'^^>'^^ ^ •>;:■;',,■., .. 11, -■ . .■ 1 •"'■i't. .•'■'•> . " > M .' ", h-': ■. ■'! 1 I' •■ ■*■' -» . v*t- ". ; m'^^^ •>.'.»•*■•; ^?^'",; fev;:. ■■,;'.■; i ..i-v«. ,.' . . , .J. , •i.'!i»>i)^!' OX y.fi'- jp."- -••I'' ■ :■ A MONTESSORI MOTHER BY DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER Author of "The Squirrel- Cage" ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1912 v^l CoPYRiaHT, 1912, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Published October, 1912 THE QUINN A BODEN CO. PRESS RAHWAY, N. J. m BEDIGA TED BY PERMISSION TO MARIA MONTESSORI PREFACE On my return recently from a somewhat prolonged stay in Rome, I observed that my family and circle of friends were in a very different state of mind from that usually found by the home-coming traveler. I was not depressed by the usual conscientious effort to appear interested in what I had seen ; not once did I encounter the wavering eye and flagging attention which are such invariable accompaniments to anec- dotes of European travel, nor the usual elated re- bound into topics of local interest after a tribute to the miles I had traveled, in some such generalizing phrase of finality as, "Well, I suppose you enjoyed Europe as much as ever." If I had ever suffered from the enforced repression within my own soul of my various European experi- ences I was more than indemnified by the reception which awaited this last return to my native land. For I found myself set upon and required to give an account of what I had seen, not only by my famil^^ and friends, but by callers, by acquaintances in the streets, by friends of acquaintances, by letters from people I knew, and many from those whose names were unfamiliar. The questions they all asked were of a striking similarity, and I grew weary in repeating the same vl PREFACE answers, answers which, from the nature of the sub- ject, could be neither categorical nor brief. How many evenings have I talked from the appearance of the coffee-cups till a very late bedtime, in answer to the demand, " Now, you've been to Rome ; you've seen the Montessori schools. You saw a great deal of Dr. Montessori herself and were in close personal rela- tions with her. Tell us all about it. Is it really so wonderful? Or is it just a fad.^^ Is it true that the children are allowed to do exactly as they please.'* I should think it would spoil them beyond endurance. Do they really learn to read and write so young.'* And isn't it very bad for them to stimulate them so unnaturally? And ..." this was a never-failing cry, " what is there in it for our children, situated as we are ? " Staggered by the amount of explanation necessary to give the shortest answers that would be intelligible to these searching, but, on the whole, quite mis- directed questions, I tried to put off my interrogators with the excellent magazine articles which have ap- peared on the subject, and with the translation of Dr. Montessori's book. There were various objec- tions to being relegated to these sources of informa- tion. Some of my inquisitors had been too doubtful of the value of the perhaps over-heralded new ideas to take the trouble to read the book with the close and serious attention necessary to make anything out of its careful and scientific presentation of its theories. Others, quite honestly, in the breathless whirl of PREFACE vii American business, professional and social life, were too busy to read such a long work. Some had read it and emerged from it rather dazed by the technical terms employed, with the dim idea that something remarkable was going on in Italy of which our public education ought to take advantage, but without the smallest definite idea of a possible change in their treatment of their own youngsters. All had many practical questions to put, based on the difference between American and Italian life, questions which, by chance, had not been answered in the magazine articles. I heard, moreover, in varying degree, from all the different temperaments, the common note of skepti- cism about the results obtained. Everyone hung on my first-hand testimony as an impartial eye-witness. "You are a parent like us. Will it really work.'^ " they inquired with such persistent unanimity that the existence of a still unsatisfied craving for informa- tion seemed unquestionable. If so many people in my small personal circle, differing in no way from any ordinary group of educated Americans, were so actively, almost aggressively interested in hearing my personal account of the actual working of the new system, it seemed highly probable that other people's personal circles would be interested. The inevitable result of this reasoning has been the composition of this small volume, which can claim for partial ex- piation of its existence that it has no great preten- sions to anything but timeliness. viii PREFACE I have put into it, not only an exposition, as prac- tical as I can make it, of the teclmic of the method as far as it lies within the powers of any one of us fathers and mothers to apply it, but in addition I have, set down all the new ideas, hopes, and visions which have sprung up in my mind as a result of my close contact with the new sj^stem and with the genius who is its founder. For