Why Montessori Sensorial Materials Work: The Light of Understanding
by Dr. David Fleischacker
During the first 6 years of life, Maria Montessori discovered that the inner being of the child is being formed, literally. Brain research has demonstrated this as well. Just before birth, the child undergoes massive synaptic growth in the brain that sets the child up for absorbing his or her familial and cultural life. This absorption enters even the neural synaptic pathways. The pathways not used fall away to make room for a member, say, of the Fleischacker family with their familial characteristics. At the same time, the family does not completely determine the child. The inner life of the child significantly plays a role in that coming to be, and so a uniqueness develops in each boy or girl within their familial environment.
The sensorial materials in a special way feed the natural thirst of the child’s motor-sensory consciousness. The materials provide a rich landscape for the construction of the imaginative world of the child, and in proper use, these materials prepare the child for future increases in understanding and knowledge.
Let us take one example. One of the materials is tied to geometric motor-sensory formation — the wooden cylinder blocks. The wooden cyclinders are constructed from an attractive wood. In one set, all the cylinders are cut to the exact same length, but differing in one feature alone – the diameter. At the top of these cylinders is a carved knob or a ball that allows the child to lift the cylinder with two or three fingers. The cylinders in turn have a home in an attractively cut wooden rectangular block that has a sequence of holes matching precisely the diameters of the cylinders. Both the cylinder and its home are sanded to a glass like surface that allows the cylinder to slide in and out with little friction. Helpful as well is that the diameters of each cylinder are sized in a mathematical portion to the others that is relevant to mathematic principles that the child will learn in a later sensitive stage. 
So the cylinders fit neatly into their rectangular home. They are the same in all ways (color and height and texture) save the diameter. They have an elegance and simplicity in both look and feel that exudes the beauty and the significance of the one idea that the child will learn. In short, the child learns the meaning of diameter experientially at this stage–in his or her motor-sensory being.
So interiorly, why is this so powerful? The answer lies in the nature of the child’s soul.
The Western world since the rise of classical culture in Greece (the first enlightenment), from Homer to Socrates, one sees an awakening to the interior life and nature of the human person. The motive was a recurrence of challenges to personal and civic life. Instead of blaming the stars, the rivers, or the sun for their glory or their demise, the Greeks realized more and more the significance of the role of the citizens in the fate of the city-state. They came to discover that not all or even most of the events in life were caused by the sun, the moon, and rivers. Instead, they discovered that human passions, intelligence, freedom, and love had a larger role to play in the fate of a polis. There will still the gods of course, but those gods looked less and less like the sun and moon and rivers, and more and more like men, women, and children. Bruno Snell, in his book The Discovery of Mind, argues that these human like gods allowed for a kind of reflective self-discovery of human nature and intelligence. This, in part, is why the Western world has such a rich language of interiority that combines, a) acts of the soul (eg. passions, understanding, knowledge, will) and the state of those acts as either rightly developed (virtues) or wrongly oriented (eg. vices).
I said that the Greek discovery of the mind was only a part of the journey into interiority. The rest of the story began just around the corner from Greece. Eric Voegelin writes about a “leap in being,” as he called it, that allowed the Israelites to discover the interior aspects of the soul that are constituted as a tension between the state of life as it is found now and that of an already existent eternal beyond, the I AM of all reality (Israel and Revelation–a difficult but fascinating book). This revelation moved the Israelites to a deeper understanding of themselves, especially in their existence as the image of the I AM (for scriptures scholars, the name of God given to Moses has a slightly different meaning in Hebrew than in Greek. In Hebrew is could be translated as “The One who has always been with you” as in the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” In any case, the point made here remains the same. Adam and Eve were made in the image and likeness of God).
As the cultures of Athens and Jerusalem intertwined and became integrated, especially once Christ was born, and his Church came alive, the interior life was explored in its most profound elements and depths. One of those elements was the significance of the act of understanding (or the intellectual virtue of understanding). This act is at the root of the power of Maria Montessori’s sensorial materials. Aristotle had recognized it, as did the Pythagoreans before him. Understanding was key to grasping the form of things. St. Thomas Aquinas also picked up on the import of this act (in Latin it was called intelligere). Following Aristotle, St. Thomas notes that intelligere arises when the light of the mind, the Agent Intellect, turns its gaze toward phantasms (certain images), and “abstracts” the species in an act of understanding. All human understanding springs from these phantasms. It is these phantasms that the sensorial materials prepare. They are relevant to everything from math and science to common sense and art as Bernard Lonergan points out in his book Insight, .
