2012.12.26 蒙特梭利大分裂

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U.S.
The Great Montessori Schism
The divisive history of the popular school system, and what it teaches us about education and change

By Emily Chertoff
DECEMBER 26, 2012
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The divisive history of the popular school system, and what it teaches us about education and change

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Students gardening at a Berlin Montessori school, 1930. (Wikimedia Commons)
True to its nature as an essentially religious institution, the kindergarten has undergone schisms, been rent with heresies, has been divided into orthodox and heterodox, into liberals and conservatives, although the whole body of the work has gone constantly forward, keeping pace with the increasing modern preoccupation with childhood.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, A Montessori Mother, 1916

I have fond memories of my Montessori preschool and kindergarten. Every day was like a be-bop performance—there were structures, but the players got to improvise within them. A typical Montessori day—in an American Montessori school, at least—includes large chunks of time for students to explore the classroom. Nobody told us how to play with our toys, or when. There were occasional moments of inspired weirdness (burning incense when we learned about ancient Egypt; making fake whale blubber out of marshmallows), but our teachers were sweet, the atmosphere was lovey-dovey, and I didn't have any concept of the quasi-religious fervor that can underlie alternative education theories.

Then, a few years ago, I wound up doing some in-depth research into the history of Montessori in the U.S. The infighting I turned up may say more about the true believers of alternative education in general than it does about Montessori in particular.

At least when it comes to early education, Montessori is in some ways the least alternative of the alternative education methods. Students play with carefully designed toys that a parent can easily see leading to more abstract concepts. Golden beads that teach her to count! Little round weights that introduce volume and shape! Shoe-tying! Pouring juice! This makes Montessori palatable to parents like mine, who would have allowed me to go feral sooner than send me to a Waldorf preschool to make woodcrafts and learn about Geist.

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In the U.S., Montessori has two major accrediting bodies that, together, accredit or affiliate with around 4,000 schools. The first—Association Montessori Internationale (AMI)—was founded by Maria Montessori in 1929 in order to perpetuate her own work. Montessori started her first school, the Casa dei Bambini, in a Rome tenement in 1907. Over time, she developed a comprehensive system for teaching children through middle school, and left notes that suggested a way to adapt her ideas at a high-school level. Montessori subscribed to constructivism, a theory of education that says students do better if we let them piece together how the world works by moving through it themselves than if we deliver knowledge top-down.

Today, the organization she founded is considered the "orthodox" wing of Montessori teaching. AMI touts the continuity of instruction across its schools, and its resistance to fads. If your child switches instructors, he'll still be taught the same way. If you move, you can be assured that your new AMI school will use the same pedagogy. Short-lived trends in education won't affect how your kid learns. You'll know exactly what you're getting.

Here's the problem, as some Montessori teachers saw it, even in the 1950s: Sometimes those short-lived trends aren't short-lived, and sometimes they are not trends. As we discover more about learning, or as the times change, does the way we teach kids have to change as well? Traditionalist Montessori said no: Don't mess with the teaching method if it's working well. Some Montessori teachers weren't satisfied with that answer.

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In 1953, Nancy McCormick Rambusch, an American teacher, went to an education conference in Paris, where she first encountered the Montessori method. After training in Britain, she returned to the United States to open a Montessori school in Greenwich, Connecticut. Up until that point, Montessori had taken off in countries around Europe, but unlike other imported European methods like Waldorf, it hadn't made much of a dent in the U.S.

That's because, in the early 20th century, some prominent American educators had actively discredited the Montessori method. The American philosopher and educator John Dewey, and his student William Heard Kirpatrick, thought Montessori's program stifled creativity and focused too much on the individual. Kirpatrick went on a campaign against the Montessori method in the 1920s, attacking it in a popular pamphlet. His criticisms helped keep Montessori scarce in the U.S. for about three decades.

But on the cusp of the 1960s, things were changing. Rambusch's efforts, beginning in the late 1950s, represented a fresh attempt in a few decades to introduce Montessori to the U.S. This time, it stuck, and some of the credit is probably due to her idea that the method needed to be modernized. In an influential book, lectures, and her own work as a teacher, academic, and school administrator, Rambusch focused on bringing contemporary American ideas about education into the Montessori method, creating a form of blended Montessori.