ideas, hopes, and visions are as important elements in a comprehension of this new philosophy as an accurate knowledge of the use of the " geometric insets," and my talks with Dr. Mon- tessori lead me to think that she feels them to be much more essential. Contact with the new ideas is not doing for us what it ought, if it does not act as a powerful stimulant to the whole body of our thought about life. It should make us think, and think hard, not only about how to teach our children the alpha- bet more easily, but about such fundamental matters as what we actually mean by moral life ; whether we really honestly wish the spiritually best for our chil- dren, or only the materially best; wh}^ we are really in the world at all. In many ways, this " Montes- sori System " is a new religion which we are called upon to help bring into the world, and we cannot aid in so great an undertaking without considerable spiritual as well as intellectual travail. The only way for us to improve our children's lives by the application of these new ideas is by medi- tating on them until we have absorbed their very essence and then by making what varying appHca- PREFACE ix tions of them are necessary in the differing condition of our hves. I have set down, without apology, my own Americanized meditations on Dr. Montessori's Italian text, simply because I chance to be one of the first American mothers to come into close contact v»'ith her and her work, and as such may be of yalue to my fellows. I have, however, honesth^ labeled and pigeon-holed these meditations on the general philos- ophy of the sj'stem, and set them in separate chapters so that it should not be difficult for the most casual reader to select what he wishes to read, without being forced into social, philosophical, or ethical con- siderations. I confess that I shall be greatly disap- pointed if he takes too exclusive advantage of this opportunity, for I quite agree with the Italian founder of the sj^stem that its philosophical and ethical ele- ments are those which have in them most promise for a new future for us all. Finall}', in spite of all my excuses for the under- taking, I seem to myself, now that I am fairly em- barked upon it, very presumptuous in speaking at all upon such high and grave matters, fit onh' for the sure and enlightened handling of the specialist. But tliis is a subject differing from biology, physi- ological psychology, and philosophy (although the foundations of the system are laid deep in those sci- ences), inasmuch as its usefulness to the race depends upon its comprehension by the greatest possible num- ber of ordinary human beings. I hearten myself by remembering that if it is not to remain an interesting X PREFACE and futile theory, it must be, in its broad outlines at least, understood and practised by just such people as I am. We must all collaborate. And here is the place to say that I consider this book a very tentative performance; and that I will be very grateful for suggestions from any of my readers which will help to make a second edition more useful and complete. This volume of impressions, therefore, lays no claim to erudition. It is not written by a biologist for other biologists, by a philosopher for an audi- ence of college professors, or by a professional peda- gogue to enlighten school-superintendents. An ordi- nary American parent, desiring above all else the best possible chance for her children, addresses this mes- sage to the innumerable legion of her companions in that desire. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Miss M. I. Batchelder and Miss Mary G. Gillmore, both of the Horace Mann School, for helpful suggestions; to Miss Anne E. George, who also read the manu- script; and to the House of Childhood, Inc., 200 Fifth Avenue, New York, for the use of illustrations. Dr. Montessori's patent rights in the didactic appa- ratus are controlled, for the United States and Can- ada, by the House of Childhood, Inc., Carl R. Byoir, President. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Preface v I. Some Introductory Remarks About Parexts . 1 II. A Day ix a Casa dei Bambini 7 III. IMoRE About What Happens in a Casa dei Bambini 29 IV. Something About the Apparatus and About the Theory Underlying It .... 48 V. Description of the Rest of the Apparatus and the Method for Writing and Reading . . 67 VI. Some General Remarks About the Montessori Apparatus in the American Home . , 91 VII. The Possibility of A^ierican Adaptations of, or Additions to, the Montessori Apparatus . 105 VIII. Some Remarks on the Philosophy of the System 117 IX. Application of This Philosophy to American Home Life 127 X. Some Considerations on the Nature of " Dis- cipline " 141 XI. More About Discipline, with Special Regard to Obedience 153 XII. Difficulties in the Way of a Universal Adop- tion of the Montessori Ideas . . . .165 XIII. Is There Any Real Difference Between the Montessori System and the Kindergarten? . 171 XIV. Moral Training 195 XV. Dr. Montessori's Life and the Origin of the Casa dei Bambini • . 