Pedagogical Anthropology

by Maria Montessori

Let us compare the appearance of man upon the earth to the discovery of the motive power of steam and to the subsequent appearance of railways as a factor in our social life. The railway has no limits of space, it overruns the world, unresting and unconscious, and by doing so promotes the brotherhood of men, of nations, of business interests. Let us suppose that we should choose to remain silent about the work performed by our railways and their social significance in the world to-day, and should teach our children only about the accidents, after the fashion of the newspapers, and keep their sensitive minds lingering in the presence of shattered and motionless heaps of carriages, amid the cries of anguish and the bleeding limbs of the victims.

The children would certainly ask themselves what possible connection there could be between such a disaster and the progress of civilisation. Well, this is precisely what we do when, from all the prehistoric and historic ages of humanity, we teach the children nothing but a series of wars, oppressions, tyrannies and betrayals; and, equipped with such knowledge, we push them out, in all their ignorance, into the century of the redemption of labour and the triumph of universal peace, telling them that "history is the teacher of life."

Modern Anthropology: Cesare Lombroso and Criminal Anthropology. The Anthropological Principles of Moral Hygiene.—The credit rests with Italy for having rescued Anthropology from a sort of scientific Olympus, and led it by new paths to the performance of an eminent and practical service.

It was about the year 1855 that Cesare Lombroso applied the anthropological method first to the study of the insane, and then to that of criminals, having perceived a similarity or relationship between these two categories of abnormal individuals. The observation and measurement of clinical subjects, studied especially in regard to the cranium by anthropometric methods, led the young innovator to discover that the mental derangements of the insane were accompanied by morphological and physical abnormalities that bore witness to a profound and congenital alteration of the entire personality. Accordingly, for the purposes of diagnosis, Lombroso came to adopt a somatic basis. And his anthropological studies of criminals led him to analogous results.

The method employed was in all respects similar to the naturalistic method which anthropology had taken over from zoology; that is to say, the description of the individual subject considered chiefly in his somatic or corporeal personality, but also in his physiological and mental aspect; the study of his responsiveness to his environment, and of his habits (manners and customs); the grouping of subjects under types according to their dominant characteristic (classification); and finally, the study of their origin, which, in this case, meant a sociological investigation into the genesis of degenerate and abnormal types. Thus, since the principles of the Lombrosian doctrine spread with a precocious rapidity, it is a matter of common knowledge that criminals present anomalies of form, or rather morphological deviations associated with degeneration and known under the name of stigmata (now called malformations), which, when they occur together in one and the same subject, confer upon him a wellnigh characteristic aspect, notably different from that of the normal individual; in other words, they stamp him as belonging to an inferior type, which, according to Lombroso's earlier interpretation, is a reversion toward the lower orders of the human race (negroid and mongoloid types), as evidenced by anomalies of the vital organs, or internal animal-like characteristics (pithecoids); and that such stigmata were often accompanied by a predisposition to maladies tending to shorten life. Side by side with his somatic chart, Lombroso painstakingly prepared a physio-pathological chart of criminal subjects, based upon a study of their sensibility, their grasp of ideas, their social and ethical standards, their thieves' jargon and tattoo-marks, their handwriting and literary productions.

And, by deducing certain common characteristics from these complex charts, he distinguished, in his classic work, Delinquent Man, a variety of types, such as the morally insane, the epileptic delinquent, the delinquent from impulse or passion (irresistible impulsion), the insane delinquent, and the occasional delinquent.

In this way, he succeeded in classifying a series of types—what we might call sub-species—diverging from the somatic and psycho-moral charts of normal men. But the common biopathological foundation of such types (with the exception of the last) was degeneration. We may well agree with Morselli that, in many parts of his treatise, Lombroso completed and amplified Morel, whose classic work, A Study of the Degeneration of the Human Species, was published in France at a time when Lombroso had hardly started upon his anthropological researches.

Both of these great teachers based their doctrine upon a naturalistic concept of man, and then proceeded to consider him, through all his anomalies and perversions, in relation to that extraneous factor, his environment. Morel, indeed, considers the social causes of degeneration, that is to say, of progressive organic impoverishment, as more important than the individual phenomena; they act upon posterity and tend to create a human variety deviating from the normal type. Such causes may be summed up as including whatever tends to the organic detriment of civilised man: such (in the first rank) as alcoholism, poisoning associated with professional industries (metallic poisons), or with lack of nutriment (pellagra), conditions endemic in certain localities (goitre), infective maladies (malaria, tuberculosis), denutrition (surménage). It may be said that whatever produces prolonged suffering, or whatever we class under the term vices, or even the neglect of our duties, chief among which is that of working (parasitism of the rich), or any of the causes which exhaust, or paralyse, or perturb our normal functions, are causes of degeneration, of impoverishment of the species.

Such is the doctrine which underlies the etiological concept of abnormal personality in psychiatry as well as in criminology, or points the way to its bio-social sources.

Accordingly, just as general Anthropology sought to investigate the origins of races or that of the human species in the very roots of life, so criminal Anthropology searches the origins of defective personality in its social surroundings.