Pedagogical Anthropology, Maria Montessori [online e book reader TXT] 📗

The transport galleries are ordinarily too low to permit a man of average height to walk erect; along these galleries little transport-wagons are run by hand, excepting where the carrying is done on the backs of the men themselves.

"Even in the front of the advance tunnels and in the galleries that are being worked, miners are to be seen in the most incongruous attitudes. These anomalous positions of the body maintained throughout long hours of toil react upon the functional action of the heart and lungs, upon the stomach and intestines in the proper performance of their tasks, and result in producing hernia, varicose veins and eventually deformities of the skeleton (vertebral column, thorax)."[20]

Field labourers also (Fig. 26) become permanently deformed, with diminution of stature, from remaining too long bent over in the act of hoeing or reaping. But a still more painful labour is that of the women in the rice fields during the period when the weeding is done.

The position necessitated by this work requires a strained and prolonged dorsal flexion of the vertebral column, accompanied by a strain on the lower dorsal nerves; great elasticity is required to endure a position so painful and so apt to induce lumbago; only young women can endure it, and even they become deformed, and suffer seriously from anemia, intestinal maladies and diseases of the uterus, which predispose them to abortion or sterility (Figs. 27, 28, 29).

Stone breakers also contract painful diseases and deformities from their work. They are constantly bowed over their task, performing a rhythmic, alternating movement of flexion, extension and torsion of the trunk upon itself, while at the same time there is a slight undulation in a backward and forward direction, accompanying the rising and falling of the arm holding the hammer. These movements of extension and flexion of the trunk involve the whole vertebral column, while the pelvis remains practically motionless. "At the end of the day they rise from their task bowed over and they walk home bowed over, holding the vertebral
column rigid; any attempt to force the trunk into an erect
position is extremely painful. In the morning they return to their work with their loins still aching." And among these stone breakers there are young men, some of them mere boys! And when we think that these injurious attitudes are coupled with malnutrition, we must realise the extent of the organic disaster that accompanies diminution of stature as a result of adaptation to labour.

We are naturally horrified at such conditions enforced upon a certain portion of humanity; and we pray for a time to come when machinery will have universally replaced human labour, in transportation, in stone-breaking, and in reaping, and when children will be spared from hard and deforming toil.

But how is it that while we are so sympathetic regarding conditions at a distance from us, we remain unconscious of similar conditions, that are close beside us, and of which we are the directors, the cruel enforcers, the masters?

In the near future, I hope that people will tell with amazement, as if citing a condition of inferior civilisation, how the school children, up to the opening of the twentieth century represented one category of those "deformed by prolonged and enforced labour in injurious positions!"

Such studies in school hygiene as deal with the type of school benches, designed to minimise the danger of deformities of the vertebral column in children—will, I hope, be regarded by the coming generations with the most utter amazement! And the school benches of to-day will find their place in museums, and people will go to look at them as if they were relics of bygone barbarism, just as we now visit the collections from old-time insane asylums, of series of complicated instruments of wood and iron that in bygone centuries were considered necessary for maintaining discipline among the insane.

What in the world would we say, if somebody should propose, in order to obviate the deformities and physiological injuries of labourers, that certain mechanisms should be applied to them individually for the purpose of diminishing the harm? Imagine a law being proposed, to the effect that all miners should be obliged to wear trusses, to keep their viscera from breaking loose, as a result of prolonged compression! What would we think of such reforms and such a path toward an orthopedic state of society?

Our way toward progress and higher civilisation is a very different one. To remove man from torturing toil that twists the bones and undermines the health—such is the goal that it is our duty to set before us!

For the deformed vertebral column is the extreme sign of a great accumulation of evils; the internal organs are correspondingly affected with disorders fatal to the entire organism; but even greater is the corresponding harm done to the human soul! What we want is not only that the bones shall not be thrown out of their eurhythmic harmony, but that the souls of the labourers shall be freed from the inhuman yoke of slavery (progress can consist solely in a radical alteration of the form of labour).

So far as concerns the school, which is not limited to a few categories of human beings, but is extended to all, by requirements of law, is it not possible for us to adopt a different attitude of mind?

The established fact that the pupils may even deform their skeletons in the course of their work, goes to prove that this work contains some error in principle that is fatal to successive generations; and so long as this principle is maintained, we may assert a priori that even if, with the help of school benches as complicated and as costly as orthopedic machines, we should succeed in checking the deformation of the vertebral column, we should fail to check the deformation of the soul. Because whoever is condemned to labour that deforms is a slave.

