Frankenstein's Montessori

Reanimating Montessori in the New Year

AI Generated Image of Maria Montessori as Dr. Frankenstein or Frankenstein’s Monster, I can’t quite tell.

January 2024
Nr. Bath (Home of the Mary Shelley Frankenstein Museum)
Weather: Stormy, ominous
Tom, January 22

Dear Marigolds,

“It’s alive!” 

In the spirit of the new year, I’ve been ruminating on rebirth, or, more specifically, reanimation. Firstly, we’re reanimating this monstrous project of ours with a new book - thank you Chelsea for proposing The 1946 London Lectures.

And secondly, I just got back from watching Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film Poor Things, a sort of feminist rewriting of Frankenstein, and I have lots of tenuous connections to make between the themes of the film and Montessori philosophy. I know Justin is going to tell me that really Dogtooth is the true Lanthimos/Montessori film, and I also know that Lanthimos’s film is not a perfect feminist film by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it raises some interesting ideas about childhood and agency that will be fun to unpack.

To quickly summarize the film without spoiling it, Poor Things is the story of Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, a young woman whose body is resurrected by scientist Godwin Baxter when he replaces her brain with that of an infant. The film explores what would happen if the sensibility of a developing child was implanted into the body of an adult woman. Bella’s intense childish curiosity, horniness, and wonder are the driving force of the story. “I am a changingable feast, as are all of we,” she proclaims. The story follows her self-construction: she explores the world around her, maturing and developing at a rapid pace, constantly seeking further knowledge and experience. In this way she becomes the ultimate “self-made” woman, carving her way through the patriarchal strictures of 19th-century “polite” society unimpeded by shame, self-restraint, or parental control. She brazenly refuses to allow her narrative to be controlled by the innumerable men who line up to try and possess her, instead achieving a liberated self and sexuality that transforms the world around her.

Now, there is a lot less sex in Dr. Montessori’s The 1946 London Lectures, otherwise I think they are comparable works. Let’s carve them up with compassion.

Humanity is a Monster

“Humanity is a monster when adult - bloodthirsty, indulging in continuous slaughter. But the monster does not come to life all of a sudden. It is not created in one moment, in one hour, in one week, even in one year. Adulthood is the result of years of toil and struggle. He who constructs this adult person, the adult that may become crueler than the monsters in the films, is the child who, by virtue of his own life and through years of constructing his own personality, becomes a man or woman.” Maria Montessori, The 1946 London Lectures.

“Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.” Alisdair Gray, author of Poor Things (2002), the novel the film was adapted from.

In the opening lecture of The 1946 London Lectures, titled “Education as a Help to Life”, Dr. Montessori focuses on one key aspect of her philosophy that she wants to be fully understood, and then she repeatedly rams this point home throughout the lecture. As Annette Haines mentions in the editor’s notes, this is the voice of Dr. Montessori in the late stages of her career, “the voice of a woman slightly perturbed because she has been misunderstood over and over again”, and as such there is a repetitiveness, directness, and urgency to these lectures that is at once exciting, exhausting, and a little nutty. The simple point she wants to make is that “the children are our future.” Now that may sound trite, but she means it in a much more fundamental and radical way than even Whitney Houston did. What she means is that in order to improve humanity and to evolve as a species, we have to learn from children, as their untapped potential is the key to our future. In a later essay, “Education Based on Psychology”, she macabrely compares the discovery of children’s untapped energy to Luigi Galvani’s discovery of animal electricity:

What we saw was similar to the famous dead frogs that, although headless and skinned, when hung by the feet from an iron railing began to move. Something just as unexpected happened in our study of children. It was so surprising, so unexpected, that people thought it was a miracle, like the dead frogs coming to life…

The consequence of the discovery of this energy in the child will have an even greater and more profound effect on the future. If you can imagine the immense power of this energy and the effect it is bound to have once people have learned to use it, then you will have visions of a society quite different from that of today. There will be a new world, a new humanity. (Montessori, 1946 Lectures)

There is a 19th-century revolutionary, scientific fervor to Montessori’s ideas in these lectures. She is definitely the Godwin Baxter and Victor Frankenstein of her own story. And, as with most great ideas and idealists, she teeters on the edge of science fiction, quackery, and monstrosity. There is something The Matrix-esque about her comparisons of the “energy of the child” to the discovery of animal electricity. And there is more than a passing connection to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was also heavily influenced by Galvinism and the myth of Pygmalion, which Montessori references in the same lecture:

This reminds me of the Greek legend of Pygmalion. A sculptor made a statue and fell in love with it. So great was his love that it gave the statue life. This is how we now consider humanity. Unconsciously, we consider social groups as statues that have suddenly become human beings. But it is not so - they do not suddenly emerge as adult human beings or social groups all at once. Tales of statues coming to life have been depicted in films. Man creates a machine - the machine becomes animated - but without a soul, it becomes a monster. (Montessori, 1946 Lectures)

Like Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Montessori’s stated goal is to create a better “man” - the perfection of the human species using science and technology. It is not surprising that the Montessori Method is popular with contemporary technologists like Jeff Bezos and other Californian tech-bros who are obsessed with self-improvement, AI, space travel, soylent, Ayn Rand, and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity. “Perhaps the man we dreamt of, the man, of whom the idealists preached in the past, may be found in childhood,” she proclaims. Up to this point, we have been squandering our resources, creating men without souls - statues, machines, monsters, dead frogs.

