The other day, as I was going through my notes, I stumbled upon something I'd written down while at Kouryou-chan's school for a parent-teacher event: Maria Montessori's "Stages of Child Development." Montessori identified these stages as "absorbative", "social", "moral" and "communal," and so forth, and basically laid them down on a timeline of six-year periods with substages and so forth.
By coincidence, I had recently read an article by a hospice physician who was basically debunking Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. He said that the whole "five stages" think was bunk and a patient's reaction to the news of impending death was as varied as it was individual. Some of the relatives with whom he had dealt could not understand why their grandfather hadn't reached the "acceptance" stage after being hospiced for eight weeks, and he was furious at Kubler-Ross for implying that this otherwise dignified man was somehow "immature" for refusing to accept his eventual death peacefully.
The writer believed that what Kubler-Ross had done was hit upon a forumla that was sufficient to mentally strait-jacaket a sufficient number of people such that people had come to accept it as a universal truth. And I think Montessori did the same thing: Create a framework into which enough children can fit, even if sometimes awkwardly, that those who don't can be sent elsewhere. Montessori herself said that observation and not the calendar determines when a child moves from the absorbative stage to the social stage, but even then I'm not convinced that "socializing" is the dominant characteristic of a child in the early years of traditional schooling.
By coincidence, I had recently read an article by a hospice physician who was basically debunking Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. He said that the whole "five stages" think was bunk and a patient's reaction to the news of impending death was as varied as it was individual. Some of the relatives with whom he had dealt could not understand why their grandfather hadn't reached the "acceptance" stage after being hospiced for eight weeks, and he was furious at Kubler-Ross for implying that this otherwise dignified man was somehow "immature" for refusing to accept his eventual death peacefully.
The writer believed that what Kubler-Ross had done was hit upon a forumla that was sufficient to mentally strait-jacaket a sufficient number of people such that people had come to accept it as a universal truth. And I think Montessori did the same thing: Create a framework into which enough children can fit, even if sometimes awkwardly, that those who don't can be sent elsewhere. Montessori herself said that observation and not the calendar determines when a child moves from the absorbative stage to the social stage, but even then I'm not convinced that "socializing" is the dominant characteristic of a child in the early years of traditional schooling.
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