Maria Montessori on the Importance of Work for the Adolescent

"...Finally we should like to suggest another institution which might become of great importance, and that is the shop. A shop or store could be established...and here the [students] could easily bring and sell the produce of their...garden and other things that they had made. Eventually they might also collect and bring things made by other people who are poor and know some craft and can produce pretty or useful objects...This would be real social work and would encourage those small village industries that are being lost today through the prevalence of machinery and mass production. This trade could have a special effect in preserving something of a past age when personality could be expressed in the construction of the simplest objects.

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The shop itself could be regarded as a revival of the medieval exchange that was a general meeting place and social center, beautifully decorated and blessed and consecrated by religion, and where buying and selling were conducted with scrupulous honesty. This was also a place where the small tradesman could make those individual bargains that are also the beginnings of acquaintance and the foundation of friendship and social life...Many reminders still exist of the old custom of mixing up trade with friendship and personal contacts. And this custom could be re-established by the young people with their happiness, enthusiasm, and their desire for every kind of experience.

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The shop would also necessitate a genuine study of commerce and exchange, of the art of ascertaining the demand and being ready to meet it, of the strict and rigid rules of bookkeeping. But the thing that is important above everything else is that the adolescent should have a life of activity and variety, and that one occupation should act as "holiday" from another occupation. The shop would be in respect to the studies of economics and politics an educational object..."

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"The essential reform is this: to put the adolescent on the road to achieving economic independence...This "independence" has more educational than practical value; that is to say, it has a closer connection with the psychology of the adolescent than with an eventual actual utility....this would result in a "valorization" of his personality, in making him feel himself capable of succeeding in life by his own efforts and on his own merits, and at the same time it would put him in direct contact with the supreme reality of social life.

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"work for wages" at once suggests a trade and implies technical training and competition. This work should, instead, be an exercise of "utilized virtues," of "super values" and skills acquired beyond the limits of one's own particular specialization, past of future.

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This conception of work implies a general principle that holds the work itself to be of greater importance than the kind of work. All work is noble, the only ignoble thing is to live without working. There is need to realize the value of work in all its forms, whether manual or intellectual, to be called "mate," to have a sympathetic understanding of all forms of activity. Education should therefore include the two forms of work, manual and intellectual, for the same person, and thus make it understood by practical experience that these two kinds complete each other and are equally essential to a civilized existence.

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The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed. It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.

Young people must have enough freedom to allow them to act on individual initiative."

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- Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence