What is " The Absorbent Mind" ?

 

The Absorbent Mind

A child’ s development occur in different stages. The first plane is between 0 and 6 years old, and this stage is divided into two sub-phases also: 0 -3 and 3 -6. The memory is observed after three years old. The child is unconscious from the birth to almost three years old, but he can still learn so many things. Now the question is, how a child can still remember if he does not have a memory? The key factor here is, while we learn by our mind, the children just gets in what exists around, i.e. they acquire with their psyche. While the information we learnt remains in somewhere in our memory in separate forms, the child transforms it and makes it a part of himself, and thus, those taken into him becomes incarnate by forming his mind and psychic body.

The newborn child is endowed with such a faculty that he can take in the environment and can transform it. It is something different what we know about mind, memory and learning concepts. It is a type of gaining the knowledge and making it a part of his psyche.  The child observes his environment and absorbs experiences, human sounds, order of his home, habits, customs, traditions, etc. This is called as absorbent mind. The absorbent mind is the feature of a child that not simply learning what exists in his environment or what is taught but it is a process of incarnation to create the man in the future. The children not simply learn something but they absorb the environment so that it becomes a part of their psyche, a part of their personality. This type of absorption not only penetrates into him but also it forms the mind, psyche and character of the child. The child does this to become a part of that environment and to create the man in the future, to complete his psychic body and to adapt himself to the environment that he belongs to. As Dr. Montessori mentioned “It is logical that if psychic life is to construct itself by incarnating the environment, the intelligence must observe and study first, it must gather a great quantity of impressions from it, just like the physical embryo begins with a great accumulation of cells before starting to build its special organs.”

The discovery of this privileged mind has completely refutes the idea of being a “tabula rasa”, an empty bowl waiting to be filled in. It is something hard to draw the borders of definition and powers of absorbent mind. There are interesting aspects of it to be mentioned. For example, it is not selective, i.e. it does not judge the upcoming as “ok, this is good, this is bad.” but it absorbs whatever exists around without any reaction or rejection. For example, think of a little girl hearing of a swear, you can be sure that you will hear the same word in an unexpected time and place from her mouth. She cannot distinguish those must be taken in from that of must not be. The child does not take in the world by performing a special effort. The absorbent mind does it with so ease that a child does not feel fatigue even. Actually, this is normal also, because all these processes are directed by a power existing naturally inside the child. This power, which is called horme, is unconscious and pushes the child for doing his activity instinctively. It is such a strong will that the child cannot resist against it and since he feels a great eager to do that work, he shows no signs of fatigue. By virtue of this phenomenon, the child can handle all obstacles hindering his development and goes through the self- perfection. Here, one can be aware of the vital importance of the environment that the newborn lives in and the attitude of parents during his conquest of the environment. Because this special mind not simply absorbs the view around, but also the behaviors, language, customs, religion, character, culture, the environment should be prepared so that he can be a part of each dimension of life. Besides, the parents should be so careful that they should train and convince themselves not being a guardian against his horme. This is vital due to the fact that each impression, each feeling or memory is engraved in the child’s subconscious mind, mneme, which in turn affects all his future characteristics, tendencies and social connections.

To sum up, the absorbent mind is a great gift for human being, otherwise how could a little child learn such a complex world, how to overcome a great deal of language acquisition with all rules and pronunciation even, how to hold a spoon, fork, how to behave in society,  etc. As a scientific research noted that, one should work hardly for sixty years in order to achieve the goals that a three years old had achieved. Thus, the absorbent mind is the unique power of the child, who assumed to be no conscious, no intelligence and no emotions, that provides a tremendous ease of overcoming the birth terror, adaptation to the new world and creating the human kind.