FIRST PLANE OF DEVELOPMENT, FIRST SUBPLANE: 0-3

From the very first split of the very first cell, the Human Being is being formed, the construction of an Individual beginning. This stem cell is endowed with a power at conception that will enable the development of more cells, splitting and specializing within thisChild to create an Adult.

At birth, the Child has developed her working senses, but little else is apparent. There is very limited coordination of the Child’s movement and she shows only traces of her functioning Human Intellect, having no language for communication, but even from the start does she have these potentialities. With them, and guiding her along the path to their realization, she has the Human Tendencies. So from the moment she opens her eyes, the Child begins to work unconsciously toward the construction of the Person she will become, her earliest work providing a foundation for everything that will follow. A mature, realized adult is the eventual result of this strong base.

For this reason, the first three years are the most important in a Human life. Whatever can be done to aid the Child in her monumental task must be unhesitatingly adopted. The intellect is there at birth, but mostly in potential, but first the child will need to establish the patterns of life in order that she will eventually be able to take her first tentative steps toward participating in it. Through imitating the actions she sees around her daily, the Child will determine her activities. The Child’s construction and realization of her potential, therefore, will be based on the experiences she has in the environment, proportional to the freedom she has for Exploration.

ON HUMAN DEPENDENCE

The newborn Human Child is especially dependent on the Adult for a long time. This is for good reason. By this she is given the opportunity to complete her development when she has full function of her senses, not before. And so the brain and its tools learn to work with and for each other by working together to complete the process that each has begun in the womb.

Thus the construction of the Child will vary according to her exposure, and she, in her dependence, is given a great opportunity for depth of observation prior to ever being expected to act. She can see her surroundings and will begin to decipher the society into which she was born well before she is asked to actively participate.

In a way this weakness of the newborn Child also created, in the first place, the society into which she is trying to adapt. The Child engenders love and affection that bind families of Humans together and inspire communal groups to form, and so while the Child is dependent upon the Family, the Family, and indeed Society at Large, is equally ensconced in its reliance upon the Child.

THE HUMAN TENDENCIES

The first Tendencies that compel her, as it was for Early Man, begin with the Tendency for Exploration. For this, the young Child has use of her sensorial input. She can explore her environment with her eyes, her ears, her nose, her fingers and even her tongue. The sensory organs form the building blocks of the Child’s conscious intelligence.

The Child has within her the potential for coordinated movement, the particular set needed by the Human Being. And when she begins to crawl, the field of the Child’s exposure is greatly redoubled. She can now continue the work of classification that she began in her immobility. Classification is the manifestation of her Tendency for Order, at this stage a classification of impressions.

Through this defining order, the Child begins to feel secure. It is the satisfaction of her Tendency for Orientation. In trying different things, she gets responses that come to be trusted, and she begins to find a certain place in the world.

The Child also needs this order to build Intellect. Without Order, there can be no pattern; and with out a pattern, the child cannot sequence or find Reason. Through the patterning she does find, the Child begins to form her likes and dislikes—her attitudes, beliefs and prejudices.

But it is sill never enough. The Child wants to take part and share in the magic around her, and exploration through movement allows her to adapt. She continues to work on her movements, both gross (balance/equilibrium) and fine (movement of hand), until she perfects them. This practice betrays her Tendency for Repetition toward Exactness. And she continues to explore, for the more capable and refined she gets, the wider her field will become. Once the Child begins to walk, she exhibits an almost continuous movement.

HORMÉ

The term Hormé, borrowing from the name of the Greek spirit (dæmon) if impulse or eagerness to do a thing, was coined to explain the insatiable drive for children to

LANGUAGE

All throughout her extra-spacial movement, the Child has been discovering yet another path. From the explorations of her sense of hearing, the Child has begun to understand the importance of spoken language. Already she has found correlation between her certain actions and the response it elicits in others, and in imitating the noises she hears around her she discovers another vehicle for communication. This is another potential that is latent within her, the Human Potential for Language driven by a Tendency for Communication.

