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

of the sun for several hours a day; this treatment is found to be most efficacious in giving tone to the tissues and improving the general condition of the system.

Variations in the Growth of Stature According to the Seasons.—One proof of the beneficent influence of heat and sunlight upon the growth of the organism, is afforded by the variations in the rate of growth according to the seasons. Every individual grows more in summer than in winter. Daffner gives the following figures relative to the increase in stature according to the seasons:

Number of subjects Age in years Stature in centimetres Increase in centimetres October April October Winter Summer Entire year 12 11-12 139.4 141.0 143.3 1.6 2.3 3.9 80 12-13 143.0 144.5 147.4 1.5 2.9 4.4 146 13-14 147.5 149.5 152.5 2.0 3.0 5.0 162 14-15 152.5 155.0 158.5 2.5 3.5 6.0 162 15-16 158.5 160.8 163.8 2.3 3.0 5.3 150 16-17 163.5 165.4 167.7 1.9 2.3 4.2 82 17-18 167.7 168.9 170.4 1.2 1.5 2.7 22 18-19 169.8 170.6 171.5 0.8 0.9 1.7 6 19-20 170.7 171.1 171.5 0.4 0.4 0.8

In the "Children's Houses," I require a record of stature to be made month by month in the case of every child, the measurement being taken on the day corresponding to the day on which he was born in the month of his birth; in addition to which I keep a record of the total annual increase.

The ages of these children vary between three and four years, and they all belong to the poorer social classes.

MONTHLY AVERAGE INCREASE IN STATURE
In the "Children's Houses" (In millimetres)

Cold months Warm months December January February May June July 4 3 4 7 8 8

Another factor of growth is

Electricity.—One of the most interesting discoveries of recent date is that of the influence of terrestrial electricity upon the growth of living organisms.

A series of experiments were made, by isolating cavies (a species of small Indian pig) from terrestrial electricity, and as a result they were found to be retarded in growth and to develop very imperfectly, much as though they had been suffering from rickets. In short, they manifested an arrest of organic development.

If, in electro-therapy, an electric current is applied to the cartilages of the long bones in children whose limbs have apparently been arrested in development, the result is a rapid increase in length, amounting to a luxuriant osteogenesis.

Since we know that the electric current can stimulate the nerve filaments and the fibres of the striped muscles when they have been rendered inactive from the effects of paresis or even of paralysis, we realise that electricity can exert an influence over the entire physiological life of an organism. We live not only upon nutriment, air, heat, and light, but also upon a mysterious, imperceptible force, that comes to us from the mother earth.

In addition to the biological potentialities which control the development of every individual, all living creatures owe something of themselves to their environment.

Space.—An empirical contention, without scientific value, but nevertheless of some interest, is that there is an ultimate relationship between the dimensions of living bodies and the territorial space, that is, the environment in which they are destined to live. In view of the innumerable varieties of living creatures, such an assertion would seem to be utterly unfounded. But as a matter of fact we see that while inorganic bodies can increase indefinitely in dimension, living creatures are limited in form and size. This fact undoubtedly has some primal connection with properties innate in corporeal life itself; in fact, in order to attain its appointed end, life requires the services of certain very small microscopic particles called cells. But the aggregations and combinations of cells in living organisms are also limited in their turn, and no matter how willingly we would attribute the greatest share of causation to biological facts, nevertheless, as always happens in life, we cannot wholly exclude environment.

Both animals and men that are bred on vast continents (Chinese, Russians) have tended to produce races of powerful and giant build: in islands, on the contrary, the men and the animals are of small size; it is sufficient merely to cite the men and the little donkeys of Sardinia, the small Irishmen who furnish jockeys for the race-track, and the small Irish horses or ponies that serve as saddle-horses for the children of the aristocracy the world over.

There is a harmony of associations, as between the container and the contained, between environment and life, notwithstanding that as yet science has not made serious investigations in regard to it.

Voltaire, in his Micromega, avails himself of this intuitive conception to create the material needed for his satire; he talks amusingly of the inhabitant of the planet Sirius, who was eight leagues in height and at four hundred years of age was still in school, while the inhabitant of Saturn was a mere pigmy in comparison, being scarcely a thousand rods tall—in fact, the inhabitants of Saturn could not be otherwise than pigmies in comparison, since Saturn is barely nine hundred times larger than the earth.

Gulliver makes use of similar standards in his Travels, which are read with so much delight by children.

