Collaboration

What should one think about when they think about cooperation, particular in reference to our own children inside Montessori Schools?  Very often, in a Montessori context, one needs to think about the larger picture.  Firstly, this larger picture is the child as a human being.  From there we move to the collectivity of human nature.  Why?  Montessori education derives its method from anthropologic roots along with the biology and psychology of the child therefore in order to understand certain concepts necessitates the deliberation of human evolution.  Cooperation is a hallmark of the human experience.  Human beings began cooperating a very long time ago, think at least 200,000 years ago with the emergence of our species.  Other hominids cooperated and even other animals of the animal kingdom are known to cooperate as well.  When one thinks about cooperation, sometimes certain concepts such as altruism arise.  Altruism is individual behavior that benefits others but not the individual itself.  Yet humans are not the only species capable of altruistic behavior as the primatologist Frans de Waal’s research on chimpanzees has shown.  So what is cooperation?  Cooperation is a somewhat complex topic as it requires the understanding of concepts such as kin selection, in-group, out-group, reciprocity,  intention, and joint intentionality.  So how then can we understand cooperation in the context of either parent-child or teacher-child relationships?  Again, we must look towards human evolution to give insight.  Although other hominids cooperated, no other species in the history of earth has cooperated in the same way that homo sapiens have.  How do we know this?  Look around, our very own town has a town hall that governs, giving us access to water, electricity, or roadways.  Our houses are built along streets that form neighborhoods and have street signs denoting where we are.  Our town hall is governed by the capital and in the capital stand astonishing edifices like Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower.  How is this even possible?  It is through the cooperation of human beings that this has become a reality.  And not only that but it has been a cooperation passed along through generations of people.  Notre Dame took 182 years to build, no human being lives that long but cooperation amongst human beings is everlasting.  One must view the child or their own child in this aspect of human cooperation.  When they grow to become adults they will join into becoming an active contributor in the creation of what Dr. Montessori called supra-nature.  Supra-nature is what was described above, the network of roads, buildings, and etc… all built by humans on top of nature.  Yet children, are in the midst of development, their ‘job,’ is to develop.  Cooperation in all of its complexity cannot necessarily be expected in the same way that one might demand it of an adult.  Therefore one must regard cooperation in children as something different, something that is developing.  Yet we should not as adults give children a carte blanche to be non-cooperative.  It is well known that reading to infants, develops language skills yet when we read to infants it can appear as if nothing is being absorbed but rest assured, it is.  Children need to be encouraged to demonstrate cooperative behavior as well as see adults modeling cooperative behavior.

The social neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman called humans, “super cooperators” and this has resulted in the extraordinary feat of building up human culture (supra-nature).  Where do children stand in this aspect to human culture?  Again, they are in the midst of development and are not yet at the level of being super cooperators.  The younger they are the less development they have.  It is not until the 3rd plane of development (12-18) that we begin to see the first real forays into the type of cooperation that humans are truly capable of.  At this age, Dr. Montessori spoke of social experiences that construct the individual’s consciousness.  In other words, the individual adolescence becomes bonded to society. 

Children of the elementary age and children of the first plane (0-6) are still experiencing cooperation, they are just experiencing it in a different manner than the adolescent.  However, there is one key that makes Montessori Education uniquely different from all other forms of education and that is its approach to cooperation.  Dr.  Montessori said this, “The first reform in education must be to offer a wider environment and to multiply the possibilities of association and of activity.”  In order to understand what she means one must examine both association and activity to arrive at a sense of what one really means by cooperation in the childhood context.  Association is driven by the human tendency of communication.  This is the tendency to talk with others, to tell others about stuff.  Public schools suppress this characteristic of the child.  Children want to associate with others because they have this tendency to want to communicate with others.  The other aspect is activity.  In Montessori Education, one recognizes the spontaneous activity as being a cornerstone of human behavior.  Spontaneous activity is the manifestation of internal energies that push development toward optimization.  It is not, a child spontaneously running through the aisles of the grocery store.  