This act of understanding is not the same as a word or a concept. It is easy to think so, because concepts and words are the first thing to which we attend when we think about thinking and the mind. However, concepts and words are meaningless unless we first have an insight which comes before we “put it into words.” This is crucial to realize. Teaching is not primarily about teaching words, even as important as these come to be. Rather insight or understanding is central.
Two key elements are involved in an insight.
- We have to be in a state of wonder (at the root of this is an interior light of wonder that the ancients called the light of Being).
- Our motor-sensory imagination has to come together in the right way to get an insight.
Children naturally have an energetic wonder about life and the world. We do not create that! In theological terms, this light that makes it possible for us to understand is a created participation in the divine light. The reason Aristotle, and St. Thomas following him, called this the agent intellect is because it was this interior part of the human soul that was moving the person to seek to understand all that could be understood. We all know this beautiful energy in children, especially when they discover how to express it in words and ask why and what to the point that is beyond even advanced adults to answer. Only the cynic would think that the child was trying to show off or annoy them.
Furthermore, the child has a wildly energetic motor-sensory life that has the energy of young neurons seeking to be formed by absorbing the world around them. This is absolutely beautiful to ponder and realize.
Together, the wonder and the imaginative thirst come alive in a world that can be touched, moved, seen, smelled, heard, and tasted within the spatial world constituted by what scientists have discovered are the proprioceptors (another sense scattered throughout the body that constructs a spatial layout of the world from one’s own body and in which one’s body is oriented).
For the motor-sensory conscious imagination of the child to be form, he or she naturally discovers one kind of connection at a time. The child then repeats this until it is mastered, and in this mastery it resides as a habit in the neurons of the child. The result? This connection has come to constitute part of the state of the child’s soul.
Basically, when a kind of pattern arises within the imagination, along with a conscious wonder about what is experienced in the pattern, there emerges this oft overlooked act of understanding. It is an ah-ha moment of great joy in the child which happens quite often in a rightly formed and led Montessori classroom and atrium.
To be more precise about the relationship of image and insight, let’s take an ancient example that Lonergan uses in his book Insight, that of the circle. He starts with something easy to imagine — a cartwheel (Insight, chapter 1). To get to the insight, one must have imagined lines (spokes on the wheel), and an imaginable dot in the center (the hub in the wheel). All of the spokes are on the same plane. They are the same length. They all are attached to the hub. Now begin to shrink the width of the spokes toward nothing. Shrink the hub to something without depth, width, or height. Then one is moving toward “imagining” geometric lines and points. Notice what wonder does. “What if” the young geometer might ask, we had an infinity of lines. The imagination makes the spokes smaller and smaller as it adds more and more lines. Likewise with the hub. “What if” we shrink it to no magnitude and turn it into nothing more than a location. In the end, our poor garden of an imagination cannot keep up. It cannot literally see those lines without width or the point without any magnitude. But if done right and in the light of wonder, a breakthrough happens. One understands the nature of a circle. How do you know if you had this insight? If one sees why necessarily the circle is broken if one line is longer or shorter, then one has had the insight. Without the hub and spokes, the visual lines and dots, the circle can not be understood because phantasm is necessary for insight. Likewise without wonder, there would be no insight either. This child is alive to both and with both, spring insight.
Something similar happens with the wooden blocks. With the wooden cylinders, the child learns the meaning of diameter in a tactile and a visual manner. The descriptive insight that arises in the child as Lonergan would note, leads to a nominal definition of diameter (Insight, chapter 1). Because this experiential based insight bursts forth within a energetic exercise of the child’s own wonder, it now has a special place in his or her heart. In later stages, when the child moves to the higher levels of math and geometry, the child comes to a deeper meaning of notions like diameter, which by then are old treasured friends.
What Montessori’s sensorial materials accomplish is to feed the natural thirst of the child’s wonder and these feed the child’s motor-sensory being. In doing so, some beautiful part of this world enters into the heart of that child, through the inner light of wonder, and it prepares the child’s imagination for future insights and breakthroughs in language, art, poetry, science, and the faith that seeks a deeper understanding of God and creation. This is why the sensorial materials are so powerful.