The Child has the ability to pick out the specific sounds made by the Humans around her from the cacophony of noise always present in an environment. It is a talent of specialization that enables the Child to imitate and practice only the noises she hears that will do her constructive good until she is able to construct her own language.

Through all of this, if given freedom, comes the development of Independence. The ability to do things by and for herself. And it is an ever increasing spiral: with freedom for independence comes mobility and language and all the other tools of independence, and then upon the acquisition or perfection of each of those, the Child gains more independence further still. Opportunities for this will help move the Child from the Unconscious Absorbent Mind of her First Subplane to the Conscious Absorbent Mind that is to follow.

PREPARED ENVIRONMENT

An environment must be prepared that will allow the Child to develop her full potential to become a contributory member in the society of which she is already part. For this, she needs to be able to see Life happening around her. This Child needs freedom to move and experiment in her surroundings. Watching leads to imitating, and if the environment itself is an invitation to the Child, she must similarly be given the ability to act out her calling.

In then carrying out these acts psychological patterns of behavior will emerge, shifting with and guiding the Child throughout her Formation and lifelong Being. So she follows the direction of her Tendencies, and is led to certain experiences that will enable her construction as a Being of Reason.

ROLE OF ADULT

The Adult must be sure to ensure an environment that can foster the conditions to best allow the Child’s potential to develop. He needs to give her exposure to Life around her. He needs to give to the Child as much sensory input as possible to provide her experience from which she can build her cognition. Things to manipulate, to look at, to hear, to feel. But these things, this environment, must be ordered. Lack of order gives the Child nothing on which to build her foundations for reason. From an ordered environment, the Child can make distinctions, and it is distinctions that provide fodder for the Child’s drive toward Classification.

The Adult must also take care to realize that the Child will absorb anything and everything in her environment. This includes the mannerisms and attitudes of the Adult himself. The Adult must provide for the Child a good example which she can imitate. He must give her clear keys that will aid her in her attempts to understand the world. The Child does want to take part, to share, and the Adult must provide for that.

Limitations

For a true understanding of the world and her place, the Child must know her limitations. Limitations will delineate the Child’s world, and these boundaries will help her to orientate herself within it. The Adult must set limitations in place for the benefit of the community, and to teach behavior. The Child is striving to adapt to society, and so these boundaries are welcome to her Sense of Orientation within it.

CODA

Above all, the Child must be given her freedom. Freedom with understanding of her developmental Planes. The lessons given to her will encourage that freedom by giving her the opportunity to hone the tools she needs for life. The Adult will indeed be able to “help her help herself.”

FIRST PLANE OF DEVELOPMENT,
SECOND SUBPLANE: 3-6

By the end of the First Subplane, the Child has undergone a great transformation. With her sensorial exploration, she has laid the foundations for her lifelong understanding of the world. Coordinated movement gives her a wider field from which she can draw experience, and she has begun to use language to extend into a spiritual direction of exploration.

The Second Subplane acts as a period of crystallization for the First, here the Child perfects the modes of exploration she developed in her infancy. Her Prepared Environment, therefore, should allow a continuing construction of Self and Individuality. For this, the Child needs to be provided with a distinct set of “keys” with which to unlock her potential. It is a world for the First Plane Child of qualities, facts embodied in the objects around her. The keys she needs are materials and experiences that will isolate these qualities for her classification and understanding—the qualities of the senses: color, scale, form, taste, smell, sound, pitch, texture as well as the qualities of the community: language, number, culture, behavior.

PREPARED ENVIRONMENT

The first environment the Child explores is the home, and the bulk of her formative 0-3 years will have been spent here. When she comes into a 3-6 classroom, then, many of the activities and classifications will be familiar to her from those first years. But many also will be new, and the preparation of the environment must be always kept in mind for the positive conveyance of these isolated qualities, both old and new.

The environment must from the first be a place of beauty. Beauty will call to the Child to want to interact, and it will also provoke a feeling of proud ownership and responsibility in her surroundings. This beauty should be a simple beauty, one created by order and cleanliness. There should be pictures on the wall—pictures that are changed from time to time to inspire continued interest—but there should be no over-abundance of decorations that will distract from the materials and clutter the environment. Clutter of any kind, in fact, should be avoided.