210 XVI. Some Last Remarks 232 Index 239 ILLUSTRATIONS IMaria Montessori Frontispiece ^ The schoolroom in the convent of the Franciscan nuns in the Via Giusti page 8 The meal hour " 22 ^^ The morning clean-up " 26 ^ Waiter carrying soup *' 26 '^ Exercises in practical life " ^Q \^ Building " the Tower " " m \^ Buttoning-frames to develop co-ordinated movements of the fingers and prepare the children for ex- ercises of practical life " 68 Solid geometrical insets " 70 - The broad stair " 74 ' The long stair " 74^ Insets which the child learns to place both by sight and touch " 78* Tracing sandpaper letters " 86 ^ Tracing geometrical design " 86 v' Training the " stereognostic sense " — combining motor and tactual images " 100 ^ Color boxes comprising spools of eight colors and eight shades of each color " 116^ Materials for teaching rough and smooth ..." 138 ^ Counting boxes " 162 ' Insets around which the child draws, and then fills in the outline with colored crayons ..." 188 '^ Word building with cut-out alphabet . . . . " 224 "^ A MONTESSORI MOTL CHAPTER I SOME INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ABOUT PARENTS AN observation often made by philosophic ob- i\ servers of our social organization is that the tremendous importance of primary teachers is ri- diculously underestimated. The success or failure of the teachers of little children may not perhaps determine the amount of information acquired later in its educative career by each generation, but no one can deny that it determines to a considerable extent the character of the next generation, and character determines practically everything worth considering in the world of men. Yet the mind of the average community admits this but haltingly. The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened ma- jority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the char- acter of the teacher. But is there a thoughtful parent living who has not ESSORI MOTHER .e haphazard way in which Fate has 1 him into a profession greatly more im- and enormously more difficult? For it is not quic , S O H g OJ H S < K ^ O ^ H^ ;^ o H H & tt A MONTESSORI MOTHER 69 own lives so sanely, who have accomplished such astonishing feats in reading and writing, are the re- sults of many other factors besides buttoning-f rames and geometric insets, important as these are. Perhaps the most vital of these other factors is the sense of responsibility, genuine responsibility, not the make-believe kind, with which we are too often apt to put off our children when they first show their touchingly generous impulse to share some of the burdens of our lives. For instance, to take a rather extreme instance, but one which we must all have seen, a child in an ordinary home is allowed to pick up a bit of waste-paper on the floor, after having had his attention called to it, and is told to throw it in the waste-paper basket. This action of mechanical obedi- ence, suitable only for a child under two years of age, is then praised insincerely to the child's face as an instance of " how much help he is to Mother ! " The Montessori child is trained, through his feel- ing of responsibility for the neatness and order of his schoolroom, to notice litter on the floor, just as any housekeeper does, without needing to have her attention called to it. It is her floor and her busi- ness to keep it clean. And this feeling of responsi- bility is fostered and allowed every opportunity to grow strong, by the sincere conviction of the Mon- tessori teacher that it is more important for the child to feel it, than for the floor to be cleaned with adult speed. As a result of this long patience on the part of the Directress, a child who has been under her 70 A MONTESSORI MOTHER care for a couple of years, will (to go on with our chosen instance) pick up litter from the floor and dispose of it, as automatically as the mistress of the house herself, and with as little need for the goad either of upbraiding for neglect, or praise incom- mensurate with the trivial service. This is an at- titude in marked contrast to that of many of our daughters who often attain high-school age without acquiring this feeling, apparently perfectly possible to inculcate if the process is begun early enough, of loyal solidarity with the interests of the household. With this caution that a Montessori life for a little child does not in the least mean his incessant oc- cupation with formal sensory exercises, let us again take up the description and use of the apparatus. The first thing which is given a child is usually either one of the buttoning- frames (shown in the illustration facing page 68), or what are called the " solid geometric insets." This latter game with the formidable name is illustrated opposite this page, where it is seen to resemble the set of weights kept beside their scales by old-fashioned druggists. No other Montessori exercise is more universally pop- ular with the littlest ones who enter the Children's Home, and few others hold their attention so long. This combines training for both sight and touch, since, as an aid to his vision, the child is taught to run his finger-tips around the cylinder which he is trying to fit in, and then around the edges of the holes. His finger-tips recognize the similarity of llllliiA* ^BBMMMMBMMMppw^ii ' i I . I I I ' l l" Solid Geometrical Ixsets. Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir A MONTESSORI MOTHER 71 size before his eyes do. This piece of apparatus is, of course, entirely self-corrective, and needs no supervision. When it becomes easy for a child quickly to get all the cylinders into the right holes, he has probably had enough of this exercise, al- though his interest in it may recur from time to time, during many weeks. One of the exercises which it is usual to offer him next is the construction of the Tower. This game could be played (and often is) with the nest of hol- low blocks which nearly every child owns, and it con- sists of building a pyramid with them, the bigvgeot at the bottom, the next smaller on this, and so on to the apex made by the tiniest one. This is to learn the difference between big and small; and as the child progresses in exactitude of vision, the game can be varied by pihng the blocks in confusion at one side of the room and constructing the pyramid, a piece at a time, at some distance away. This means that when the child leaves liis pyramid to go and get the block needed next, he must " carry the size in his eye " as the phrase runs, and pick out the block next smaller by an effort of his visual memory. The difference between long and short is taught by means of ten squared rods of equal thickness, but regularly varying length, the shortest one being just one-tenth as long as the longest. The so-called Long Stair (illustration facing page 74) is constructed by the child with these. This is perhaps the most dif- ficult game an\ong those by which dimensions are 72 A MONTESSORI MOTHER taught, and a good many mistakes are to be an- ticipated. The material is again quite self-cor- rective, however, and little by little, with occasional silent or brief reminders from the adult onlooker, the child learns first to correct his own mistakes, and then not to make them. Thickness and thinness are studied with ten solids, brick-like in shape, all of the same length, but of regularly varying thickness, the thinnest one being one-tenth as thick as the biggest one. With these the child constructs the Big Stair (illustration facing page 74). Later on (consider- ably later), when the child begins to learn his num- bers, these " stairs " are used to help him. The large numbers cuts out of sandpaper and pasted on smooth cardboard, are placed by the child beside the right number of red and blue sections on each rod of the Long Stair. After the construction of the Long and Big Stair the child is usually ready for the exercises with dif- ferent fabrics to develop his sense of touch, and for the first beginning of the exercises leading to writing ; especially the strips of sandpaper pasted upon smooth wood used to teach the difference between rough and smooth. At the same time with these ex- ercises, begin the first ones with color which consist of simply matching spools of identical color, two by two. When these simple exercises of the tactile sense have been mastered, the child is allowed to attempt the more difficult undertaking of recognizing all the A MONTESSORI MOTHER 73 minute gradations between smoooth and rough, be- tween dark blue and light blue, etc., etc. The training of the eye to discriminate between minute differences in shades, is carried on steadily in a series of exercises which result in an accuracy of vision in this regard which puts most of us adults to shame. These color-games are played with silk wound around flat cards, like those on which we often buy our darning-cotton. There are eight main col- ors, and under each color eight shades, ranging from dark to light. The number of games which can be played with these is only limited by the ingenuity of the Directress or mother, and, although most of them are played more easily with a number of chil- dren together, many are quite available for the soli- tary " onl}^ child at home." He can amuse liimself by arranging his sixty-four bobbins in the correct order of their colors, or he can later, as in the pyramid- making game, pile them all on one side of the room, and make his graduated line at a distance, " holding the color " in his mind as he crosses the room, a feat which almost no untrained adult can accomplish ; al- though it is surprising what results can be obtained any time in life by conscious, definite effort to train one of the senses. There is nothing miraculous in the results obtained in the Casa dei Bambini. They are the simple, natural consequence of definite, direct training, which is so seldom given. The remarkable improvement in general acuteness of his vision after training his eyes to follow the flight of bees, has been 74j a MONTESSORI MOTHER picturesquely and vigorously recorded by John Bur- roughs; and all of us know how many more chest- nuts we can see and pick up in a given time, after a few hours' concentration on this exercise, than when we first began to look for them in the grass. The color-games played by a number of children together with the different-colored spools are vari- ous, but resemble more or less the old-fashioned game of authors. One of them is played thus. Eight children choose each the name of a color. Then the sixty-four spools are poured out in confusion on the table around which the children sit. One of