At one point in 1959, Rambusch became the U.S. representative of the AMI. In 1960, she founded the American Montessori Society, which was an American affiliate of the larger organization. But she began to fall out with Mario Montessori, Maria's son and the keeper of her legacy, over the reforms Rambusch wanted to make to Montessori pedagogy.*

The AMS today describes the schism between it and the AMI this way:

AMS insisted that all teacher educators have a college degree so that the coursework could, potentially, be recognized by state education departments. AMS also broadened the curriculum for teachers and sought to forge inroads into mainstream education by offering Montessori coursework in traditional teacher preparation programs.

Mario Montessori disagreed with these changes, and in 1963 AMI and AMS parted ways. The two organizations have since reconciled their differences, and now enjoy a collegial relationship of mutual support and respect.

That elides a lot of history. In 1967, AMS sued AMI over the right to exclusively use "Montessori" as a descriptor of their schools in the U.S. They lost—the U.S. Patent Office ruled that the name was a generic descriptor of a type of schooling (which means that other, non-accredited schools are allowed to use it, too). The AMS's changes, and its flexibility with pedagogy, helped Montessori make inroads as a public-school teaching method. But hostilities continued between the two groups. As the above summary suggests, the groups competed from the 1970s to the 1990s for official recognition.

Today, AMS and AMI seem to agree that their fight over methods was unproductive. The two organizations have made it up, and now trumpet their work together. Still, the conflict between the two wings of Montessori raises an important question. Should teaching methods modernize as society changes? Or should they stick, like AMI did, with a method that has worked for decades?

On balance, it's not clear that one answer is right or wrong—except maybe when it comes to dealing with changes in technology. On that score, at least, it looks like old-school AMI may be a good thing. Recent research suggests that a decrease tactile play has hurt the development of children's motor skills. If that's the case, the constructivist approach of old-school Montessori may make a good antidote, fake whale blubber and all.

* This article originally misidentified Mario Montessori as Maria Montessori's daughter. We regret the error.

Emily Chertoff is a former writer and producer for The Atlantic's National channel.



美国
蒙特梭利大分裂
这个受欢迎的学校系统的分裂历史，以及它对教育和变革的启示

作者：艾米丽-切尔托夫
2012年12月26日
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流行的学校制度的分裂历史，以及它对教育和变革的启示

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1930年，柏林蒙特梭利学校的学生在做园艺。(Wikimedia Commons)
幼儿园作为一个本质上的宗教机构，经历了分裂，受到异端邪说的影响，被分为正统派和异统派，自由派和保守派，尽管整个工作的主体一直在不断前进，与现代人对童年的关注度不断提高同步。

多萝西-坎菲尔德-费希尔，《蒙特梭利母亲》，1916年

我对我的蒙特梭利学前班和幼儿园有着美好的回忆。每一天都像一场Be-bop表演--有结构，但演奏者可以在结构中即兴发挥。至少在美国的蒙特梭利学校，典型的蒙特梭利日包括大块的时间让学生探索教室。没有人告诉我们如何玩我们的玩具，或何时玩。偶尔也会有一些受到启发的怪事（当我们学习古埃及时烧香，用棉花糖做假鲸鱼脂肪），但我们的老师很可爱，气氛很温馨，而且我对另类教育理论中可能存在的准宗教狂热没有任何概念。

几年前，我对美国蒙特梭利的历史进行了深入的研究。

至少在早期教育方面，蒙台梭利在某些方面是最不另类的教育方法。学生们玩的是精心设计的玩具，家长可以很容易地看到这些玩具会导致更抽象的概念。金色的珠子可以教她数数。介绍体积和形状的小圆形砝码! 绑鞋带! 浇灌果汁! 这使得像我这样的父母可以接受蒙台梭利，他们会让我更早地变成野人，而不是把我送到华德福幼儿园去做木制品和学习盖斯特。

更多关于替代教育

没有老师，没有课堂，没有家庭作业；你会把你的孩子送到这里吗？

这所小学是一个邪教吗？(父母是否关心？）
在美国，蒙台梭利有两个主要的认证机构，它们共同认证或附属于大约4000所学校。第一个机构--蒙特梭利国际协会（AMI）--是由玛丽亚-蒙特梭利于1929年成立的，目的是为了延续她自己的工作。蒙特梭利于1907年在罗马的一个公寓里创办了她的第一所学校--婴儿之家。随着时间的推移，她开发了一个全面的儿童教学系统，一直到初中，并留下了笔记，建议将她的想法适用于高中阶段。蒙特梭利赞同建构主义，这种教育理论认为，如果我们让学生通过自己的努力拼凑出世界的运作方式，比我们自上而下地传授知识效果更好。

