Pedagogical Anthropology

by Maria Montessori

The spoken word requires a most complicated mechanism, and among the details of this mechanism, by no means the least important are the acts of inspiration, by which the air is received into the lungs, and of expiration, by which it is expelled, simultaneously with all the other movements producing speech. Indeed, we know that when speech is further complicated by the act of singing, it becomes necessary to study special rules for breathing; in short, to educate the voice.

Now, why do we not also educate the voice for its ordinary task of the spoken language? Speech is one of the marvels that characterise man, and also one of the most difficult spontaneous creations that have been accomplished by nature. Through the voice, the lawyer defends the innocent, the teacher educates the new generations, the mother recalls her erring son to the path of virtue, lovers unite their souls, and all humanity interchanges ideas. If intelligence is the triumph of life, the spoken word is the marvellous means by which this intelligence is manifested.

We trouble ourselves to educate the voice only for the purpose of singing, and neglect the spoken word. We do not stop to think that singing appeals only to the senses and emotions, while speech appeals to the emotions and the intellect, and therefore charms and at the same time convinces.

Anyone who has heard that wonderfully gifted speaker, Ofelia Mazzoni, expounding our great poets to the labouring classes at the People's University in Milan, rousing the slumbering intelligence of the working man, will understand what an immense educative force we are neglecting.

In a century in which we speak of an intellectual reawakening and a brotherhood of man, we have forgotten the voice! Yet in this new era of humanity that is learning brotherly love and striving for peace, the voice plays a part analogous to that of the trumpet-call in the centuries consecrated to war.

As a matter of fact, our schools so far neglect defects of speech that it is not uncommon to hear a stammerer undergoing examinations for a degree in jurisprudence. The fact that an otherwise cultured man lisps or stammers is treated by us as quite an indifferent matter, just as among savage tribes a king may have unclean nails without anyone observing the fact.

Yet it is now known that stammering may usually be cured by a systematic training in the art of breathing.

Respiratory gymnastics ought to constitute one of the principal courses of instruction in schools for children. I have introduced it into the "Children's Houses," among children between the ages of four and six, combining it with a special instruction in written language (letters of the alphabet), designed to educate the movements of the organs of speech, without worrying or tiring the children, and this method has borne such good results that our little ones, by the time they are five years old, have lost nearly all their defects in pronunciation.

Spirometry.—The pulmonary capacity may be measured directly by means of an instrument called the spirometer; the breath must be strongly expelled through a tube opening into a hollow cylinder, thus raising a graduated piston contained in it; and, by reading the figure indicated on the piston-rod, we learn the volume of air expelled from the lungs.