Furnishings should be strictly limited to what is needed in the community, and any tables and chairs or other furniture should be of the correct size and proportion to the children. These should be light as well as proportioned, so the children can take ownership of the classroom and move the furniture as they see fit. But always the environment must be kept clear enough for movement within it to be possible so that the Child can perfect her coordination and control at liberty.

Everything must be purposefully placed in the environment so the Child can do things for and by herself, for at this Plane the Child exists as, and necessarily must work for, her own Individual. Lessons, therefore, will be primarily to individual children.

Order

The young Child needs everything together in order. This will aid in her task of classifying the things she discovers in her world according to the Mathematical Mind and her Human Tendency for Order. With this opportunity, the Child will develop her potential; but if these things are not kept in mind, obstacles will be created against the Child’s growth.

PRIMARY FIELDS OF EXPLORATION

In order to interact with her environment, the Child must essentially develop an understanding of the society around her. This includes not only those tools she need for her own orientation and progression, but also those expectations society has of its members.

Sensorial Materials

Of primary importance to the contributory functioning of the Child is her ability to gather and order her own impressions of the world around her. This is why Mankind is endowed the Human Tendencies: to push her along this track.

To encourage this and aid in the Child’s efforts, a group of materials should be presented and left available for the Child’s free interaction that will provide the keys for which she has been searching in her quest to unlock the qualities of her senses. These are the Sensorial Materials, used to isolate impressions of each of the Human Senses in order to give the Child a tool for unlocking her world. The materials embody the very qualities of the World itself, they are “materialized abstractions” of the its essences.

The Child is, by design, a sensorial explorer. Indeed, there is no way otherwise for the Child to relate to her surroundings. With the isolation provided by these materials, the Child’s mind can focus. The material is not to give impressions, but to help the Child classify them. Order and classification lay the foundations of the intellect.

With repetition in the use of these Sensorial Materials, the Child is able to form abstractions of the impressions themselves. Then, matching these abstractions to the environment around her, the Child is able to create a connection between the impressions she formed from her work with the materials and the World itself. These abstractions, unlike the materials themselves, will then be with the Child throughout life, able to be taken with her anywhere she would need them for understanding any known or unknown surroundings.

The language of these Sensorial Materials, the nomenclature she receives, finalizes the Child’s key to classification. The intellect needs language to solidify an idea in the Mind and most effectively classify it. It is also a test for the Child to be able to recall from memory an explicit classification—now given a quantifiable handle—in relationship to any new impressions she takes from the outside world.

Practical Life

Because the Child is brought into the world with little instinct other than the underlying need to survive, and because she is weak and underdeveloped, she must adapt to the society in which she finds herself. She begins her work with observation, and then develops a classification system in order to understand her place. But still she longs to contribute to society, interact with it. To this end, she begins to imitate those around her. Their sounds, their reactions, their expressions, their movements and their actions.

With this in mind, it is important to provide the Child with the opportunity to perform those tasks she sees around her daily. The Child is basing herself on the real life around her in order that she will be able to fit into the Real Life into which she was born, so the Child will naturally need to construct herself using these real life activities themselves. Sweeping, setting the table, washing the dishes, tying a bow, cleaning laundry, etc.

The Adult can use these activities and points of their interest to challenge the Child. He will have the responsibility of presenting these activities for the Child’s use, but it will be the Child’s responsibility to choose them. They will be culturally appropriate—that is to say that the Child will have been exposed to them as common and familiar. For this reason, the Child will be drawn to them, eager to participate in the same activities she witnesses the members of her society performing.

The materials, however, will be designed to her size and proportion, allowing her to undertake these challenges with as many controllable obstacles as possible removed from the path of her determination. At the same time, these Practical Life activities will require the Child’s movement, and as she practices these specific tasks, so will she be developing her coordination and control.

Grace & Courtesy

All of these exercises have an end to them that the Child, through the initiative of her Tendencies for Exactness, Control of Error, Repetition and Work will develop strong faculties for discernment and self-discipline. Aiding specifically in this goal are the lessons in Grace & Courtesy.

