Cosmic Education at the Elementary Level and the Role of the Materials

This issue of Communications pays tribute to the memory and fine mind of Camillo Grazzini, long-time director of training at the AMI training centre in Bergamo, who died earlier this year. “Cosmic Education at the Elementary Level and the Role of the Materials” beautifully illustrates his deep understanding of Cosmic Education and its implications for the Second Plane Child. This article is based on a paper delivered at the AMI International Study Conference on “The Child, The Family, The Future”, held in Washington, D.C. in July, 1994.

Camillo Grazzini recounts his close collaboration with Mario Montessori concerning work done with children at the elementary level. He describes how Mario Montessori would extensively lecture ‘on the psychology of the elementary age child; on the environment, materials and work of the teacher in relation to the child of six to twelve; [Mario] would also give lectures on the cosmic fables as psychological keys to the exploration of culture. These cosmic fables are:

1 God Who Has No Hands—the story of the creation of the universe, etc. and, therefore, the greatest vision of the whole that can be offered to the child (introducing geography in particular)

2 Story of Life—both the appearance or coming of life and the evolutionary succession (introducing biology)

3 Story of the Appearance or Coming of Man—(introducing human history)

4 Story of ‘The Ox and the House’—which is the story of the alphabet (for language)

5 Story of Numbers or of Counting—(for mathematics)

6 Story of ‘The Country/Nation of the Great River’—commonly known as ‘The Great River’: the story of the human body (for human physiology and anatomy).’

Mr Grazzini illustrates some of the activities carried out under Mario Montessori’s guidance when study groups ‘prepared materials for each of the subject areas in a different part of the room. These materials were designed to correspond and appeal to the sensitivities and tendencies of a child of the second plane of development: imagination, culture, morality, etc.’

The interdependencies of the various subjects studied were exemplified, and a concrete three-dimensional image of Maria Montessori’s words was created. ‘One of the purposes of education is to relate the studies (or subjects), one with the other, around the Cosmic Centre. For you cannot understand biology without understanding chemistry or physics, and you cannot study life without its environment, which brings us to geography. (…) And every subject is a more detailed description of the one fundamental principle’.