybody has their place in them.59 In Montessoris
vision for the classroom, those places are well dened: The child is the master,
demonstrating the miracle of emerging life, and the teacher is his servant.
A servant who is also a model: this is a mystery to which Montessori bowed
in awe. In describing the type of person who would be best suited to be a teacher
of abnormal children, she said it was someone who perfects his moral nature
and thereby exerts a sort of fascination on others.
And if he continues to perfect himself and to mount toward the moral altitudes,
cultivating at the same time a love for his own mission, he will, as if by magic,
become an educator; he will feel that a magic power of suggestion goes forth from
him and conquers; the work of redemption will then seem to accomplish itself like
a conagration which has been kindled from some central point and spreads in rolling ames through the dried undergrowth.60
CONCLUSION
The Montessori Method developed by the Italian education pioneer, Dr. Maria
Montessori, is in many ways a practical application of mimetic theory to the eld
of early childhood education. Attempting to be rigorously scientic, she based
her theory on her observations and eldwork with mentally decient children
and then with normal children from Italys lower class. What she discovered
was what she called the absorbent mind, which is to say that human beings
learn by imitation and that children come into the world not only equipped
with this ability to absorb from their environment but with an intense drive to
do so. From that intuition of human mimeticism, she developed her use of selfcorrecting didactic materials, prepared environments that allow for the liberty
of the child, and a mode of teacherly interaction that does not interfere with
normal processes.
Montessori realized that rivalry interferes with human development. Normalized children, that is, children freed from the tyranny of adults, are calm,
capable of intense concentration, and easily distracted from conict with their
peers. While fascinated with their adult models, children are nevertheless capable
of direct relationships with the objects in their environment. Benot Chantre, in
summarizing what happens to the object of mimetic rivalry, rightly points out
117
that if I quickly come to prefer the dispute to the disputed object, this can only
mean that it is rst and foremost the other who obsesses me, my mediator and his
supposed autonomy, more than the particular object of his desire.61 In childhood,
obsession with the other is always behind the childs fascination with and engagement with the object. Yet the object, imbued with the being of the adult model,
manages to remain a focus of attention provided the mediation is withdrawn. In
other words, if the adult can preserve his position as a benign model of external
mediation, then the child is free to have a healthy, nonxated attachment to the
mediated object. In this ideal student-teacher relationship, acquisitive desire
remains uid, models remain luminous, and objects remain in view.
The precision of Montessori teacher training reects the difcult challenge faced by the adult mediator in maintaining the proper distance from the
child. As an unassailable model, the adult is an external mediator, at so distant a
remove as to make the subjects entering into rivalry with it a remote possibility.
External mediation is characterized by this one-way imitation: model remains
model and subject remains subject with no blurring of roles. But a caretaker
adult is not completely like an external mediator who has little if any awareness
of the subjects fascination with him. Adult caretakers are as fascinated with
their subjects as their subjects are with them, and indeed can become fascinated
with being objects of fascination, resulting in the tyranny so despised by Montessori. As such, this is a relationship of internal mediation in which the roles of
subject and model are uid and dynamic, indeed, impossible to separate. The
correct role of the Montessori educator is to maintain the distance of the model
in external mediation while engaged in reciprocal imitation with the child, each
admiring and learning from the other without descending into rivalry. Roel
Kaptein calls a relationship of this type a model-model relationship:
We are in a model-model relationship when we are not in rivalry with our model.
A model has his or her place and we have our own places as well. We respect each
other and each others places. Model-model relationships are relationships in which
learning can really take place. It is the place of (cultural) freedom.62
In his introduction to Kapteins book, Girard writes of contaminated desire:

Imitative desire wants nothing more than to be free from imitation. Complete
self-sufciency is its ultimate idol. If it were the authors [Kapteins] goal as well, he
would move away from genuine spontaneity which is not the absence of mimetic
behavior but the most nave and innocent imitation of all, that of a little child, the
attitude recommended by Jesus.63
118
Suzanne Ross
When adults and children can remain models for one another, genuine spontaneity is indeed the result. Freed from shame, adult and child alike do not cloak
their desire behind facades of self-reliance. It is the capacity for open admiration
and mutual vulnerability that Montessori sought to preserve and nurture.
Mark Anspachs discussion of relationships of love highlights the vulnerability of children in their dependency on adult generosity. Anspach points out
that relationships of love succeed not so much because each is freely giving to
the other, but that each is openly receiving without assurance of being able to
pay back in kind. In reciprocal relationships, those on the receiving end incur an
obligation that, if not paid back, results in a shamed position of social inferiority. He writes that relationships of love require a fearlessness in occupying the
position of indebtedness:
It is not a question . . . of the condence required to give before being sure that the
other person will reciprocate, but of the still greater condence needed to accept
the others gift when one is not sure of being able to reciprocate oneself. In this case,
one must be condent that the other person will not take advantage of the situation
by demanding an impossible return gift.
Can the generosity of giving be separated from the obligation to give back?64
Children possess no illusion of being able to give back in equal measure to