The Grace & Courtesy lessons are the Child’s orientation to Life, in particular the Manners of Society. They teach the Child to take part in a more responsible way, and give her security through knowledge of what she needs to do in order to conform with the Norms of Society. Because these customs are local and passed down from generation to generation, this is the first opportunity for the Child to make contact with the history of her Culture.

Will

It is the in this Second Subplane that the Will begins to develop. No longer merely a passive acceptor of Life’s impressions, increasingly an actor, the Child of this age begins to assert her own choices. She has discovered that she has the power to reject, if she desires, a compulsion. The activities of Grace & Courtesy are particularly suited for addressing this, giving the Child at once an education in proper action and experience with its value. These are the preliminary lessons that will be given to the Child toward making proper decisions.

Language

But the Child has all of her Human Tendencies determining her path, not just the Tendencies for Exactness, Control of Error, Repetition and Work that have compelled her along. Just as with those, the Human Tendencies for Exploration, Orientation and Order are not taught, but inherent. It is from these that the Child begins to understand her world, and one of the most compelling things in the environment of the Child is the use of Language. She is fascinated by it—what it’s for, how it’s used, how it’s made.

She explores Language by listening, and begins to be able to see that it is made of distinct sounds. These she attempts to copy, and the imitation process continues until the Child has begun to control the skill. She develops a vocabulary, often uniquely her own until she can better master her communication skills, and later works out grammar and sentence structure. The important thing is that she begins to understand and communicate.

The 3-6 Child must necessarily explore Language, it being the field by which Man explores his Spiritual Life. It is a way to express feeling and emotion—the workings of the spirit. Language allows the Child to relate her thoughts to the world, and it becomes the strongest tool she has. It is also through language that culture is passed down and built upon, for what is society but the organized cooperation of Man?

There are four discoveries essential to the Child’s increasing understanding and usage of Language:

1. That there are more words than those the Child knows, and an enrichment of vocabulary will facilitate communication
2. That each word has a particular function in a sentence, and that the order in which these words appear is important to the meaning of a sentence
3. Language can be made visible
4. Visible Language—written Language—can be re-interpreted and understood for its meaning

Writing & Reading

For the Child, though fascinated by the written communication she sees, writing will come before reading. Writing follows easily for the Child who has begun to understand Letters as tools that can be used to express the thoughts that are in her head. Even before she has developed the motor control to hold a pencil and form letters of her own, the Child is able to shift pre-made letters into an order that records her thoughts. These she will spell phonetically, but still the words are being made.

Conversely, reading is a greater skill that requires the Child to recreate from the letters and words laid down a thought that is not already in her head. This is harder for the Child, even so much so that she may not be able to re-read a word she herself once wrote. If a thought is not already—or not still—in the Young Child’s head, the idea is harder to come by.

When the Child has written something, she should be encouraged to illustrate her idea and decorate the text so that she will be best able to fully express her ideas.

Prepared Environment

Education at this Subplane must be encouraged in an environment, then, that will provide a saturation of input from which all facets of Language can be discovered. She must be read to and spoken to clearly. Full sentences must be used in order that she can repeatedly pick the pieces apart for classification. Correct language must also at all times be used.

Ultimately, Language and its usage that the Child hears should serve as a consistent example from which she can draw imitation, respect due to the fact that she is trying to understand Language as a means for effective communication. It would be a deterrent to her, for instance, were the Adult to adopt the Child’s early attempts as replacements for the word or correct sentence structure itself. A Child who says “ohp-uh-nee-no” instead of “oatmeal,” for instance, is doing her best to form what she hears; if the others in her environment repeat the “cute” word back to her instead of saying it correctly, her chances of correcting herself—as she wants to do—are falsely limited.

Mathematics

Just as it was for the Child in her development of Language, Mathematics is a concept that is not taught. Math is inherent in human beings just as it is inherent in Nature. Accordingly, Human Beings have been endowed with a Mathematical Mind perfectly suited for the discovery and conceptualization of the facts of mathematics that order the very Universe. In fact, it is because it is intrinsic in Nature that Man is so readily aware of Math, and the Mathematical Mind will provide guidance from the moment of birth to the time of death.

