Pedagogical Anthropology by Maria Montessori (new books to read .TXT) 📖

with immoral tendencies, destructive, violent, incorrigible; one would say that these were clear cases of predisposition to crime; all at once a genuine epileptic attack occurs, followed by other repeated attacks; the criminal tendencies disappear; the patient is simply an epileptic. In these cases, we have successive forms of epileptic equivalence. In the majority of cases, therefore, the proper course would be to treat the patient for epilepsy, as being the cause of the apparent "evil tendencies of mind." And hence one notable side of the great problem of the moral education of juvenile criminals is transformed fundamentally into this other problem: "Can epilepsy be treated and cured?"

Up to the present, the treatment of epilepsy is a problem. While therapeutics prescribe bromides and warm baths, pedagogy is to-day following a very different course with a combined treatment of hygiene and education. Benedickt, and following him, the principal authorities among medical specialists, are at present condemning the use of depressing bromides, which hide the attacks as an anesthetic hides pain, but do not cure them. The cure, says Benedickt, depends upon hygienic life in the open air in order to absorb the poisons, and upon graded work, provided, however, that the malady is still recent and has not assumed a chronic form. Two principles of much importance: the malady must be of recent occurrence! Consequently, it is only in the period of childhood that we can attempt the treatment of the great majority of those predisposed to crime, with any hope of effecting a cure! A declaration of tremendous interest for the defense of society. But the treatment must be pedagogic. Accordingly, we have returned to the point of departure. We began by asking: "How are we to educate them"? A course of reasoning led us along this different road, "it is necessary to give them treatment." But the treatment consists in educating them. Well, from all this we can so far extract one unassailable principle; in their education all coercive measures must be absolutely abolished, because nervous and convulsive maladies are most successfully treated with gentleness and quiet; it is evident that all emotion, all fear, all nervous exhaustion, all punishment in short, no matter how mild or just it may be, would seem to be prohibited in pedagogic treatment.

Accordingly, it is necessary to approach the question anew; what is needed is to set the nervous system in order, to calm it, to restore its equilibrium. Benedickt says: this is to be achieved through work, rationally measured and graded; hence, manual training, as organised, for example, in the Reformatory of San Michele, constitutes of itself a moral cure; it concurs in readjusting the nervous system by reinforcing it.

However, we must not generalise over such complex questions; if the pathological factor, and more especially epilepsy, constitutes a great centre of biologic causes producing individuals predisposed to crime, we cannot conclude that there is a constant correspondence between epilepsy and criminality. But there is no doubt that among these predisposed we shall almost always find some who are suffering from a taint, or from dystrophy, due to tuberculosis or syphilis; in short, the minus habens, the physiological proletariat.

The benefit wrought by education consists not only in contributing to the real and actual cure, as in the case of epilepsy; but also in the corrective, as well as curative, effect upon the personality. The abnormal mentality which generally accompanies degenerate or epileptic conditions requires special methods of education, which in many cases must absolutely exclude all forms of coercion. Mental hygiene, an abundance of psychic stimulus, partly intellectual (chiefly through objective demonstration) and partly moral (in the form of praise and gentle caressing treatment), are indispensable accompaniments of such education. An abnormal mentality almost always accompanies defects of the mind; from the hypochondriac or the epileptic to the imbecile and the idiot, the abnormal mentality builds itself up from inaccurate perceptions, and hence more or less from illusions; a deficiency of reasoning power or a half delirious condition completes the fatal organisation of a mode of thought which renders such an individual unfitted for his environment. We have seen an example of this in the boy whose clinical history was read in class; his perceptions were inexact, consequently colours, odours, and sounds reached him in a manner somewhat different from our perception of them; his mental world must therefore be differently constructed from ours. Defectives frequently pass by objects without obtaining any impression of them, or else transform what impression they do get into a false idea. Even their sensations of touch and pain are different from the normal. Hence, they do not feel as we do, and are often inaccessible to the anguish of pain which refines human nature by sometimes raising it to the point of heroism. And because we have learned through our own sufferings to understand the meaning of pity, altruism and solidarity, these unhappy beings differ from us even in their relation to society. Their scanty powers of logic lead them to fall openly into errors, which provoke vindictive retaliation on our part that tends in the ultimate analysis to isolate these unfit beings from social intercourse.

