The Montessori Method, 2nd Edition - Restoration # Chapter 14 - General Notes on the education of the senses ## [14.1 The aim of education biological and social](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+14+-+General+notes+on+the+education+of+the+senses#14.1-the-aim-of-education-biological-and-social (Link to Montessori.Zone's Translation Base Text "The Montessori Method")) I do not claim to have brought to perfection the method of sense training as applied to young children. I do believe, however, that it opens a new field for psychological research, promising rich and valuable results. Experimental psychology has so far devoted its attention to ***perfecting the instruments by which the sensations are measured**.* No one has attempted the ***methodical*** preparation ***of the individual for the sensations**.* It is my belief that the development of psychometry will owe more to the attention given to the preparation of the ***individual*** than to the perfecting of the ***instrument**.* But putting aside this purely scientific side of the question, the ***education of the senses*** must be of the greatest ***pedagogical*** interest. Our aim in education, in general, is two-fold, biological and social. From the biological side we wish to help the natural development of the individual, from the social standpoint it is our aim to prepare the individual for the environment. Under this last head, technical education may be considered as having a place, since it teaches the individual to make use of his surroundings. The education of the senses is most important from both these points of view. The development of the senses indeed precedes that of superior intellectual activity and the child between three and seven years is in the period of formation. We can, then, help the development of the senses while they are in this period. We may graduate and adapt the stimuli just as, for example, it is necessary to help the formation of language before it shall be completely developed. All education of little children must be governed by this principle–to help the natural ***psychic*** and ***physical development*** of the child. The other aim of education (that of adapting the individual to the environment) should be given more attention later on when the period of intense development is past. These two phases of education are always interlaced, but one or the other has prevalence according to the age of the child. Now, the period of life between the ages of three and seven years covers a period of rapid physical development. It is the time for the formation of sense activities as related to the intellect. The child at this age develops his senses. His attention is further attracted to the environment in the form of passive curiosity. The stimuli, and not yet the reasons for things, attract his attention. This is, therefore, the time when we should methodically direct the sense stimuli, in such a way that the sensations which he receives shall develop rationally. This sense training will prepare the ordered foundation upon which he may build up a clear and strong mentality. It is, besides all this, possible with the education of the senses to discover and eventually correct defects which to-day pass unobserved in the school. Now the time comes when the defect manifests itself in an evident and irreparable inability to make use of the forces of life about him. (Such defects as deafness and near-sightedness.) This education, therefore, is physiological and prepares directly for intellectual education, perfecting the organs of sense, and the nerve paths of projection and association. But the other part of education, the adaptation of the individual to his environment, is indirectly touched. We prepare with our method the infancy of the ***humanity of our time**.* The men of the present civilization are pre-eminently observers of their environment because they must utilize to the greatest possible extent all the riches of this environment. The art of today bases itself, as in the days of the Greeks, upon observation of the truth. The progress of positive science is based upon its observations and all its discoveries and their applications, which in the last century have so transformed our civic environment, were made by following the same line that is, they have come through observation. We must therefore prepare the new generation for this attitude, which has become necessary in our modern civilized life. It is an indispensable means man must be so armed if he is to continue efficaciously the work of our progress. We have seen the discovery of the Roentgen Rays born of observation. The same methods are due to the discovery of Hertzian waves, and vibrations of radium, and we await wonderful things from the Marconi telegraph. While there has been no period in which thought has gained so much from positive study as the present century, and this same century promises new light in the field of speculative philosophy and upon spiritual questions, the theories on the matter have themselves led to most interesting metaphysical concepts. We may say that in preparing the method of observation, we have also prepared the way leading to spiritual discovery. ## [14.2 Education of the senses makes men observers and prepares them directly for practical