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  Cosmic Education
       By Melinda Miller. 2006
Maria Montessori said that to the young child we must give keys to the world and the possibility to explore its sights, sounds, smells, textures and tastes through his own activity. The child of six comes, then, to the elementary class having explored through his senses the many qualities he finds in his environment. Having had the advantage of the Children's House, he should also know how to read and write, add and subtract, multiply and divide. He should know about units, tens, hundreds and thousands. His movements should be under the command of his will, and he should be an individual adapted to his society. The child's psychological characteristics are changing, and the absorbent mind is giving way to the reasoning mind. The child of the second plane of development is no longer content to be a sensorial explorer. Able to distinguish between fact and fantasy, he is ready to use his imagination and intellect for an immensity of work.
Whilst the young child was given the world, Dr. Montessori saw the need to give the universe to the child of the second plane. In To Educate the Human Potential she says, ‘Since it has been seen to be necessary to give so much to the child, let us give him a vision of the whole universe. The universe is an imposing reality and an answer to all questions. We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are part of the universe and are connected with each other to form one whole unity. This idea helps the mind of the child to become fixed, to stop wandering in an aimless quest for knowledge. He is satisfied, having found the universal centre of himself with all things.' (Clio, p.5-6)
‘Cosmic Education', as Maria Montessori's plan for the education of the 6-12 year old is known, certainly builds on what the child has done in the Children's House, but it is not a continuation of it. Therefore, it is important that, in the early days of a child's entry into the elementary class, he see that his experience in this class is going to be very different. Within the first days or weeks in this new class, then, the child should hear the first Great Lesson, or Cosmic Tale.
The story of ‘God With No Hands', a dramatic tale appealing to the child's imagination and reasoning mind through the use of impressionistic charts and experiments, tells of the creation of the universe and should create in the child a sense of admiration and wonder. It gives a sense of the magnitude of our universe and seeks to illustrate some of the laws of nature that worked to form the earth. For example, rocks, water, and air (solids, liquids, and gases) each obey certain laws of nature today in the same way they did millions of years ago. The particles of solids cling together very strongly and press downward, but the particles of water do not hold together so firmly. They roll over one another, moving sideways and downwards to fill every crack and crevice, while gases don't need to cling together at all and can move in all directions. This story opens the door to many avenues of further exploration and experimentation and starts the children on their quest for information and knowledge.

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The second Great Lesson has to do with ‘ The Coming of Life .' The children have seen in ‘God With No Hands' how the earth has been formed. Now they are presented with the progression of life that populates that earth. The appearance of unicellular life came almost as an answer to some confusion and chaos on earth to help clean the seas of the salts that were polluting it, and while cleaning the seas these bits of jelly built shells to protect themselves. Just as the rocks, water and air had laws of nature to obey, so did the first life. They were to eat, grow and create others like themselves. These unicellular animals had to do all the work to live, but eventually they seemed to decide to join together, and in time, some cells in these multicellular animals performed one task and other cells other jobs. The Timeline of Life is introduced, showing the continuation of the progression of life – sponges, sea anemones, trilobites, sea lilies. Finally, life came out onto the land and became plants. About this time, something else happened. An animal developed with a rod inside to support it. Fish were the beginning of animals with backbones.
Eventually, some of the land rose up, closing off some of the seas. If there was little rain and the water was drying up, what were the animals to do? Some developed a sac lined with moisture inside their bodies that allowed them to breathe outside water, and amphibians, able to live partly in water and partly on land, came into being. Here too came something else – the first voice! Imagine how quiet the earth must have been with just sounds such as the pounding of the seas and the falling of the rains. Now the silence was broken with the voice of the frog!
The timeline is thus unrolled slowly to reveal each new development in the progression of life – reptiles, birds and mammals – each adapting to changes in the earth and its climates. This is not the end of the story, though. At the end of a very cold period, a new type of being appeared. It had no heavy fur like the other animals to keep it warm, nor did it have huge teeth and big claws with which to fight to defend itself. This creature, though, had a larger brain with the power to think and to imagine. This was the human being. It is humbling to see that on this timeline, which is several metres long, only a few centimetres represent the relative amount of time human beings have existed.
