I have previously written about Cosmic Education and its central role in the Primary Montessori classes (6-12 years).
This time I’d like to hone in on some of the specifics of how we work with the ākonga to develop their understanding of the great themes of Cosmic Education: especially unity, for example that all living creatures share DNA, or that planets were formed by the particles uniting; diversity, for example all the different cultures on the planet or all of the different types of stars out there; and interconnectedness, for example our actions affect the environment.
Were you to take a stroll through the Primary classes at the moment, you may see ākonga engaged in studying the timeline of life, researching and making fossils, laying out the planets on a giant scale, creating accurate models of living creatures, the history of the universe, researching cultures from around the world, history and much more.
All these ‘topics’ come under the banner of Cosmic Education for sure, but it’s not the content alone that makes a learning experience for a Montessori child ‘cosmic’ in nature. Indeed, a mainstream school may cover these same topics, but is unlikely to be doing it in a ‘cosmic’ sense.
Sometimes the topics the ākonga end up doing can seem quite unusual. I once had a student who got obsessed by the lungs and respiratory system of crayfish! Mind you, our Montessori teacher albums cover some fairly specialized territory too: Ordovician extinction; the different theories of how humans acquired language; subjunctive clauses in grammar, to name but a few. These are not exactly the topics you’d normally see in a Primary School. I certainly didn’t get exposed to this stuff at Primary School, did you?
But in Montessori education we are ‘planting the seeds’ for further study at High School and beyond. Beyond this method of ‘seed planting’, is it important for a child to learn these things? In a Montessori Primary class the answer is yes. One of the main points of these seemingly unusual studies is the way they can be used to draw children’s attention to those great themes mentioned above.
To use the example above, learning about the respiration of a crayfish may seem unimportant, but it is a springboard for discussing and researching some big ideas, for example: crustaceans have a fascinating body plan, they are a product of adaptation to their environment, they have other vital functions such as reproduction and nutrition that are equally fascinating, they are part of a bigger story that connects with topics in Geology, plate tectonics, Chemistry, even astronomy. It’s all connected. And that’s the key to Cosmic Education.
This weaving of concepts and themes can happen within all of the various topics we present to the children. Thus we can encourage ākonga to research seemingly obscure topics, and we can cover the regular Primary School curriculum, but with a distinctly Montessori point of difference.
Maria Montessori saw that this approach would help children develop a sense of their own purpose and of their connection with their fellow humans and the environment itself.