them (the eldest or one chosen by lot) begins to deal out to the others in turn. That is, the one on his right asking for red, the dealer must quickly choose a spool of the right color and hand it to his neighbor. Then the child beyond asks for blue, and so it goes until the dealer makes a mistake. When he does, the deal goes to the child next him. After every child has before him in a mixed pile the eight shades of his chosen color, they all set to work as fast as they can to see who can soonest arrange them in the right chromatic order. The child who does this first has " won " the game, and is the one who deals first in the next game. Children of about the same age and ability repeat this game with the monotonously eternal vivid interest which characterizes an old-established quartet of whist-players, and they attain, by means of it and similar games with the color spools, a control of their eyes which is a marvel and which must forever add A MONTESSORI MOTHER 75 to the accuracy of their impressions about the world. When a generation of children trained in this man- ner has grown up, landscape painters will no longer be able to complain, as they do now, that they are working for a purblind public. We are now approaching at last the extremely im- portant and hitherto undescribed " geometric insets," whose mysterious name has piqued the curiosity of more than one casual and hasty reader of accounts of the Montessori system. A look at the pictures of these shows them to be as simple as all the rest of Dr. Montessori's expedients. Anyone who was ever touched by the picture-puzzle craze, or who in his childhood felt the fascination of dissected maps, needs no explanation of the pleasure taken by little children of four and five in fitting these queer-shaped bits of wood into their corresponding sockets, the square piece into the square socket, the triangle into the three-cornered hole, the four-leafed clover shape into the four-lobed recess. There can be no better description of the way in which a child is initiated into the use of this piece of apparatus than the one writ- ten by Miss Tozier for McClure^s Magazine : " A small boy of the mature age of four, who has been sitting plunged either in sleep or meditation, now starts up from his chair and wanders across to his directress for advice. He wants something to amuse him. She takes him to the cupboard, throws in a timely suggestion, and he strolls back to his table with a smile. He has chosen half a dozen or 76 A MONTESSORI MOTHER more thin, square tablets of wood and a strip of navy-blue cloth. He begins by spreading down the cloth, then he puts his blocks on it in two rows. They are of highly-varnished wood, light blue, with geometrical figures of navy-blue in the centre ; there is a triangle, a circle, a rectangle, an oval, a square, an octagon. The teacher, who has followed him, stands on the other side of the table. She runs two of her fingers round one of the edges of the triangle. ' Touch it so,' she says. He promptly and delight- edly imitates her. She then pulls all the figures out of their light-blue frames by means of a brass but- ton in each, mixes them up on the table ; and tells him to call her when he has them all in place again. The dark-blue cloth shows through the empty frame, so that it appears as if the figures had only sank down half an inch. While he continues to stare at this array, off goes the teacher. " ' Is she not going to show him how to begin? ' " ' An axiom of our practical pedagogy is to aid the child only to be independent,' answers Dr. Mon- tessori. ' He does not wish help.' " Nor does he seem to be troubled. He stares a while at his array of blocks ; yet his eye does not grow quite sure, for he carefully selects an oval from the mixed-up pile and tries to put it in the circle. It won't go. Then, quick as a flash, as if subcon- sciously rather than designedly, he runs his little fore- finger around the rim of the figure and then round the edge of the empty space left in the light-blue A MONTESSORI MOTHER 77 frames of both the oval and the circle. He discov- ers his mistake at once, puts the figure into its place, and leans back a moment in his chair to enjoy his own cleverness before beginning with another. He finally gets them all into their proper frames, and instantly pulls them out again, to do it quicker and better next time. " These blocks with the geometric insets are among the most valuable stimuli in the Casa dei Bambini. The vision and the touch become, by their use, accus- tomed to a great variety of shapes. It will be noted, too, that the child apprehends the forms synthetic- ally, as given entities, and is not taught to recognize them by aid of even the simplest geometrical analysis. This is a point on which Dr. Montessori lays par- ticular stress." Now it is to be borae in mind that although, for the children, this is only a " game," as fascinating to them as the picture-puzzle is to their elders, their far- seeing teacher is utilizing it, far cry though it may seem, to begin to teach them to write. And here I realize that I have at last written a phrase for which my bewildered reader has probably been waiting in an astonished impatience. For of all the