Montessori in the Digital Age

A. Prem Kumar

Dr. Montessori was well respected by the leading scientists and technologists of her age,

most of whom defined the previous century. One of her advocates was none other than

Thomas Edison, probably the most celebrated technologist and entrepreneur. Alexander

Graham Bell and his wife Mabel founded the Montessori Educational Association at their

Washington, DC, home in 1913. And later, Albert Einstein was a supporter of Dr. Montessori

and worked to bring her methods to the US in the 1950s. Evidently she was no stranger to

technology given that at the age of thirteen she had joined an all-boys technical school to

prepare for engineering, before she went on to become Italy's first dottoressa.

Technology today, 60 years since her death, has changed manifold impacting human culture

and thinking profoundly. The computer in your pocket, the smartphone, has more memory

& processing power than the largest of computers at her time. And we live in a time where

the number of mobile phones outnumbers the number of toilets in India as per a UN report,

a grave situation in itself. The world lies at the dawn of an era where computers will soon

outnumber people on the planet; and they will all be connected to the Internet. Digital

technology has not only augmented our cognitive capabilities it has also begun impinging

upon our social capabilities too. The rise of social media has had such a fast impact on the

world that many are still unraveling how it got so disruptive so quickly across the various

spheres of human activities and interests ranging from consumption to creation to

collaboration to revolution. Thanks to the advances in science and technology, jobs that

were unheard of even a decade ago are in high demand today. Can we even imagine, let

alone anticipate, what jobs will the children of today prepare themselves for? Will my son

actually grow up to be an astronaut chef that he dreams of now? Space tourism is definitely

on the raise, so maybe he will be a gourmet chef on a space cruise ship? The dream job is

actually an original idea of my son that probably reflects on the imaginative mind of a child

of seven.

With the digital technology becoming so ubiquitous there is no way that an urban infant can

escape it; many probably are raised on lullabies played on the mobiles. Toddlers already are

trying to swipe or pinch the images on magazines expecting them to either change or zoom

out. While the frequency range of a mobile phone is so limited and thus robbing the infant

of a richer range of sounds, the touch screens are devoid of any tactile feedback which is so

necessary for the development of the toddler who is learning the most through her sense of

touch. And yet, these same digital technologies hold the promise of delivering education to

the length and breadth of the nation at minimal costs. Paucity of teachers can be overcome

through videoconferencing or recorded videos of lectures. In fact, "massively open online

courses" (MOOCs) are quite the flavour of the day in the higher education circles, with

hundreds of thousands of registered students and billions of views of uploaded video

content.

Between the digital devices that exist in the child's first environment, the potential they

hold to help a child learn and the "unbundling" effects of the Internet that provides an

alternative to the tutor on premises, the changes that are apparent in imparting education

are not so clear where it comes to actual learning. There is no empirical study on the impact

of digital technology on learning, but the few research results that are emerging are not

encouraging. While the smartphones and tablet PCs can draw the attention of the children

keeping their attention is increasingly difficult, resulting in easily distracted children.

Children tend to become passive recipients of content, rather than moulders of their

experiences by manipulating these devices. To counter the passivity by teaching them how

to manipulate, can we introduce them to tools like Gcompris for children below six years

and Scratch, developed by MIT, for children older than six, by which they can control how

the computer behaves & responds to their commands?

Pew Research Center has recently found by surveying 2000 teachers across the USA, that

while children have better access to information for their research purposes, there is not

much improvement in their research skills as such. One teacher said, “They don’t know how

to filter out bad information, and they are so used to getting information quickly that when

they can’t find what they are looking for immediately, they quit.” In fact critical

consumption of information is a skill that even adults find difficult. The amount of

information available online is huge, and they are made easily & quickly accessible thanks to

the search engines, however not all that is on the web can be trusted. As Howard Rheingold

says in his new book, "Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter?”

"Part of the process of effectively harnessing the power of search involves the metacognitive

skill of regarding all digital information with a skeptical eye, searching for clues, and using

social networks and online tools to test the validity of online “knowledge” found or sent to

us. Such tools might be thought of as mind-extending lenses, bringing into focus the most

trustworthy information while blurring the questionable information into the background."

Dr. Montessori was of the opinion that “when dealing with children there is greater need for

observing than of probing.” Do we need to be bold enough to consider providing mobiles

and tablet PCs, probably as exercises of practical life, so that we can observe children with

these technologies? Like how the One Laptop Per Child has attempted by giving their

specially designed laptops to children in a remote village in Africa and learnt that children

could learn alphabets on their own within a short time and were even able to change

settings on the laptop so that they could activate the camera in it, having figured it out all by

themselves. Or do we wait till there is greater penetration of digital technologies, when it is

inarguably and irrevocably accepted as an item of human culture? Probably this requires a

plane based evaluation rather than a single yes or no for children of all planes of

development?

There definitely are more questions than answers at this stage. And thus this definitely calls

for observation by Montessori adults and the sharing of these observations for us to even

discern any impact of these digital technologies on child development and learning.

Probably we can use these digital technologies ourselves too to collaborate and share so

that we not only learn about the children but also the technology to shape our own

Montessori materials for a digital age if need be?

This text is shared under a creative commons license. CC:BY-NC-SA

This text was submitted as a draft for an article in the magazine “Follow The Child” from Indian Montessori Center

Publication. An edited form was subsequently published in their January 6, 2013 issue.