Pedagogy – Page 20 – Montessori Muddle

A sense of justice as a key to moral development

On an personal level, I’ve always felt that the sense of justice shapes the way people react to the world on a fundamental level. In the language of Montessori, justice is a fundamental need of humanity. As we mature we begin to see justice from different perspectives, and after going over the history of human rights, I wonder if this applies to societies as well.

Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous theory about the stages of moral development center around the idea of how people see and react to justice and injustice. His first level (pre-conventional) is based on how moral actions affect oneself; if I do this then they will do that right back to me (and I won’t like it). In the second level (conventional) the main concern is how actions affect and are perceived by society; it’s not right to do this because everyone will talk about it (and I don’t like that). The final level (post-conventional), moral judgments are made based on some underlying principles; I should not do this because it will violate someone’s universal human rights (and I would have violated my own principles).

When we talk about the history of human rights, we are discussing how society has gone through these different stages. The first rule of justice, no matter the culture, is some variant of the Golden Rule, an eye for an eye. Eventually we discover the rights of the citizen, then finally the rights of humans. In humans, this moral evolution is innate in potential but not necessarily realized. Similarly is societies, after all, the Greek democracies eventually failed. But there seems to be a general trajectory of history toward post-conventional morality. Robert Wright, in his book “Nonzero” sees this path as the almost inevitable outcome of the beneficial nature of cooperation to human societies.

Of course Nonzero was written in the post-Cold War and pre 9/11 period, when the world was breathing a sigh of relief when the potential for global thermonuclear war seemed to disappear (I also remember David Rudder’s 1990 had a similar theme).

Two faced

scjallsms3 — Facial symmetry: left=original picture; middle=left-left composite; right=right-right composite

A slight tilt of the face to the left or the right changes the emotional message you send. There’s a whole field of study on what’s called laterality that looks at how the asymmetry of your posture says things you might not realize.

Mike Nicholls has done some interesting work. In one study, he took two pictures of just the left side of peoples’ faces and reflected one half to make a composite image that basically had just two left sides or two right sides. The image above (which was not done by Nichols) shows an original photo, a left-left composite and a right-right composite. He found that:

… head turns of just 15 degrees can bring about significant changes in the perceived emotionality.

Nicholls discusses the implications with regards to the fact that portraits tend to feature the left side of the face. However, it is also interesting to think about what this means for non-verbal communication. Another paper, using 3D imaging of facial movements showed that:

Emotions are expressed more clearly on the left side of the face than the right … There was a trend, however, for left-sided movement to be more pronounced for negative than positive emotions.

Where does morality come from?

“Do to others as you would have them do to you”. The golden rule (in some form or the other) is almost universal. And because it is found throughout different cultures and belief systems suggests that much of what we view as morality and ethics are innate to the human mind. But what are we born with, and what do we learn from culture? Is the golden rule necessary for successful social groups, so that cultures with the golden rule are more successful that ones that don’t have it? These two questions are fundamental to how we educate, particularly in a method such as Montessori’s that has such a strong moral dimension.

Maria Montessori herself came from a strong catholic background, but the success of her approach in so many different cultures does argue that, at least for the younger kids, the innate aspects of morality and needs of the child are most important. By the time students get to the Middle School, however, the influence of the local culture has become much more important.

Morality and culture affect students’ motivations and behavior, yet much of what is considered acceptable in many cultures conflict with the core Montessori principles of respect for oneself and for others. Much of popular American culture for example, is driven by television where moral messages can be decidedly mixed. How often is it appropriate to use violence (or even torture)? Television shows give decidedly different answers from Montessori. But there are many other, more subtle differences. As Montessori educators we will be faced with the question of what to do when Montessori philosophy differs from the beliefs of the student, their family and the larger culture.

My thoughts are that the “cosmic education” that is a part of the Montessori method should be based on the “universal” aspects of morality that can be shown to make for successful individuals and societies. Some interesting work by Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia looks at how certain systems of morality have contributed to the success of societies. As Nicholas Wade summarizes:

… natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?

Haidt suggests there are “five innate and universally available psychological systems” of ethics, and different cultures add stories, virtues and ways of policing these ethics. The Moral Foundations Theory website has a good summary of the five systems, harm/care, fairness, loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. In a beautiful example of adding transparency and technology to scientific research, he even has a page for challenges to the theory. Each of the moral foundations these deserves separate consideration of how they evolved, how they benefit society, and how they mesh with Montessori philosophy.

Nicholas Wade has a good article on the subject and on Haidt’s work in the New York Times.

Why collaboration is important

Montessori middle schools depend a lot on collaborative work and discussions. Individual parts of group work allow students to specialize in areas, hopefully, where they are interested and willing to learn the most. Then when they share their work with the group the whole group gets the information, and the person presenting it gets feedback from different perspectives. Collaborative work is excellent preparation for creative work in the future.

Some recent research by Kevin Dunbar, a neuroscience at the University of Toronto, gives some strong support to the usefulness of collaborative work. He found that group discussions, with people from different backgrounds can be much more effective at solving problems than discussions among specialists. Different backgrounds mean that each person is forced to take a step back from their expertise and think and describe the problem in a way someone else with a different perspective can understand. This allows both the expert and the person they are describing the problem to, to see the problem from different perspectives.

Cognitive science and math for pre-schoolers

There is an interesting article in the New York Times on cognitive neuroscience is showing that pre-schoolers are capable of learning mathematical concepts. How novel. The third paragraph:

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

This timescale coincides with Angeline Lillard’s observations in Montessori: The Science behind the Genius (Lillard, 2005) about how constructivist approaches to teaching, like Montessori’s, were devalued and derogated because the more factory-like approaches were seen as more efficient during a time when the marvels of the industrial revolution were continuously impressing. This general theory, of course, may or may not be related to the theory of teaching specific concepts like math. It is disappointing that the references to such a broad statement are not provided in the article.

Human? nature

To follow up on the previous post on the evolutionary benefits of kindness, this essay by Marc Hauser describes some of the science that indicates that morality is innate. Not religious affiliation, gender, nationality nor political views affect how people respond to moral dilemmas.

“We tend to see actions as worse than omissions of actions.” People tend to believe that deliberately hurting a healthy person to save one or more others is morally repugnant if the others would only be hurt by your inaction.

The evolutionary benefits of kindness

Evolution is often summed up in the phrase, “survival of the fittest”, well sometimes “fittest” can also refer to kindness. Having empathy is evolutionarily beneficial. As individuals, the more we give to others the more respect we gain for ourselves. As a group or a society, when people are able to cooperate they do better than when they cannot. What scientists have recently been uncovering is that empathy and the urge to cooperate are built into our very genes.

This research ties in elegantly with Montessori philosophy. The benefits of kindness and cooperation seem obvious when you think about it, but the fact that we are genetically predisposed to act in this way helps explain why the emphasis on cooperative work works so well in early childhood classrooms.

If you put this research together with the way society is currently evolving, where problems have to be dealt with with teams from different backgrounds, perspectives and disciplines, it really points out the importance of collaborative work in the middle school.