Dr. Montessori’s great discovery was that the raw ingredients of future man can already be found lying dormant in children. We have been ignorant of these powers, and we have actively hindered their evolution, leaving man in a state of arrested development as a species. “The soul of the child is rich, great, and immense - like a vast unknown continent - and it is being discovered by science only today,” she says, like a true 19th-century frontierist/colonialist. Through studying children, through recognizing their inherent gifts, and through removing obstacles to child development, we can resurrect humanity - “the re-awakening of man’s conscience.”

I think it is about time for a little Rocky Horror Picture Show interlude:

A Scientific Method of Pedagogy

A science must be created to study this work in all its phases: the study of the construction of the human being through the child who constructs the man to be through experience. (Montessori, 1946 Lectures)

In the second lecture of The 1946 London Lectures, titled “Scientific Pedagogy”, Dr. Montessori states that it was never her intention for her name to be attached to her methodology and that she prefers the name “scientific method of pedagogy” instead, but her publishers rejected this name, saying, “Good gracious, what a monstrous title! Let us make it simpler. Let us call it ‘The Montessori Method’.” Like Dr. Montessori, I am disappointed with this early branding choice, as I think calling our practice “Montessori” education has obscured and minimized the radical potential of her methodology, making it seem slightly cultish by attaching it to a personality. I personally prefer “The Scientific Method of Education.” This is what is most radical about Montessori education, it applies the scientific method to education. The problem with the name is that it all feels a little coldly scientific. Montessori addresses this saying, “It must not be carried out in a cold-blooded fashion…It requires the re-awakening of man’s conscience, the redirecting of our ideals, the realization that herein lies our hope.” There must be a warmth, morality, and spirituality infusing this scientific approach - a stitching together of the head, hand, and heart.

So what does scientific pedagogy look like in practice? Well, we don’t have teachers in Montessori classrooms - we have guides - and the role of the guide is to observe the children in an environment intentionally prepared to meet their needs at each stage of their development, and to work out how to support the conditions for optimal development at each stage. The child does not rely on the adult for this optimal development, these tendencies are inherent. Instead the adult, through observation, should look to remove any obstacles that may exist in the path of optimal development and adjust the environment accordingly. This is the essence of Montessori education.

“We must make a plan of development guided by the child through the power it reveals. We must proceed, not on the basis of our own ideas or on our own prejudices, not on preconceived methods, but by observing the child. The personality of the child stands loftily at the center of the great problem that is education. It is the only possible master in this plan.” (Montessori, 1946 Lectures)

It’s funny that I’ve accused Dr. Montessori of being like Victor Frankenstein and Godwin Baxter, because the essence of her methodology is the antithesis of the masculine, creator complex that drives these figures (who themselves are satirical caricatures of masculinity and scientific rationalism) and that drives so much of parenting and education today. She challenges the misguided belief that children need to be shaped, controlled, and created by their superior adults. Adults are so focused on “correcting” the errors of children - their manners, mistakes, and behaviors - errors we have often caused - that we are blind to their powers. Her methodology instead is all about respecting the agency of children and letting them self-create. She asks, “How much fuller and richer life would be if we saw the child in all his greatness, all his beauty, instead of focusing on all his little mistakes?”

This is where Montessori philosophy overlaps with the philosophy of Poor Things, as these ideas about agency, the potential of childhood, and freedom are at the center of the radical, feminist vision that Lanthimos is reaching for in his film.

“I am Bella Baxter. I am a flawed, experimenting person. I seek outings and adventures. Bella’s so much to discover. And there is a world to enjoy, circumnavigate. It is the goal of all to progress, grow.” Bella Baxter, Poor Things (2023)

In determining her own path and smashing through all the obstacles in her way, Bella Baxter is a beacon of agency, self-construction, and self-determination. She refuses pity, help, charity, and external control. She is a willful child, filled with what Montessori called horme or the hormic impulse. Without giving too much away, Bella not only creates herself through the journey of the film, but ultimately creates a new world around her, a visionary existence that is at once feminist, socialist, queer, neurodiverse, and polyamorous.

“The power of freedom is scary to people at times,” says Lanthimos about the film. Montessori education is often scary to parents too, because it challenges and upends our conceptions of parental control. Over the course of the movie, Bella teaches Godwin Baxter how to be a good parent (and grandparent) to her, as he learns the art of letting go. There is so much more to dig into here that I don’t have time for - Godwin’s name comes from William Godwin, English philosopher and father to Mary Shelley, and Frankenstein is in many ways a rumination on fathers, daughters, and parenting in general. To try to tie this all up, what Montessori’s The 1946 London Lectures and Poor Things have in common is a vision of childhood agency and the power of childish/juvenile energy. It is a vision that is transgressive and transformative, that challenges our existing social structures, our parenting and education systems, and that points towards a more free and equal world.

I can’t tell you how excited this topic is getting me, as we are starting to get into ideas that I don’t typically have a chance to discuss. This gives me an opportunity to finally dig out my Master’s thesis! The title of my Master’s thesis was “Hart Crane’s White Buildings & the Incunabula of the Divine Grotesque”, and was an investigation into one of my favorite poets Hart Crane and the way he deploys “grotesque” imagery and language to imagine a new world, a transformative queer agency. I am a big fan of monstrousness in literature as a way of exploring new territories of thought, liminal spaces, and aspects of our society and selves that we force subterranean. I am also in the middle of reading Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, which explores the ways that feminist artists have used monstrousness and the grotesque in order to tell the truth of their experiences as bodies. I see Dr. Montessori’s uses of grotesque imagery in the London lectures as working within this tradition. In order to create paradigm shifts in society, we have to envision things which haven’t been seen before, which can look monstrous at first. I roll with the monsters.

I love and miss you both, my fellow monsters. As Mary Shelley said in Frankenstein,

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

Love,

Tom