Psychic Conditions.—Psychic Stimuli.—Accordingly many chemical and physical factors associated with the environment concur in aiding life in its development. From the light of the sun to the electricity of the earth, the whole environment offers its tribute to life, in order to cooperate in life's triumph. But, in the case of man, in addition to these widely different factors, there is still another distinctly human factor that we must take into consideration and that we may call the psychic stimulus of life: We may scientifically affirm the Bible statement that "man does not live by bread alone."

Without reverting to the basic physiological explanations of the emotions, as given by Lange and James, we may nevertheless assert that sensations of pleasure stimulate the renewal of bodily tissues and consequently promote health, happiness, and strength; while, on the contrary, painful events produce physiological effects depressing to the tone of the nervous system and to the metabolic activity of the tissues.

But it is precisely these metabolic phenomena that hold the key of life, and an organism in the course of evolution depends directly upon them. This problem concerns pedagogy in a very special way: when we have given food to the children in our schools, we have not yet completed our task of nourishing these children; for the phenomena of nutrition which take place in the hidden recesses of their tissues are very different from a simple intestinal transformation of aliments, and are influenced by the psychic conditions of the individual pupil.

Great workers not only need abundant nutriment, but they require at the same time a series of stimuli designed to produce "pleasure." The pleasures of life, necessary to human existence, include more than bread. In the history of social evolution there exist, side by side with the productions of labour, an entire series of enjoyments, more or less elevated, that constitute the stimului to production, and hence to evolution, and more profoundly still, to life itself.

The further man evolves and the more he produces, the more he ought to multiply and perfect his means of enjoyment.

Without stimuli, nutrition would grow less and less till it ended in death. Every-day experience in the punishment of criminals gives us proof of this. Confinement to a solitary cell is nothing else than a complete deprivation of psychic stimuli. The prisoner does not lack bread, nor air, nor shelter from the elements, nor sleep; his whole physiological life is provided for, in the strict material sense of the word. But the bare walls, the silence, the isolation from his fellow men in utter solitude, deprive the prisoner of every stimulus, visual, oral and moral.

The consequences are not merely a state of hopelessness, but a real and actual malnutrition leading to tuberculosis, to anemia, to death from atrophy. We may affirm that such a prisoner dies slowly of hunger due to defective assimilation; the solitary cell is the modern donjon, and far more cruel than the one in which Ugolino died within a few days, so much so that solitary confinement, being incompatible with life, is only of short duration.

Labour, love, and sensations apt to stimulate ideas, that is, to nourish the intelligence, are necessities of human life.

This is further proved by observations made regarding the development of puberty. Psychic stimuli may render such development precocious, and, on the contrary, their absence may retard it. Jean Jacques Rousseau relates in Émile that at Friuli he encountered young people of both sexes who were still undeveloped, although they were past the usual age and were strong and robust, and this he attributed to the fact that "owing to the simplicity of their customs, their imagination remained calm and tranquil for a longer time, causing the ferment in their blood to occur later, and consequently rendering their temperament less precocious."[27]

Recent statistical research confirms the intuitive observation of that great pedagogist; the women in the environs of Paris attain puberty nearly a year later than those who live in the city; and the same difference is observed between the country districts around Turin and those of the city itself.

All this goes to prove the fact of psychic influence upon physiological life: psychic excitation, experienced with pleasure, by developing healthy activities, aids the development of physical life.[28]

These principles must be taken under deep consideration when it comes to a question of directing the physiological growth of children. Fenelon relates a fable about a female bear who, having brought into the world an exceedingly ugly son, took the advice of a crow and licked and smoothed her cub so constantly that he finally became attractive and good-looking. This fable embodies the idea that maternal love may modify the body of the child, aiding its evolution toward a harmony of form by means of the first psychic stimuli of caresses and counsel.

Nature has implanted in the mother not only her milk, the material nourishment of her child, but also that absolutely altruistic love which transforms the soul of a woman, and creates in it moral forces hitherto unknown and unsuspected by the woman herself—just as the sweet and nourishing corpuscles of the milk were unknown to the red corpuscles of her blood. Accordingly, the nature of the human kind protects the species through the mother in two ways, which together form the complete nutrition of man: aliment and love. After a child is weaned, it obtains its aliment from its environment in more varied forms; and it also obtains from its environment a great variety of psychic stimuli, calculated not only to mould its psychic personality, but also to bring its physiological personality to its full development.