The Viewpoint of Compensation Education in Montessori's Thoughts on Education : The Relation of Physique, Environment and the Intellectual Level

Abstract

While studying medicine in the 1890's, Maria Montessori studied also an intellectual handicapped child's medical treatment education and anthropology, which led to a deeper recognition of the importance of education. Through this process, she investigated the pupils at the elementary school in Rome and published two papers in 1904. Although they were the investigations conducted as pedagogical anthropology research, they contained many important elements concerning the composition of her thoughts on education. However they have been mostly over looked until now. The purpose of this paper is to show clearly how she considered the relationship between physique, environment and education and how she developed these viewpoints in her future research. As a result, it becomes clear as follows. First, she was interested in the internal factor and investigated it from the view of anthropology regarding the relationship between a child's physique and their intellectual levels. However, through advancing this positive investigation, she noticed the importance of the environment and gradually became interested also in external factors. And she found that the physique could be influenced by external factors. Moreover, she revealed the disadvantages in the school of the child of a lower layer by analysis of a family's conditions and criticized the fact that education extended such a gap. And she recognized it was necessary to compensate for this disadvantage or gap through education. Considering the problems caused by a disadvantaged family's condition, she showed in future research the contents of the fundamental capability which should be acquired before entering an elementary school.