Put into contact with the world, the Child begins her understanding of Math by finding the patterns in everything. She notices numbers of things and how those numbers change. She begins to classify geometric form. She becomes aware of symmetry and sequence. In her environment, the Child is surrounded by Mathematics.

Math Facts

Mathematics is a specialized language of symbols, and basic familiarity with it is an expectation of Society. But it is a simple language for which the logical intelligence—the Mathematical Mind that is common to Humanity—is distinctly suited. There is very little for the Child to learn: the numbers 1-9 and the place holder 0; the simple, tens and hundreds families; and the units, thousands and millions hierarchies. From this base, all of mathematics unfolds.

The Child is also expected to be able to manipulate these facts in four basic ways. There are two ways to put numbers together—addition and multiplication—and there are two ways to separate them—subtraction and division.

Materials

The materials designed to aid the Child in her exploration of Mathematics are tools for her use that isolate the Mathematical Concepts individually: number, relationship and manipulation. Specifically, the Montessori materials isolate the base number—ten—of our mathematical system. The relationship of one to ten is seen throughout the materials’ designs, in form, quantity and represented in color.

By repetition in her use of these concrete materials, the Child will be exposed to each idea in such a way that an abstraction can form. These materials should be beautiful and calling to the child, but must always remain mathematically precise and indicative of only that concept they are addressing.

ROLE OF THE ADULT

The Adult must ensure that the Child’s foundation is as firm and solid as it possibly can be. The formation and abilities of the Child’s mind will change between the First Plane and the Second, and the Adult must follow the Child as she prepares to make this progression. With the guidance of the Adult leading her toward the next presentation or material for which she is ready, the Adult being aided in this task by his observations of the Child’s individual developmental progress, the Child will be on her way to developing a Reasoning Mind.

But this is the Child’s work, the development of herself, and the Adult must therefore be aware of the Child’s distinct need for liberty in this task, while at the same time continually mindful it never runs to license. It is the inner discipline of the Child herself that is of use for optimal development, not the pre-conceived notions of the Adult. He must therefore know how to observe the Child to be able to recognize what she needs at that particular moment, recognizing whether that means he should become active or passive in her education. He must become marked by humility, and must abolish all anger and pride from his constitution.

Following the Child in this way, the Adult must allow her to carry out sensorial, factual explorations of the World—she must, as always, be allowed to make her choices as to the materials with which she wants to work. These materials must therefore be presented in such a way that she has access to them for use without needing to solicit explicit consent or aid from the Adult. The Child’s Human Tendencies are the inner guidelines that will enable her to make the decisions of what best to take from the environment, and when.

This gives the Child the chance to choose and learn good choices, which will help her develop inner discipline and will. Freedom, at the same time, will be engendered, and because she will be in an classroom that several other people, the Child will be learning to function as a member of Society.

Sensitive Periods

For the Adult, a recognition of the Sensitive Periods and their importance is vital. The Child is passing rapidly through her periods of absorption, and there are specific windows of development during which the acquisition of concepts or abilities is ideal.

Sensitive Periods by Age

The Sensitive Period for its respective developmental skill being limited, the Adult should be aware of the Child’s optimal time to progress. At the beginning of the 3-6 Subplane, all the Sensitive periods are intact, but two of the four have passed by the end of the first year, and only only will guide the Child throughout the entire phase.

Recognition of these Sensitive Periods, then, will be an astute guide for the Adult in knowing which lessons a child is ready for, and which should be prioritized while there is still time for their absorption.

CODA

The Child, new to this world into which she is trying to find her place, cannot help but to want to know. She is an explorer from the first, and the only change that has taken place between the First and Second Subplanes is that now her explorations are being made on an ever wider field of understanding. As an Individual, the Child is becoming aware that she is a member of Society, and so she is learning a “responsibility to the collective order.”

The 3-6 year old Child has an Absorbent Mind that Functions through the Human Tendencies, and if her needs are met the end process of this Mind is a unique Individual. At the far end of this developmental Plane the Child will be ready to take her place in the Second Plane of Development.