profound, searching, regenerating effects of the Montessori sys- tem, none seems to have made an impression on the public like the fact, almost a by-product of the method, that Montessori children learn to write and read more easily than others. I have heard Dr. Mon- tessori exclaim in wonder many times over the pop- 78 A MONTESSORI MOTHER ular insistence on that interesting and important, but by no means central, detail of her work; as though reading and writing were our only functions in life, as though we could get information and education only from the printed page, a prop which is already, in the opinion of many wise people, too largely used in our modem world as a substitute for first-hand, individual observation. It cannot be denied, however, that the way Montes- sori children learn to write is very spectacular. The theory underlying it is far too complicated to describe in complete detail in a book of this sort, but for the benefit of the person who desires to run and read at the same time, I will set down a short-cut, unscientific explanation. The inaccuracy and relative weakness of a little child's eyesight, compared to his sense of touch, has been already mentioned (page 57). This simple element in child physiology must be borne constantly in mind as one of the determining factors in the Mon- tessori method of teaching writing. The child who is " playing " with the geometric insets soon learns, as we have seen from Miss Tozier's description, that he can find the shallow recess which is the right shape for the piece of wood which he holds in his hand if he will run the fingers of his other hand around the edge of his piece of wood and then around the different re- cesses. It is hard for an ordinary adult really to conceive of the importance of this movement for a little child. IxsETs Which the CfeiLo Iearxs to Place Both by Sight AXD BY Touch. Copyright 1912. by Carl R. Byoir A MONTESSORI MOTHER 79 Indeed, so fixed is our usual preference for vision as a means of gaining information, that it gives one a very queer feeling to watch a child, with his eyes wide open, apparently looking intently at the board with its different-shaped recesses, but unable to find the one matching the inset he holds, until he has gone through that eerie, blind-man's motion with his finger- tips. Now that motion, very frequently repeated, not only tells him where to fit in his inset, but, like all frequently repeated actions, wears a channel in his brain which tends, whenever he begins the action, to make him complete it in the way he always has done it. It can be seen that, if, instead of a triangle or a square, the child is given a letter of the alphabet and shown how to follow its outlines with his fingers in the direction in which they move when the letter is written, the brain channel and muscular habit resulting are of the utmost im- portance. But before he can make any use of this, he needs to learn another muscular habit, quite distinct from (al- though always associated with) the mastery of the letters of the alphabet, namely, the mastery of the pencil. The exceeding awkwardness naturally felt by the child in holding this new implement for the first time, has nothing to do with his recognition of A or B, although it adds another great difficulty to his re- producing those letters. He must learn how to man- age his pencil before he engages upon the much more 80 A MONTESSORI MOTHER complicated undertaking of constructing with it certain fixed symbols, just as he must learn how to walk before he can be sent on an errand. The old- fashioned way (still generally in use in Italy, and not wholly abandoned in all parts of our own coun- try) was to force the child to fill innumerable copy- books with monotonous straight lines or " pot-hooks," a weariness of the spirit and a thorn in the flesh which any one who has suffered from it can describe feel- ingly. One way adopted by modern educators to avoid this dreary exercise is by frankly running away from the issue and postponing teaching children to write until a much more mature age than formerly, in the hope that general exercises in free-hand drawing will sufficiently supplement the general strengthening and steadjdng of the muscles which come with more ma- ture development. It is an inaccurate but, perhaps, suggestive comparison to say that this is a little as though young children should not be taught how to walk because it is so hard for them to keep their bal- ance, but made to wait until all their bones are mature. Dr. Montessori has solved the difficulty by another use of the geometric insets. This time it is the hole left by the removal of one of the insets which is used. Suppose, for instance, that one chooses the tri- angular inset. It is set down on a piece of paper and the triangle is lifted out, leaving the paper show- ing through. The child is provided with colored crayons and shown how to trace around the outline A MONTESSORI MOTHER 81 of the triangular-shaped piece of paper. The fact that the metal frame stands up a little from the paper prevents his at first wildly unsteady pencil from going outside the triangle. When he has traced around the outline * with his blue crayon, he lifts the frame up and there is the