life](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+14+-+General+notes+on+the+education+of+the+senses#14.2-education-of-the-senses-makes-men-observers-and-prepares-them-directly-for-practical-life (Link to Montessori.Zone's Translation Base Text "The Montessori Method")) The education of the senses makes men observers, and not only accomplishes the general work of adaptation to the present epoch of civilization but also prepares them directly for practical life. We have had up to the present time, I believe, a most imperfect idea of what is necessary for the practical living of life. We have always started from ideas, and have ***proceeded thence to motor activities***; thus, for example, the method of education has always been to teach intellectually and then to have the child follow the principles he has been taught. In general, when we are teaching, we talk about the object which interests us, and then we try to lead the scholar, when he has understood, to perform some kind of work with the object itself but often the scholar who has understood the idea finds great difficulty in the execution of the work which we give him because we have left out of his education a factor of the utmost importance, namely, the perfecting of the senses. I may, perhaps, illustrate this statement with a few examples. We ask the cook to buy only 'fresh fish.' She understands the idea, and tries to follow it in her marketing, but, if the cook has not been trained to recognize through sight and smell the signs which indicate freshness in the fish, she will not know how to follow the order we have given her. Such a lack will show itself much more plainly in culinary operations. A cook may be trained in book matters and may know exactly the recipes and the length of time advised in her cookbook; she may be able to perform all the manipulations necessary to give the desired appearance to the dishes, but when it is a question of deciding from the odor of the dish the exact moment of its being properly cooked, or with the eye, or the taste, the time at which she must put in some given condiment, then she will make a mistake if her senses have not been sufficiently prepared. She can only gain such ability through long practice, and such practice on the part of the cook is nothing else than a ***belated education*** of the senses an education which often can never be properly attained by the adult. This is one reason why it is so difficult to find good cooks. Something of the same kind is true of the physician, the student of medicine who studies theoretically the character of the pulse, and sits down by the bed of the patient with the best will in the world to read the pulse, but, if his fingers do not know how to read the sensations his studies will have been in vain. Before he can become a doctor, he must gain a ***capacity for discriminating between sense stimuli**.* The same may be said for the ***pulsations*** of the ***heart***, which the student studies in theory, but which the ear can learn to distinguish only through practice. We may say the same for all the delicate vibrations and movements, in the reading of which the hand of the physician is too often deficient. The thermometer is more indispensable to the physician the more his sense of touch is unadapted and untrained in the gathering of the thermic stimuli. It is well understood that the physician may be learned, and most intelligent, without being a good practitioner, and that to make a good practitioner long practice is necessary. In reality, this ***long practice*** is nothing else than a tardy, and often inefficient, ***the exercise*** of the senses. After he has assimilated the brilliant theories, the physician sees himself forced into the unpleasant labor of the semiography, that is to make a record of the symptoms revealed by his observation of and experiments with the patients. He must do this if he is to receive from these theories any practical results. Here, then, we have the beginner proceeding in a stereotyped way to tests of ***palpation***, percussion, and auscultation, to identify the throbs, the resonance, the tones, the breathings, and the various sounds which ***alone*** can enable him to formulate a diagnosis. Hence the deep and unhappy discouragement of so many young physicians, and, above all, the loss of time; for it is often a question of lost years. Then, there is the immorality of allowing a man to follow a profession of so great responsibility, when, as is often the case, he is so unskilled and inaccurate in the taking of symptoms. The whole art of medicine is based upon an education of the senses; the schools, instead, ***prepare*** physicians through a study of the classics. All very well and good, but the splendid intellectual development of the physician falls, impotent, before the insufficiency of his senses. One day, I heard a surgeon giving, some poor mothers, a lesson on the recognition of the first deformities noticeable in little children from the disease of rickets. It was his hope to lead these mothers to bring to him their children who were suffering from this disease, while the disease was yet in the earliest stages, and when medical help might still be efficacious. The mothers understood the idea, but they did not know how to recognize these first signs of deformity, because they were lacking in the sensory education through which