And as a matter of fact we employ coercive means, "rewards and punishments," to enforce upon children a condition that in their eyes amounts to serving their first sentence.

It is not the school bench, but the method that needs reforming; it is not the ligaments of the spinal column, but human life in evolution that we ought to respect, and lead toward the attainment of perfection! Amid the many banners of liberty that have been raised in these latter times, one is still missing—one which we ought to seize upon as the standard of our cause: the liberty of the new generation, which is groaning in the slavery of compulsory education, upon iron-bound benches, emblematic of chains!

I foresee, in a radical reform of pedagogic methods, the practical possibility of taking as guiding principles the individual liberty of the pupil and a reverential regard for life. And I affirm this all the more loudly, because I have applied such a method with indisputable success in the "Children's Houses," obtaining prodigious results in the health and happiness of the children, perfect discipline in the classes, marvelously rapid progress in studies, and a surprising awakening of souls, a passionate love for the work.

Physiology and Social Conditions.—Nutrition.—One of the effects of environment, of the highest importance in its relation to the development of stature, is nutrition. In order to attain the maximum development as biologically determined by heredity in a race, sufficient nutriment is the first necessity. It is a familiar fact that material or physiological life consists essentially in the exchange and renewal of matter, or in metabolism, which is also a renewal of vital force.

The living molecules are continually breaking up, thus expressing in an active form forces that had accumulated in a potential form, and eliminating the rejected matter; only to form again by means of new matter, containing potential forces. This breaking up and renewal constitutes the material of life, that never pauses in its molecular movement; the cessation of renewal of matter is death, that is, scission without reparation; consumption without renewal; and consequently a rapid disintegration of the body. Living matter consists in metabolism, and is consequently directly related to the nutritive substances which renew the elements necessary for continual redintegration.

We may disregard certain individual potentialities, of a purely biological nature, and that are capable of manifesting vital forces of varying degrees of intensity: but it may be asserted as beyond question that every living being, if he is to live according to his biological destiny, has need of sufficient nutrition. This is not the same as saving that the food determines the life of an individual in its final development, in the sense that by eating in excess one may attain the stature of a giant, or an imbecile become intelligent or a man of talent become a genius. We all bear within us, in that fertilised germ that constituted the first cell of our organism, predetermined biological conditions, on which depend the physical limits of our body, as well as those of our psychic individuality. But in order that this germ may develop in accordance with its potentiality, it is necessary that it shall obtain the requisite material from its environment. Because otherwise—and here the relation is direct—neither the volumetric development nor the morphological development can be accomplished, nor the psychic potentiality express itself; in other words, the stature will be undersized, in a body defrauded of the degree of beauty potential in the germ, and the muscular forces, in common with those of the brain, will remain at a level of development below that which nature had intended. Consequently, to deprive children of their requisite nutriment is stealing from life, it is a biological crime.

While we live, we must eat; and while we labour, that is, while we expend the vital forces, it is necessary to repair them. The schools should establish a system of luncheons for the pupils; this is a principle that has already been generally recognised and is already bearing fruit.

There was a time when a good appetite was regarded as a low material instinct; it was also the time when people sang the praises of spirituality, but actually indulged in banquets of Lucullian lavishness. The vice of the palate and the physiological need of nourishment were included under one and the same disdain.

To-day science has shed its light upon the true conception of nutrition and holds it to be the first necessity of life, and consequently the first social problem to be solved.

From this point of view, food is not a vulgar material thing, nor the dinner-table a place of debauchery. Indeed, there is nothing which affords better proof of immateriality than the act of eating. In fact, the necessity of eating is itself a proof that the matter of which our body is composed does not endure but passes like the fleeting moment. And if the substance of our bodies passes in this manner, if life itself is only a continual passing away of matter, what greater symbol of its immateriality and its spirituality is there than the dinner-table?

"... the bread is my flesh and the wine is my blood; do this in remembrance of what life really is."

Something similar to this is being accomplished to-day by science in regard to the sexual relations. We are accustomed to consider the sexual instincts as something contemptible, material and low, praising abstinence, and leaving these instincts wholly out of consideration in the course of education, as though they were something degrading, or even shameful. And undoubtedly our sexual abuses are shameful, and shameful also is the barbaric tolerance of the masses regarding prostitution, seduction, illegitimacy and the abandonment of new-born children. It is criminal abuse that makes us despise sexual relations, just as at one time excesses of the table made us despise nutrition. But the day