most beautiful blue triangle, all the work of his own hands ! He usually gazes at this in delighted surprise, and then it is suggested to him to fill in this outline with strokes of his pencil. He is allowed to make these as he chooses, only being cautioned not to pass out- side the line. At first the crayon goes " every which way," and the " drawings " are hardly recognizable because the outline has been so overrun at every point; but gradually the child's muscular control is improved and finally carried to a very high degree of perfection. Regular, even parallel lines begin to appear and the final result is as even as a Jap- anese color-wash. It is evident that in the course of this work he makes of his own accord, with the utmost interest animating each stroke, as many lines as would fill hours and hours of enforced drudgery over copy-books. When, after much practice, the muscles have learned almost automatically to control fingers holding a pencil, that particular muscular habit is suflficiently well-learned for the child to begin on another enterprise. Now of course, though it is most interesting to * At first he traces only the outline of the inside figure. Later the square frame is algo outlined. 82 A MONTESSORI MOTHER color triangles and circles, a child does not spend all his day at it. Among other things which occupy and amuse him at this time is getting acquainted with the look and feel of the letters of the alphabet. The children are presented, one at a time, sometimes only one a day, with large script letters, made of black sandpaper pasted on smooth white cards, and are taught how to draw their fingers over the letter in the direction taken when it is written. At the same time the teacher repeats slowly and distinctly the sound of the letter, making sure that the child takes this in. After this, the little Italian child, happy in the pos- session of a phonetically spelled language, has an easier time than our English-speaking children, who begin then and there their lifelong struggle with the insanities of English spelling. But this is a struggle to which they must come under any system, and much less formidable under this than it has ever been be- fore. For the next step is, of course, to put these letters together into simple words. There is no need to wait until a child has toiled all through the alpha- bet before beginning this much more interesting process. As soon as he knows two letters he can spell Mamma. There is no question as yet of his con- structing the letters with his own hands. He simply takes them from their separate compartments and lays them on the floor or table in the right order. In handling them throughout all of these exercises the children are encouraged constantly to make that blind-man's motion of tracing around the letter. The A MONTESSORI MOTHER 83 rough sandpaper apparently shouts out informa- tion to the httle finger-tips highly sensitized by the tactile exercises, for the child nearly always corrects himself more surely by touching than by looking at his sandpaper alphabet. Of course, the strongest of muscular habits is being formed as he does this. A pleasant variation on this routine is a test of the child's new knowledge. The teacher asks him to give her B, give her D, P, M, etc. The letters are kept in little pasteboard compartments, a compartment for all the B's, another for all the D's, and so on. The child, in answer to the teacher's re- quest, looks over these compartments and picks out from all the others the letter she has asked for. This, of course, seems only like a game to him, a variation on hide-and-seek. All these processes go on day after day, side by side, all invisibly converging towards one end. The practice with the crayons, the recognition of the letters by eye and touch, the revelation as to the formation of words with the movable alphabet, are so many roads leading to the painless acquisition of the art of writing. They draw nearer and nearer to- gether, and then, one day, quite suddenly, the fa- mous " Montessori explosion into writing " occurs. The teacher of experience can tell when this explosion is imminent. First the parallel lines which the child makes to fill and color the geometric figures become singularly regular and even ; second, his acquaintance with the alphabet. becomes so thorough that he recog- 84 A MONTESSORI MOTHER nizes the letters by sense of touch only, and, third, he increases in faciHty for composing words with the movable alphabet. The burst into spontaneous writ- ing usually comes only after these three conditions are present. It usually happens that a child has a crayon in his hand and begins the motion of his fingers made as he traces around one of his sandpaper letters. But this time he has the pencil in his fingers, and the idea suddenly occurs to him, usually reducing him to breathless excitement, that if he traces on the paper with his pencil the form of the letters, he will be writing. In the twinkling of an eye it is done. He has written with his own hand one of the words which he has been constructing with the movable alphabet. He is usually as proud of this achievement as though he had invented the art of writing. The first children who were taught in