they might discriminate between signs deviating only slightly from the normal. Therefore those lessons were useless. If we think of it for a minute, we will see that almost all the forms of adulteration in foodstuff are rendered possible by the torpor of the senses, which exists in a greater number of people. The fraudulent industry feeds upon the lack of sense of education in the masses, as any kind of fraud is based upon the ignorance of the victim. We often see the purchaser throwing himself upon the honesty of the merchant, or putting his faith in the company, or the label upon the box. This is because purchasers are lacking in the capacity of judging directly for themselves. They do not know how to distinguish with their senses the different qualities of various substances. In fact, we may say that in many cases intelligence is rendered useless by lack of practice, and this practice is almost always sense education. Everyone knows in practical life the fundamental necessity of judging with exactness between various stimuli. But very often sense education is most difficult for the adult, just as it is difficult for him to educate his hand when he wishes to become a pianist. It is necessary to begin the education of the senses in the formative period if we wish to perfect this sense development with the education which is to follow. The education of the senses should be begun methodically in infancy and should continue during the entire period of instruction which is to prepare the individual for life in society. Aesthetic and moral education are closely related to this sensory education. Multiply the sensations, develop the capacity of appreciating fine differences in stimuli and ***refine*** the sensibility, and multiply man's pleasures. Beauty lies in harmony, not in contrast and harmony is refinement; therefore, there must be a fineness of the senses if we are to appreciate harmony. The aesthetic harmony of nature is lost upon him who has coarse senses. The world to him is narrow and barren. In life about us, there exist inexhaustible fonts of aesthetic enjoyment, before which men pass as insensible as the brutes seeking their enjoyment in those sensations which are crude and showy since they are the only ones accessible to them. Now, from the enjoyment of gross pleasures, vicious habits very often spring. Strong stimuli, indeed, do not render acute but blunt the senses, so they require stimuli more and more accentuated and grosser and grosser. ***Onanism***, so often found among normal children of the lower classes, alcoholism, and fondness for watching sensual acts of adults these things represent the enjoyment of those unfortunate ones whose intellectual pleasures are few, and whose senses are blunted and dulled. Such pleasures kill the man within the individual and call to life the beast.  Indeed from the physiological point of view, the importance of the education of the senses is evident from an observation of the scheme of the diagrammatic arc which represents the functions of the nervous system. The external stimulus acts upon the organ of sense, and the impression is transmitted along the centripetal way to the nerve center the corresponding motor impulse is elaborated and is transmitted along the centrifugal path to the organ of motion, provoking a movement. Although the arc represents diagrammatically the mechanism of reflex spinal actions, it may still be considered a fundamental key in explaining the phenomena of the more complex nervous mechanisms. Man, with the peripheral sensory system, gathers various stimuli from his environment. He puts himself thus in direct communication with his surroundings. The psychic life develops, therefore, about the system of nerve centers; and human activity which is an eminently social activity manifests itself through acts of the individual–manual work, writing, spoken language, etc. using the psychomotor organs. Education should guide and perfect the development of the three periods, the two peripheral and the central; or, better still, since the process fundamentally reduces itself to the nerve centers, education should give psycho-sensory exercises the same importance that it gives to psychomotor exercises. Otherwise, we ***isolate*** man from his ***environment**.* Indeed, when with ***intellectual culture*** we believe ourselves to have completed education, we have but made thinkers, whose tendency will be to live without the world. We have not made practical men. If, on the other hand, wishing through education to prepare for practical life, we limit ourselves to exercising the psychomotor phase, we lose sight of the chief end of education, which is to put a man in direct communication with the external world. Since ***professional work*** almost always requires man to ***make use of his surroundings***, the technical schools are not forced to return to the very beginnings of education, and sense exercises, in order to supply the great and universal lack. > ##### **The License of this page:** > > This page is part of the “**Montessori Restoration and Translation Project**”.