Montessori and Embodied Education

Abstract

Montessori education has been around for over 100 years; however, it still has much to contribute to a new vision of twenty-first-century education that supports well-rounded human development in democratic societies. A main theme in this chapter is that emerging interdisciplinary thought on the embodied mind has provided a new framework for understanding Maria Montessori’s contributions to education. Montessori philosophy, I believe, offers an alternative approach that might be called embodied education: education in tune with the intimate connection of the body and the mind. Such coordination of body and mind is important for education because it facilitates student experiences of deep engagement and interest that have been referred to as flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Flow-like experiences, in turn, have been associated with intrinsically motivated learning and talent development (see Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde and Whalen, 1997).