Science and the Montessori Casa dei Bambini

From Science and the Montessori Casa dei Bambini, an article by Annette M. Haines Director of Training at the Montessori Training Center of St. Louis, Missouri.

This article was first delivered as a lecture to the North American AMI Trainers' Council held in Tempe, Arizona in November, 1999.

The article's introduction by Renilde Montessori also serves to spark off discussion of the subject.

(From the introduction)

...Neither shall we know whether children in Montessori schools will be more or less scientifically inclined if in the Casa dei Bambini they are presented with science exercises or not. To have, or not to have science in the three-to-six classroom is a quietly enduring tug o' war between two factions in our very own AMI pedagogical community. We do not bandy neither do we hurl. We are civilised, we endeavour to uphold the principles of grace and courtesy which presumably are second nature to us, yet we tenaciously clamp our jaw around our well-founded convictions on the subject, sinking a powerful fang into a rationale made from solid bone.

Annette Haines offers a superbly lucid, well-illustrated exposé of pedagogical reasons for not having science exercises in the Children's House. We would like to invite defenders of the other faith to come forward with an equally eloquent avowal of their conviction that simple science experiments have a place in a prepared environment for children from three to six years of age.

(From Annette Haines' article)

In order to talk about science in the environment we prepare for the 3&endash;6 year-old, we must first ask, "What is science?" Science is a method of inquiry, a mode of investigation which makes a systematic attempt at creating knowledge.

(...) Scientific progress can be seen as the exploration of error. Most scientific hypotheses or theories are wrong: the scientific community sees that wrong ones don't get published. Right ones are made with "the tears and sweat (at any rate, with a good deal of bad language) by people who are constantly getting the wrong answer" (1978, p.111).

Science is done by the scientific method. You probably remember learning about the scientific method in school: formulate a hypothesis; construct a straw man (a null hypothesis); and design an experiment to see if the empirical evidence is enough to reject the null hypothesis with a certain level of probability that your results are not the result of chance variation. It is a powerful tool, but it cannot prove anything; it can only disprove. Science thus requires a certain attitude of scepticism (Shaughnessy & Zechmeister,1990, p. 21). No truth is so sacred that it cannot be tested.

(...) Scientific experiments are usually done in a laboratory where the variables can be controlled. The researcher lets the one variable he wishes to examine be a free or independent variable. Maria Montessori described her method as "scientific pedagogy". In the laboratory of the prepared environment, all the variables are controlled except one: the child. The child is the independent variable. Behaviour is recorded through narrative records and checklists documenting the frequency of specific behaviours, the duration of the behaviour, and so forth. It is essential to give the children freedom because only when the children are free, can we clearly see their individual differences.