that which they receive. Their utter lack of self-sufciency is obvious to them.
Montessoris respect and admiration for the work of children and their unapologetic engagement with their models provides a preventative measure against
the shaming of children and the shackles of the double-bind.
In Battling to the End, Benot Chantre and Ren Girard use the term intimate mediation, to describe relationships of internal mediation without rivalry.
In discussing his analysis of The Divine Comedy, Girard says:
. . . the hell of desire is contained entirely in our refusal to see imitation. In fact, the
poets descent from circle to circle consists in describing our mimetic nature if we
hope to free ourselves of it. I concluded by saying that the structure of The Divine
Comedy is identical to that of novelistic truth. We have called such mediation intimate during our conversation in order to suggest that it transforms mimeticism
and opens the door to the other side of violence.65
Montessori designed her pedagogical practice to open that very door. Is it

possible, as she insisted it was, to raise children who less readily succumb to
rivalrys escalations and the resulting delusional relationships with reality?
119
And would that provide the foundation for a movement beyond war? Mimetic
theory warns of minimizing the difculty of avoiding rivalry and its escalation
to violence. One could say that the violent events that permeated Montessoris
life provided her with a similar warning. Yet she clung to her vision of the formation of a human being that has outgrown its need for violence. Perhaps the
hope she offers lies in the normalization of the childs relationship to the object.
Being inducted into healthy patterns of desire over time, in which objects
take their natural place within our eld of attention, may provide some sort of
inoculation against their disappearance into rivalry and a concurrent increase in
irrationality. In our example of conict over the didactic materials, we saw that
the children are indeed capable of learning that what seemed urgently importantthat I possess it solelywas in fact inconsequential. The true moment of
hominization may be when I realize that my desire for the object can be coincident with yours without the conict escalating out of control. Girard describes
this possibility:
we will always be mimetic, but we dont have to be so in a satanic fashion. That is,
we dont have to engage perpetually in mimetic rivalries. We dont have to accuse
our neighbour; instead, we can learn to love him. . . . In communities, there are so
many people that it would be statistically impossible for mimetic violence not to
be present, but the individual isnt bound hand and foot to mimetic desire. Jesus
himself was not. To talk about freedom means to talk about mans ability to resist
the mimetic mechanism.66
Early childhood offered Montessori a glimpse of the operation of mediated

desire uncontaminated by rivalry, and it looked surprisingly peaceful. Her
belief in the goodness of creation and of human nature gave her the courage to
attempt a radical departure from accepted educational practices, allowing her to
embrace a vision of a new type of human ourishing. To follow Dr. Montessoris
advice to follow the child may provide mimetic theory with a deeper understanding of the role of the senses in imitation as well as a model for a withdrawn
mediation that makes healthy patterns of desire possible.
NOTES
1. Ren Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and
Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).
2. Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe, SJ (New York:
Suzanne Ross
120
Ballantine, 1972), 207.

3. Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, trans. Claude A. Claremont (New York: Dell
Publishing, 1967), 15.
4. Montessori, The Secret of Childhood, 208.
6. Maria Montessori, Pedagogical Anthropology, trans. Frederic Taber Cooper (New York:
Frederick Stokes, 1913), 162.
7. Montessori, Pedagogical Anthropology, 162.
9. Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method, trans. Anne E. George (New York: Schocken
Books, 1964), 31.
10. Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988), 282.
11. Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography, 327.
13. Montessori, The Montessori Method, 2847.
14. Montessori, The Montessori Method, 4871. This is the inaugural address delivered by
Montessori to commemorate the opening of the San Lorenzo Childrens House on
January 6, 1907.
15. Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, 19.
20. See http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/346759/Cesare-Lombroso. accessed
November 30, 2011
24. Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with
Others (New York: Picador, 2008), 48.
121

32. Paula Polk Lillard, Montessori: A Modern Approach (New York: Schocken Books, 1972),
71.
34. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes (New York: The
Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 12.
35. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes, 2829.
37. Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes, 28.
38. Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977), 146.
39. Ren Girard with Peirpaolo Antonello and Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution and
Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: Continuum International
Publishing, 2007), 57.
43. Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others, 14
47. Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Genesis of Desire, trans. Eugene Webb (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2010), 23.
49. Oughourlian, The Genesis of Desire, 48.
59. Roel Kaptein, with the cooperation of Duncan Morrow, On the Way to Freedom (Dublin,
Suzanne Ross
122
Ireland: The Columba Press, 1993), 36.

61. Benot Chantre, The Combray Steeple: Ren Girard or the Final Law (paper presented
at Imitatio Summer School, Leusden, Netherlands, 2009), 9.
62. Kaptein, On the Way to Freedom, 13738.
63. Kaptein, On the Way to Freedom, Introduction, 9.
64. Mark Rogin Anspach, Just the Two of Us, trans. by the author (Paris: ditions du Seuil,
2002), 3.
65. Ren Girard, Battling to the End, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 2010), 205.
66. Girard, with Antonello and de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion, 225, 222.
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The Development of a Healthy Pattern of Desire