In regards to activity and cooperation, Dr. Montessori was very clear when she said, “It was always realized that anyone who does work that is too hard must join together with others; but we saw among small children that even to be able to understand it is necessary to join with others.”  This gives one a real clue to cooperation in children under six.  In order to cooperate they must have some real understanding of the activity (the work).  If they do not, cooperation just becomes chatter.  The child from the age of 0- 6, is a child that is tasked with acquisition; acquisition of movement, acquisition of language to name but two and acquisition requires coordination.  Coordination is the organization of the different elements of a complex body or activity so as to enable them to work together effectively.  The child must be coordinating mind, body, and soul in order to acquire development.  If this is the case then one can easily understand that individual work lends itself better to development.  The younger the child is, the more intense the acquisitions are, think language or walking.  For the 3-6 child, there are always opportunities to cooperate, for the younger child this may be having a conversation while snacking.  Yet one mustn’t forget that children are still acquiring conversational skills.  Often they simply talk over each other or change subjects rapidly.  So, it is not a far stretch to see how young children working on mathematics can entirely forget the actual activity and be absorbed in conversation but this is not necessarily good.  In order to truly work on mathematics together, each child must have a certain level of understanding of how to do the activity, otherwise it devolves rather than evolves.  Children that are unable to work with others at this stage require more time working individually to develop the acquisition necessary to be able to work with others on an activity.  Individual work helps them acquire the nuts and bolts of how to do an activity, this develops the touchstone of the ability to work.  

At the 3-6 level, the child is becoming conscious for the first time.  The earliest memories of the human being are generally from this time period as before the age of three it is unconscious.  It is therefore no coincidence that children after the age of three seek out other children to bond with.  Before the age of three, this is a different type of bonding where it is more closely aligned to a nurturing bond that builds up attachment, an important element for developing healthy human relationships.  After three, children become conscious of others and are attracted to communicating with them but here is the catch, they really do not know how to do it.  If left together with no purposeful activity the potential of development is quickly minimized.  This is the importance of work or activity, it sets children on the path to optimum development.  Children that find themselves crying, being upset, complaining or becoming over emotional over others are children that need to spend more time working individually in order to develop an understanding of the activity.  This also is the same for the child that is the instigator.  Generally, however, these experiences are all part of the development of cooperation.  Children do need to experience the emotional rollercoaster of social cooperation in order to develop the true sense of what is meant by ‘super cooperators.”

And what about the elementary child?  These children know how to hold conversations yet for certain children these conversations become the work.  This is a bad pathway.  Knowledge, particularly in children is directly related to exposure.  The elementary child begins to see the universe in a different light.  Children are capable of developing a relativist type of epistemological understanding.  In other words, they begin to become conscious of the fact that the periphery that is outside of the self is the great source of knowledge.  Therefore those children that allow their tendency of communication to overshadow other tendencies such as abstraction, exploration, imagination, or work are misguided failing to see the periphery as this spring of wealth.  

Montessori Education is always built upon the preceding stage of development and for cooperation, again it must be based on the understanding of the activity in order to truly cooperate.  This was the genius of Dr. Montessori, the understanding is not necessarily the abstracting of the concept, for if this was the case there would be no need for work, but in the understanding of the procedure which propels the child to be active.  The procedure leads to the abstraction and this is the reason that Dr. Montessori developed materials to develop abstractions.  The elementary period is the period of life in which the child needs to explore as many concepts as possible.  It is the period of life when the Coriolis Force or suffixes are utterly fascinating.  This gives children a deep knowledge that will become the foundation for all the following perods of life.  

Again, cooperation does not mean conversation.  Cooperation means activity, activity that leads to development.  Elementary children want to collaborate and collaboration is the action of working with someone to produce or create something.  The elementary child needs to be interacting with others because this is the child that has become increasingly cognizant of the larger society, comprehending how many persons work together to create a functioning society.  It is the first time in a human being’s life that they become bound by the dependency of the work of others.  Yet if one examines human history, one can see that collaboration can also be negative and that the machine of society can be distorted to create evil.  The elementary child naturally wishes to work with her peers and the overwhelming majority of this time must be free from competition and possess an authentic purpose.  This purpose is toiling to understand the workings of the activity at hand.  The wealth of subject matter inside an elementary environment is remarkable but if the children are not active, then it gathers dust.  

It is not solely the responsibility of the school to guide children but also that of the parent and other adults.  Adults can support children not necessarily by directly asking children if they understand a particular concept or abstraction but listening and circling through the different subjects.  The subjects in elementary are language, geometry, mathematics, history, music, geography, and biology.  “Hey, what are working on in biology?”  You will know if you begin to hear the same things over and over that your child has become a victim to his/her tendency of communication.  The importance of finding purposeful activity is also the responsibility of the elementary child and responsibility is an important tool for a successful adulthood.   

Lastly, it is important to state that other forms of education are insufficient for children because they rely on the child being dependent of the adult.  This format is a teacher/animator giving children a directive activity, wherein the children all learn or do the same activity at the same time.  This tears the nature of the individual apart because it stunts the ability of the individual to spontaneously cooperate which, is necessary to realize the optimal potential to become a super cooperator.  Children need their peers in order to develop cooperative skills and an over dependency on the adult leaves this potentiality inert. 

Ryan 

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