This document discusses the impact of digital technology on Montessori education. It notes that several early technology pioneers supported Dr. Montessori's methods. While technology has advanced greatly since her time, there is little research on how it affects learning. Some findings suggest digital devices capture children's attention but not necessarily their engagement. The document calls for more observation of how children interact with technology to understand its role in development and whether it could enhance Montessori education.

1. Montessori in the Digital Age
A. Prem Kumar
Dr. Montessori was well respected by the leading scientists and technologists of her age,
most of whom defined the previous century. One of her advocates was none other than
Thomas Edison, probably the most celebrated technologist and entrepreneur. Alexander
Graham Bell and his wife Mabel founded the Montessori Educational Association at their
Washington, DC, home in 1913. And later, Albert Einstein was a supporter of Dr. Montessori
and worked to bring her methods to the US in the 1950s. Evidently she was no stranger to
technology given that at the age of thirteen she had joined an all-boys technical school to
prepare for engineering, before she went on to become Italy's first dottoressa.
Technology today, 60 years since her death, has changed manifold impacting human culture
and thinking profoundly. The computer in your pocket, the smartphone, has more memory
& processing power than the largest of computers at her time. And we live in a time where
the number of mobile phones outnumbers the number of toilets in India as per a UN report,
a grave situation in itself. The world lies at the dawn of an era where computers will soon
outnumber people on the planet; and they will all be connected to the Internet. Digital
technology has not only augmented our cognitive capabilities it has also begun impinging
upon our social capabilities too. The rise of social media has had such a fast impact on the
world that many are still unraveling how it got so disruptive so quickly across the various
spheres of human activities and interests ranging from consumption to creation to
collaboration to revolution. Thanks to the advances in science and technology, jobs that
were unheard of even a decade ago are in high demand today. Can we even imagine, let
alone anticipate, what jobs will the children of today prepare themselves for? Will my son
actually grow up to be an astronaut chef that he dreams of now? Space tourism is definitely
on the raise, so maybe he will be a gourmet chef on a space cruise ship? The dream job is
actually an original idea of my son that probably reflects on the imaginative mind of a child
of seven.
With the digital technology becoming so ubiquitous there is no way that an urban infant can
escape it; many probably are raised on lullabies played on the mobiles. Toddlers already are

2. trying to swipe or pinch the images on magazines expecting them to either change or zoom
out. While the frequency range of a mobile phone is so limited and thus robbing the infant
of a richer range of sounds, the touch screens are devoid of any tactile feedback which is so
necessary for the development of the toddler who is learning the most through her sense of
touch. And yet, these same digital technologies hold the promise of delivering education to
the length and breadth of the nation at minimal costs. Paucity of teachers can be overcome
through videoconferencing or recorded videos of lectures. In fact, "massively open online
courses" (MOOCs) are quite the flavour of the day in the higher education circles, with
hundreds of thousands of registered students and billions of views of uploaded video
content.
Between the digital devices that exist in the child's first environment, the potential they
hold to help a child learn and the "unbundling" effects of the Internet that provides an
alternative to the tutor on premises, the changes that are apparent in imparting education
are not so clear where it comes to actual learning. There is no empirical study on the impact
of digital technology on learning, but the few research results that are emerging are not
encouraging. While the smartphones and tablet PCs can draw the attention of the children
keeping their attention is increasingly difficult, resulting in easily distracted children.
Children tend to become passive recipients of content, rather than moulders of their
experiences by manipulating these devices. To counter the passivity by teaching them how
to manipulate, can we introduce them to tools like Gcompris for children below six years
and Scratch, developed by MIT, for children older than six, by which they can control how
the computer behaves & responds to their commands?
Pew Research Center has recently found by surveying 2000 teachers across the USA, that
while children have better access to information for their research purposes, there is not
much improvement in their research skills as such. One teacher said, “They don’t know how
to filter out bad information, and they are so used to getting information quickly that when
they can’t find what they are looking for immediately, they quit.” In fact critical
consumption of information is a skill that even adults find difficult. The amount of
information available online is huge, and they are made easily & quickly accessible thanks to
the search engines, however not all that is on the web can be trusted. As Howard Rheingold
says in his new book, "Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter?”

3. "Part of the process of effectively harnessing the power of search involves the metacognitive
skill of regarding all digital information with a skeptical eye, searching for clues, and using
social networks and online tools to test the validity of online “knowledge” found or sent to
us. Such tools might be thought of as mind-extending lenses, bringing into focus the most
trustworthy information while blurring the questionable information into the background."
Dr. Montessori was of the opinion that “when dealing with children there is greater need for
observing than of probing.” Do we need to be bold enough to consider providing mobiles
and tablet PCs, probably as exercises of practical life, so that we can observe children with
these technologies? Like how the One Laptop Per Child has attempted by giving their
specially designed laptops to children in a remote village in Africa and learnt that children
could learn alphabets on their own within a short time and were even able to change
settings on the laptop so that they could activate the camera in it, having figured it out all by
themselves. Or do we wait till there is greater penetration of digital technologies, when it is
inarguably and irrevocably accepted as an item of human culture? Probably this requires a
plane based evaluation rather than a single yes or no for children of all planes of
development?
There definitely are more questions than answers at this stage. And thus this definitely calls
for observation by Montessori adults and the sharing of these observations for us to even
discern any impact of these digital technologies on child development and learning.
Probably we can use these digital technologies ourselves too to collaborate and share so
that we not only learn about the children but also the technology to shape our own
Montessori materials for a digital age if need be?
This text is shared under a creative commons license. CC:BY-NC-SA
This text was submitted as a draft for an article in the magazine “Follow The Child” from Indian Montessori Center
Publication. An edited form was subsequently published in their January 6, 2013 issue.