Pedagogical Anthropology

by Maria Montessori

In this new task, anthropology not only studies the individual, but also gives real and personal contributions to the solution of many pedagogic problems; among others, that relating to study after school hours; to rewards and punishments; to physical training, elocution, etc.; while, by regarding the children as the effects of biological and social causes, it establishes new and enlightening standards of morality and justice, and reveals to educators responsibilities not hitherto conceived. It will suffice to call to mind the fact that the most studious children, and therefore those who receive the greatest amount of praise and prizes, show a deficiency in weight, in chest development, and in muscular force; consequently, a physiological impoverishment the blame for which must be attributed to an ignorance of hygiene and of anthropology, such as still persists throughout the whole field of pedagogy; an ignorance which leads the teacher to encourage by his praises the impoverishment of the best forces that reveal themselves in the school (the most intelligent and studious children) in an age when social industries, multiplied and grown to a giant size, demand the cooperation of a vigorous race, and to inspire by rewards and praise a sentiment of superiority and of vanity in an age that is dominated by the sentiment of universal equality and brotherhood.

The teacher ought, on the contrary, to appoint himself the defender of the race, and to demand, among his other rights, that of making such social reforms and such reforms in the school and in pedagogies as may be necessary to the accomplishment of his purpose, which is the attainment of the highest degree of civilisation and of prosperity.

But this subject would lead us to repeat principles on which we have already insisted; it will suffice to reassert that the tendency of anthropology is undoubtedly toward a reform in the school and the opening of a new era in pedagogy.

The Significance of the So-called Physical Stigmata of Degeneration.—We have studied so many congenital malformations and pathological deformations that a synthetic statement of their significance becomes necessary. All the more so, because certain principles in this connection, already widely circulated among the general public, have now been rejected by science.

One of these principles refers to the so-called atavism and formed part of the original Lombrosian doctrines: but blessed is the scientist who is obliged to correct himself, for that means that his brain is still fertile.

Certain morphological anomalies call to mind forms of the inferior races and species, from which, according to the original Darwinian doctrine of evolution, the human species had descended in a direct line: hence the term "atavistic survival." It will suffice to mention the receding forehead that calls to mind the Neanderthal cranium, the long simian arms, the prognathism distinctive of the inferior human races and of animals, microcephaly which suggests the crania of anthropoid apes, the mongoloid eyes and protruding cheek-bones, which recall the yellow races; the "canine" ear, the wooly or smooth hair, polytrichia, the dark skin, etc.

Now, all this assemblage of stigmata which went under the name of atavistic, or absolute retrogression, were held to be in almost direct relation to degeneration.

Degeneration was supposed to revive in us forms that had been superseded in the course of evolution, and hence also psychic states that had also been superseded in the history of the human race; it is well known that, according to Lombroso, a criminal might be defined as a savage, a barbarian born among us, yet still having within him his particular instincts of theft and slaughter.

To-day, since the original interpretation of the Darwinian theory has been discarded, with it have fallen all those deductions which medicine and sociology were in too great haste to draw, in order to make scientific application of them.