Maria Montessori on Creativity

 “A sensitive soul, an eye that sees and a hand that obeys’.

Dr Maria Montessori believed that to understand the child's tendencies, with the purpose of education in mind, we must see man in correlation with his surrounding environment and how his adaptation to it is created. She found that the development of children’s creativity unfolds with the child's cognitive development, from sensori-motor intelligence to intuitive thought, to concrete operations, and finally to formal operations.

The development of creativity is then a spontaneous process that occurs as the child's intelligence unfolds through his interaction with a prepared environment, evolving through a long process of cognitive development where the absorption of reality is the starting point. Art education in a Montessori classroom involves the understanding that the child’s imagination and creativity is an inborn power that develops along with his mental capacities and is based on his interactions with the environment.

The environment must have order, harmony and beauty that is based on reality so the child can develop a realistic and ordered perception of its own life. This environment encourages children to select creative endeavors and processes necessary for the total development – intellectual, artistic, emotional, and physical. The capability to select these processes requires attention and concentration, autonomy and independence, and openness to truth and reality.

In order to develop creativity the child needs freedom to choose his activities, have enough time to problem solve and form ideas, find relevant subjects available, and opportunity to share his discoveries and accomplishments. Judgment and authority inhibit the creative impulse.

Dr. Montessori found that the making of the personality, the construction of the child's self is the most significant of the creative endeavors. The environment is the font of recourses that sparks the creative process. In the Montessori classroom the child's integration is an assimilation of self through the mastery of the environment with full application of the mind, the eye and the hand.