今天，她创立的组织被认为是蒙特梭利教学的 "正统 "派。AMI吹嘘其学校教学的连续性，以及对时尚的抵制。如果您的孩子换了导师，他仍然会以同样的方式接受教育。如果你搬家，你可以放心，你的新AMI学校将使用相同的教学法。短暂的教育趋势不会影响您孩子的学习方式。你会清楚地知道你得到的是什么。

问题就在这里，正如一些蒙台梭利教师所看到的，即使在20世纪50年代。有时那些短暂的趋势并不短暂，有时它们并不是趋势。随着我们对学习有了更多的发现，或者随着时代的变化，我们教育孩子的方式也要随之改变吗？传统派的蒙特梭利说，不。如果教学方法运行良好，就不要乱来。一些蒙特梭利教师对这个答案并不满意。

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1953年，美国教师南希-麦考密克-兰布什（Nancy McCormick Rambusch）参加了在巴黎举行的教育会议，在那里她第一次接触到蒙特梭利方法。在英国接受培训后，她回到美国，在康涅狄格州的格林威治开办了一所蒙特梭利学校。直到这时，蒙特梭利在欧洲各国已经起飞，但与其他进口的欧洲方法如华德福不同，它在美国还没有多大的影响。

这是因为，在20世纪初，一些著名的美国教育家曾积极否定蒙特梭利方法。美国哲学家和教育家约翰-杜威和他的学生威廉-赫德-柯帕特里克认为蒙台梭利的课程扼杀了创造力，并且过于关注个人。Kirpatrick在20世纪20年代开展了一场反对蒙特梭利方法的运动，在一本流行的小册子中对其进行了攻击。他的批评使蒙台梭利在美国受到冷落达三十年之久。

但在20世纪60年代的风口浪尖上，情况正在发生变化。拉姆布什的努力，从20世纪50年代末开始，代表了几十年来将蒙特梭利引入美国的新尝试。这一次，它坚持了下来，其中一些功劳可能是由于她认为该方法需要现代化。在一本有影响力的书、讲座以及她自己作为教师、学者和学校管理者的工作中，兰布施专注于将当代美国的教育理念引入蒙特梭利方法，创造了一种混合的蒙特梭利形式。

1959年，兰布施一度成为AMI的美国代表。1960年，她成立了美国蒙特梭利协会，这是该组织在美国的分支机构。但她开始与玛丽亚的儿子、玛丽亚遗产的守护者马里奥-蒙特梭利（Mario Montessori）因兰布什想对蒙特梭利教育学进行改革而发生争执。

今天的AMS是这样描述它和AMI之间的分裂的。

AMS坚持要求所有的教师教育者都有一个大学学位，这样他们的课程就有可能被国家教育部门认可。AMS还扩大了教师的课程，并试图通过在传统的教师准备课程中提供蒙台梭利的课程来打入主流教育领域。

马里奥-蒙特梭利不同意这些变化，1963年AMI和AMS分道扬镳。此后，这两个组织调和了他们的分歧，现在享有一种相互支持和尊重的同事关系。

这掩盖了很多历史。1967年，AMS就在美国独家使用 "蒙特梭利 "作为其学校的描述语的权利起诉AMI。他们败诉了--美国专利局裁定该名称是一种学校教育类型的通用描述语（这意味着其他未经认证的学校也被允许使用）。美国教育学会的变化及其在教学法方面的灵活性，帮助蒙特梭利作为一种公立学校的教学方法取得了进展。但这两个团体之间的敌对行为仍在继续。正如上面的总结所表明的，这两个团体从1970年代到1990年代一直在竞争官方认可。

今天，AMS和AMI似乎同意，他们在方法上的争斗是没有结果的。这两个组织已经和好如初，现在正大肆宣传他们的工作。然而，蒙台梭利两派之间的冲突提出了一个重要问题。教学方法是否应该随着社会的变化而现代化？还是应该像AMI那样，坚持几十年来行之有效的方法？

总的来说，没有一个答案是对的或错的--也许当涉及到处理技术的变化时除外。至少在这一点上，看起来老式的AMI可能是一件好事。最近的研究表明，触觉游戏的减少已经伤害了儿童运动技能的发展。如果是这样的话，老式蒙特梭利的建构主义方法可能是一种很好的解药，假的鲸鱼脂肪和所有。

* 这篇文章最初把马里奥-蒙特梭利误认为是玛丽亚-蒙特梭利的女儿。我们对这一错误表示遗憾。

艾米丽-切尔托夫曾是《大西洋》国家频道的作家和制片人。