24 Aug Sensory learning
“The value of education and refinement of the senses, by widening the field of perception, offers an increasingly solid and rich basis for the development of intelligence” (Maria Montessori).
Once born, the child perceives the world as a sensory chaos, oscillating between lack and congestion without having a precise awareness of what happens outside and inside of himself.
He perceive different sensations such as cold, heat, thirst and hunger; he hears sounds, he breathes different smells, among which the mother’s one stands out and he sees undefined visual forms. It takes a few months for the child to give an order to his sensory universe: faces, voices and family smells will help him in building reference points that are necessary to create his sensitive world.
The interaction with the environment and the society enables the cultural modelling of the sensorial system.
Educating the senses means educating the body to the knowledge of the world. The child must be accustomed, since childhood, to a total contact with the world: through the sensory exploration of the surrounding space, he can develop his own idea of the world.
During the workshop “Follow your nose” (www.https://youtu.be/OyYLjhUi6DU) that took place during Esxence, we discovered that olfactory maps not only help in exploring different cities and places, but also in discovering, with our children, the sense of smell. Exercising this sense stimulates language and creative thinking that are essential elements for growing in the 21st century.
Esxence is a moment that helps in thinking about perfume as an art. Consequently, the art, by educating the senses to beauty, can be the basis of education.