It’s about the senses...

In her 1912 book, The Montessori Method - Scientific Pedagogy Applied to Child Education, physician and educator Maria Montessori wrote about education of the senses and the importance of sensory and motor feedback in learning, warning about, “the arrest of spontaneous movements in the education of children.”

In 1936 psychologist Jean Piaget wrote his book Origin of Intelligence in the Child. In it he posited that all learning is connected with, “the constitution of our nervous system and of our sensory organs”. In this and later works Piaget refers to the first phase of a child’s intellectual development as the sensory motor phase.

In her 1946 book Education in a New World, Montessori wrote, “Education is a natural process carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment.” Montessori was perhaps the first sensory educator. And as such deserves a place in the literature as it pertains to education.

Montessori and Piaget were on to something, and for nearly fifty years the educational world knew it and listened. During this period, schools became happy sunny places where young children enjoyed free movement and were encouraged to socialize with peers.

The dark ages of ‘autism’...

As with any skill set the bell curve prevailed and there was a group of children who demonstrated below average sensory and perceptual development. In 1943 Leo Kanner, noted for being the first child psychiatrist, wrote a paper Autistic Disturbance of Affective Contact in which he shared his observations of children demonstrating traits he referred to as “psychiatric disturbances,” which he called autism. Kanner’s reference to the disorder as behavioral set the tempo for twenty years of a dark age in which the sciences failed to cross the midline of mutual inquiry. While children became more sedentary with more and more families living in cities and rural areas being transformed into the suburbs, more time riding in cars, more working moms, less play time, and televisions making their way into more homes, and the number of children reported to have symptoms of autism was on the rise; Kanner’s child psychiatry plodded on failing to consider the sociology, neurology, and biology of the symptoms of autism.

Getting back to the sense of the senses....

Finally in the mid 1960s, some fifty years after Montessori first wrote about the importance of the senses in education, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made a breakthrough pointing to the sensory systems as the underlying cause of Autism and other developmental disorders, and pointing away from Kanner’s behavioral agenda. In his research Early infantile autism and receptor processes (Arch Gen Psychiatry, 1965) Eric Schopler observed that children diagnosed with autism demonstrate failure of motor receptors that carry sensory signals to the neocortex of normally developing children, turning these signals into information about the self and the environment.

Schopler’s use of empirical research to establish the true, neurological basis of autism and its effective treatment was a breakthrough that opened the door for further inquiry. In three papers published between 1968 and 1970 Edward Ornitz (et al) investigated sensory perception and the vestibular system as a possible critical fault in children with Autism (Perceptual inconstancy in early infantile autism. Journal of Gen Psychiatry 18:76-98, 1968; Autism and schizophrenia. Comprehensive Psychiatry 10:259-274, 1969; Ornitz EM: Vestibular dysfunction in schizophrenia and childhood autism. Comprehensive Psychiatry 11:159-173, 1970).

In his 1973 paper, Childhood Autism—A Review of the Clinical and Experimental Literature. Ornitz forwarded the notion that the motor behaviors of children on the autism spectrum are related to the faulty modulation of sensory input and ocular-motor responses, and are indicative of the autistic child’s attempts to interpret and organize sensations through kinesthetic and sensorimotor feedback. Ornitz concludes that, “It is suggested that a dysfunction of the central connections of the vestibular system with the cerebellum and the brain stem may be responsible for the sensorimotor behavior observed in autistic children and may also have implications for understanding the manner in which autistic children learn.”

In 1972 occupational therapist Jean Ayres released her book Sensory Integration and Learning Disorders, laying out a thorough description of what Schopler, Ornitz, and other psychological researchers had discussed in earlier works. In Ayres second book Sensory Integration and the Child she offered a rationale for her rehabilitative treatment protocol for children suffering from sensory integration dysfunction.

But we need proof...

Despite considerable gains in individual children coming from Ayres' work, no evidence has come forward from the literature to indicate the efficacy of sensory integration therapy for disabilities associated with learning (Hoehn TP, Baumeister AA. A critique of the application of sensory integration therapy to children with learning disabilities. J Learning Disabilities. 1994;27(6):338-350). In the absence of evidence, insurance companies refuse to pay for the cost of sensory integration therapy, and practitioners are forced to invoke the autism label calling their therapy whatever is billable. Contemporary researchers who feel Montessori and Piaget had it right, and Ayres was on to something in the way of rehabilitative therapies, call for the concerted effort by the different disciplines for empirical evidence and the development of additional therapies. Also in 1994, and in response to the above mentioned paper, Oades and Eggers wrote, “More effort is required to synthesize the different levels of analysis into a psychobiological approach, to remedial programs and new forms of therapy” (Oades, R and Eggers, C.).

Chrysalis School rises to the call...

And finally, having gone full circle back to the classroom nearly 100 years after Montessori first described a sensory education, our challenge is greater than ever. Today technology effects everything from the food our children eat to their choices at play. Products, not common sense, determine how we sleep and feed them as infants. Their toys speak to them in electronic voices. The light above them comes from a light bulb, not the sun. They spend twice as much time in a car as their grandparents did. When they go to school they are greeted by an educational system dictated by standardized testing. Their school day is an hour longer than that of their parents, and they are given homework two years before their parents were. When they get home from school, their outdoor playtime is mitigated by fears of child predators. And today, we so acutely understand how quickly their development can slip from typical to any number of labels. If we are to face the challenge we must answer the call of Oades, Eggers, and others who tell us to look to all the disiplines if we hope to find all the answers. At Chrysalis School at Read America our work is a work in progress. As we proceed we follow a specific program of instruction based on the integrated works of those who have passed before us with insight and a willingness to cross the intellectual midline. With each step we assess the outcome, ever mindful of the empirical nature of our work, and ever heartful of the human spirit in each of the students we serve. For details of our blueprint for a sensory education please visit our Sensational Classrooms page.