\ > Please [support](https://ko-fi.com/montessori) our “**All-Inclusive Montessori Education for All 0-100+ Worldwide**” initiative. We create open, free, and affordable resources available for everybody interested in Montessori Education. We transform people and environments to be authentic Montessori worldwide. Thank You! > > [](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) > > **License:** This work with all its restoration edits and translations is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). > > Check out the **Page History** of each wiki page in the right column to learn more about all contributors and edits, restorations, and translations done on this page. > > [Contributions](https://ko-fi.com/montessori) and [Sponsors](https://ko-fi.com/montessori) are welcome and very appreciated! * [The Montessori Method, 2nd Edition](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/+Chapter+Index+-+The+Montessori+Method%2C+2nd+Edition+-+Restoration+-+Open+Library#the-montessori-method%2C-2nd-edition---restoration---open-library "The Montessori Method on Montessori Zone - English Language") - English Restoration - [Archive.Org](https://archive.org/details/montessorimethod00montuoft/ "The Montessori Method on Aechive.Org") - [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7089223M/The_Montessori_method "The Montessori Method on Open Library") * [Chapter Index](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/+Chapter+Index+-+The+Montessori+Method%2C+2nd+Edition+-+Restoration+-+Open+Library) * [Chapter 00 - Dedication, Acknowledgements, Preface to the American Edition, Introduction](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+00+-+Dedication%2C+Acknowledgements%2C+Preface+to+the+American+Edition%2C+Introduction) * [Chapter 01 - A critical consideration of the new pedagogy in its relation to modern science](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+01+-+A+critical+consideration+of+the+new+pedagogy+in+its+relation+to+modern+science) * [Chapter 02 - History of Methods](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+02+-+History+of+Methods) * [Chapter 03 - Inaugural address delivered on the occasion of the opening of one of the “Children’s Houses”](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+03+-+Inaugural+address+delivered+on+the+occasion+of+the+opening+of+one+of+the+%E2%80%9CChildren%E2%80%99s+Houses%E2%80%9D) * [Chapter 04 - Pedagogical Methods used in the “Children’s Houses”](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+04+-+Pedagogical+Methods+used+in+the+%E2%80%9CChildren%E2%80%99s+Houses%E2%80%9D) * [Chapter 05 - Discipline](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+05+-+Discipline) * [Chapter 06 - How the lesson should be given](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+06+-+How+the+lesson+should+be+given) * [Chapter 07 - Exercises for Practical Life](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+07+-+Exercises+for+Practical+Life) * [Chapter 08 - Reflection the Child’s diet](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+08+-+Reflection+the+Child%E2%80%99s+diet) * [Chapter 09 - Muscular education gymnastics](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+09+-+Muscular+education+gymnastics) * [Chapter 10 - Nature in education agricultural labor: Culture of plants and animals](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+10+-+Nature+in+education+agricultural+labor%3A+Culture+of+plants+and+animals) * [Chapter 11 - Manual labor the potter’s art, and building](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+11+-+Manual+labor+the+potter%E2%80%99s+art%2C+and+building) * [Chapter 12 - Education of the senses](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+12+-+Education+of+the+senses) * [Chapter 13 - Education of the senses and illustrations of the didactic material: General sensibility: The tactile, thermic, basic, and stereo gnostic senses](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+13+-+Education+of+the+senses+and+illustrations+of+the+didactic+material%3A+General+sensibility%3A+The+tactile%2C+thermic%2C+basic%2C+and+stereo+gnostic+senses) * [Chapter 14 - General notes on the education of the senses](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+14+-+General+notes+on+the+education+of+the+senses) * [Chapter 15 - Intellectual education](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+15+-+Intellectual+education) * [Chapter 16 - Method for the teaching of reading and writing](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+16+-+Method+for+the+teaching+of+reading+and+writing) * [Chapter 17 - Description of the method and didactic material used](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+17+-+Description+of+the+method+and+didactic+material+used) * [Chapter 18 - Language in childhood](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+18+-+Language+in+childhood) * [Chapter 19 - Teaching of numeration: Introduction to arithmetic](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+19+-+Teaching+of+numeration%3A+Introduction+to+arithmetic) * [Chapter 20 - Sequence of exercise](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+20+-+Sequence+of+exercise) * [Chapter 21 - General review of discipline](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+21+-+General+review+of+discipline) * [Chapter 22 - Conclusions and impressions](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+22+-+Conclusions+and+impressions) * [Chapter 23 - Illustrations](https://montessori-international.com/s/the-montessori-method/wiki/Chapter+23+-+Illustrations)