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elfsThe 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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Date: 2006-05-31 04:57 pm (UTC)Montessori is a framework into which the kids they want to handle fit. The fact that it happens to *work* for Kouryou-chan is more or less by design...
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Date: 2006-05-31 04:59 pm (UTC)And, seems very gender biased, frankly. Boys tend to come to that much later, and in rather different forms.
Oh wait..that's right...boys are developmentally slower than girls.
What a crock.
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Date: 2006-05-31 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-31 06:07 pm (UTC)A few thoughts
Date: 2006-05-31 08:43 pm (UTC)On stages, of grief, development, or whatever. I think the guidelines, or definitions of the stages that these folks have come up with are basically true. What most people fail to recognize, though, is that these stages take differing amounts of time for each individual; yes most will take a similar amount of time for one stage, but there are still variants. Also, what a stage looks like from one person to another will vary as well.
As to childhood socializing I have very personal experience there. Most of my first 6-8 years was spent in hospitals (and a few years after kinda hermiting), therefore my early social training consisted of learning how to be a good girl and pleasing authority figures, and rejecting my natural urges to deny people the right to mess with my body. Meanwhile I missed out on learning to get along with my peer group; missed out on how to make friends; missed out on learning all those millions of little body language and social cue things that most people take for granted. It's in those early years that you learn those things, which is why children keep forming and reforming social groups. It's been extremely difficult for me to learn these things when starting from age 10-ish and I still make mistakes these days about social things that people would expect me to just know. So yah, whether it follows a proscribed pattern or not, those early years are extremely important for a child to learn how to function in basic society.
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Date: 2006-06-02 12:26 am (UTC)Unfortunately, most of the time those caveats get lost in the dust when a theory reaches popular attention, so you get "Hey, there's this research that shows everybody goes through these 5 stages!" and a one-page handout showing the stages in progression, 1-2-3. So I think the problem is more in how it is applied, something the theorist has little control over, than in the theory itself.
Maslow too
Date: 2006-06-03 05:33 pm (UTC)But this is nonsense, of course, because humans can think and act on these "higher" needs even while they are cold, wet, and hungry.
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