The third Great Lesson is ‘ The Coming of the Human Being ,' which tells the children about the great civilizations and the things people have done to become the human beings of today. We have been given two special gifts. One is the intellect, the power to reason, to think, to know and to understand. The other is love, the power of the will to choose the good of others and thus to serve. Someone, using the hand as well as the brain, has invented everything we have today. We may not know the name of each person who invented something, but that doesn't make their inventions any less important. Everyone has a role in society, and no contribution is insignificant. In To Educate the Human Potential , Dr. Montessori says of the child, ‘…he begins to ask: What am I? What is the task of man in this wonderful universe? Do we merely live here for ourselves, or is there something more for us to do?' (Clio, p.6) It is important that the child see in this great drama of the human being that we are not isolated from other creations of the universe but are a part of it and have a significant role to play.
With the coming of human beings we move on to the other two Great Lessons, the stories of the language of communication and of the language of invention. These achievements were conceived from the gifts human beings were given and are at the centre of Cosmic Education. The fourth Great Lesson is called ‘ The Story of Communication in Signs .' It tells of the quests of human beings to communicate with people who were not near them or to keep records and especially of how the Phoenicians gave us the gift of letters. Later, the Greeks took the letters of the Phoenicians and changed their shapes a little bit, and later still, the Romans changed the Greek letters a bit. It was the busy Phoenician sea merchants, though, who thought to use ‘sound pictures' to list what they had sold, and to them we owe a debt of gratitude.
The fifth Great Lesson is ‘ The Story of Numbers ,' the language of invention. The story introduces a few numeral systems, including those of the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, as well as showing the changes over time in how we write the numbers we use. This is another intellectual achievement of the human being, and with these numerals, we have a means for recording a formula, for keeping time or calendars, for cooking or for doing anything that involves mathematics.
These Great Lessons must be given to each child who is new to the class, but the older children also enjoy hearing them again, and their further exploration with each hearing will take them on different or deeper paths of exploration. We must give the children time to ponder, reflect and think about what they have heard in these tales. Maria Montessori said, ‘The secret of good teaching is to regard the child's intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination.' ( To Educate the Human Potential , Clio, p. 11) When we give the Great Lessons to the children, we are beginning the sowing of seeds. This begins with the six year old and continues until the child is twelve. Some of these seeds may sprout during the child's six years in the elementary class, and some may not germinate until the third plane of development, but they form a good foundation for the adolescent, as well.
Margaret Stephenson, who trained many elementary teachers in the United States , suggested: What is geography but the story of the earth and its coming into being through the following of laws given to the substances which formed it? What is biology but the coming of life to the earth to preserve the harmony of the world and to furnish it with beauty, colour, form, scent and variety? What is history but the story of human beings who came to fulfill the cosmic plan set in motion at the time of the creation of the universe and without whom that plan could never have been completed? What is language but one of the stories human beings have written themselves, the achievement of the discipline and power residing in the mind of man to have ideas and communicate them to others? What is mathematics but another language created by man to have a way, through formulas, some arithmetic, some geometrical and some algebraic, to transmit his inventions? What is science but an invention of man to protect his material territory, an economy he developed as a way to satisfy his physical needs? What is music but another language to set beside the language of letters that has led to song, symphony, opera, blues, jazz and dance? What is art but still another language, a creation in paint, sculpture, gold, silver and precious stones and an expression of the spirit of man?
It is probably worth noting that The Illustrated Oxford Dictionary defines ‘cosmos' as ‘the universe, esp. as a well-ordered whole [from Greek kosmos ‘order, world'].' It is Cosmic Education that will bring order to the six to twelve year old child's insatiable quest for knowledge.