To us, their whole conversation is a series of falsehoods, because it does not correspond to what we ourselves see and feel. An understanding between them and us becomes steadily more difficult, in proportion as we continue to perfect ourselves in our individual evolution, while their unhappy state is steadily aggravated through the formidable struggles and persecutions which they meet in an environment to which they are unadaptable. For instance, we saw that one of the boys who has been studied in class, had committed his most reprehensible acts as a result of false logic. "Why do you kill all the pigeons?" "To make them keep still." "Why do you beat your little sister?" "Because she won't work like the others." (The sister in question was only eighteen months old!) Well, he showed in this way that he had learned something from the corrections that he had received. They had punished him so much for being restless, and so much because he did not want to work, that he finally applied his acquired zeal to correcting others in the way that his defective logic dictated. And similarly, after seeing how they weigh objects with a steel-yard—also a form of work—it occurred to him to stick the hook into his little sister, in order to weigh her; and having learned that useful work is paid for in money, which serves to buy the necessities of life, he stole all the money that he could find at home, and gave it to the motormen on the tram-cars, who in his opinion perform the most useful work in the world.

I once had occasion to study a paranoiac patient in the asylum for the criminal insane, who had spent twenty years in prison before his insanity became so pronounced as to cause his removal from one place of restraint to the other. He had killed his betrothed, out of jealousy, so he said, but he narrated the tragic deed with a fullness of detail and a readiness of phrase—his lurking in ambush, the unfortunate girl's approach, her fall under the blows of the cobbler's knife—that proved the cold-blooded calculation with which the crime was committed.

This man was convinced that he possessed such oratorical gifts that if he had pleaded his own case in place of his attorney, the persuasive magic of his eloquence would have resulted in his acquittal. The lawyer had advised him not to speak and the prisoner was sentenced to a term of thirty years. The appeal to the Court of Cassation was denied. The result was that in his desperation at the failure of his defence, and more particularly because he had lost the chance of showing his oratorical powers in public, he conceived the idea that the only way by which he could come into court again, and speak for himself, and force them to acquit him, was to commit another murder. And he actually sprang at his lawyer's throat, armed with a nail, meaning to kill him. Thus we see how paranoiac delirium, and defective reasoning powers, sad evidences of pathological conditions, combined to create the most cynical and repellant of all criminal types.

Accordingly the treatment of the pathological condition, and the education of the mentality in children who are thus predisposed, constitute a great work on behalf of the defence of society.

Well, this is precisely what scientific pedagogy is trying to do, through a rational education of the senses: to correct false perceptions and straighten out the warped and twisted mentality of abnormal children; and little by little, through repetition of the same lessons under different forms, and the establishment of a cooperation of all the senses, the perception of objects tends to approach nearer and nearer to the normal. Meanwhile, hygienic or medical treatment may be used to correct the accompanying physical defects.

Accordingly, we are able to modify an abnormal personality by means of rational medico-pedagogic treatment; and it is by this means alone, and not through destructive coercion, that we may hope to approach the greatly desired goal.

Lastly, it is also necessary, in the etiology of crime, to take into consideration the environment, the bad example, the brutality, the absence of affection, all of which are things which might well pervert the mind of even a normal individual; and when such conditions exist, the removal of the transgressor to a different environment where he may have the benefit of physical, intellectual and moral hygiene, may result in completely transforming him. In these sad cases nothing short of the profoundest love will serve to redeem and even transform into a hero the man who has fallen into evil ways through misfortune.

No one can any longer believe that coercive measures should be added to the cruelty of the environment which oppresses the transgressor. If he has gone astray in the midst of sorrow it will be only through consolation that he can be born again to a new life; if he lost the straight path amid arid wastes, nothing short of a purifying and assuaging spiritual water will enable him to recover his path. As a sign of our humanity let us keep a smile upon our lips and our hearts free of all harshness of offense or defense; our weapons are intelligence and love and it is only by these weapons that we can become conquerors.

But, it may be answered, granted that the education of abnormal persons, and more especially juvenile delinquents, constitutes a complex work in which medicine, a special environment, and the methods of scientific pedagogy contribute harmoniously through diverse ways to the ultimate goal: yet in actual practice how are we to intervene to render docile these rebels whom society itself, with all the forces at its disposal, recognises as dangerous and condemns to isolation? In short, it is argued, a more direct method will be required for their moral education; a clear-cut method to offset that equally direct form consisting of coercion and punishment that are now the consequence of the reprehensible act. Under all the conditions to be considered in regard to the biopathological factors and the social environment, there still remains another element and the most evident of all, namely, the immediate and practical influence exerted directly upon the minds of wayward children. We may say quite truly that beneath the pathological facts and the social injustices, there exists something more profound which, for the sake of simplicity we may call the soul of humanity. Something which responds from soul to soul, which may be aroused from the depths of subconsciousness like a surprise, which may be touched and reveal itself in an outburst of affection previously hidden and unsuspected. Unknown profundities of the spirit, that seem to merge into the eternity of the universe itself and unexpectedly produce new