this manner and who experienced this explosion into writing did really believe, I gather, that writing was something of their own in- vention. They rushed about excitedly to explain, to anyone who would listen, all about this wonderful new discovery : " Look ! Look ! You don't need the movable letters to make words. See, you just take a pencil or a piece of chalk, and draw the letters for yourself ... as many as you please . . . any- where ! " And, in fact, for the first few days after this explosion, their teachers and mothers found writ- ing " anywhere ! " all over the house. The children were in a fever of excited pride. Since then, al- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 85 though the first word always causes a spasm of joy, children in a Children's Home are so used to seeing the older ones writing and reading, that their own feat is taken more calmly, as a matter of course. It really always takes place in this sudden way, how- ever. One day a child cannot write, and the next he can. The formation of the letters, so hard for children taught in the old way, offers practically no difficulty to the Montessori child. He has traced their outline so often with his finger-tips that his knowledge of them is lodged where, in his infant organism, it be- longs, in his muscular memory; so that when, pencil in his well-trained hand, he starts his fingers upon an action already so often repeated as to be automatic, muscular habit and muscular memory do the rest. He does not need consciously to direct each muscle in the action of writing, any more than a practised piano-player thinks consciously of which finger goes after which. The vernacular phrase expressing this sort of involuntary, muscular-memory facility is literally true in his case, " He has done it so often that he could do it with his eyes shut." It is to be noted that for a long time after this explosion into writing, the children continue incessantly to go through the three preparatory steps, tracing with their fingers the sandpaper letters, filling in the geometric forms and composing with the movable alphabet. These are for them what scales are for 86 A MONTESSORI MOTHER the pianist, a necessary practice for " keeping the hand in." By means of constantly tracing the sandpaper letters the children write almost from the first the most astonishingly clear, firm, regular hand, much better than that of most adults of my ac- quaintance. It is apparent, from even this short-hand account of this remarkably successful method, that children cannot learn to write by means of it without con- siderable (even if unconscious and painless) effort on their part, and without intelHgence, good judgment, and considerable patience on the part of the teacher. The popular accounts of the miracles accomplished by Dr. Montessori's apparatus have apparently led some American readers to fancy that it is a sort of amulet one can tie about the child's neck, or plaster to apply externally, which will cause the desired ef- fect without any further care. As a matter of fact, it is a carefully devised trellis which starts the child's sensory growth in a direction which will be profitable for the practical undertaking of learning how to write, a trellis invented and patented by Dr. Mon- tessori, but which those of us who attempt to teach children must construct for ourselves on her pattern, following step by step the development of each of the children under our care. And yet, although the Montessori apparatus does not teach children by magic how to write a good hand, in comparison with the methods now in use, it is really almost miraculous in its results. In our schools h,' o en o A MONTESSORI MOTHER 87 children learn slowly to write (and how badly !) when they are seven or eight, cannot do it fluently until they are much older, and never do it very well, if the average handwriting of our high-school and college student is any test of our system. In the Montessori schools a child of four usually spends about a month and a half in the definite preparation for writing, and children of five usually only a month. Some very quick ones of this age learn to write with all the letters in twenty days. Three months' practice, after they once begin to write, is, as a rule, enough to steady their handwriting into an excellently clear and regular script, and, after six months of writing, a Montessori tot of five can write fluently, legibly, and (most important and revolutionary change) with pleasure, far be^^ond that usually felt by a child in, say, our third or fourth grades. He has not only achieved this valuable accomplish- ment with enormous economy of time, but he has been spared, into the bargain, the endless hours of soul- killing drudgery from which the children in our schools now suff^er. The Montessori child has, it is true, gone through a far more searching preparation for this achievement, but it has all been without any strain on his part, without any consciousness of ef- fort except that which springs from the liveliest spon- taneous desire. It has tired him, literally, no more than if he had spent the same amount of time play- ing tag. I have heard -some scientific talk which sounded to 88 A MOXTESSORI MOTHER my ignorant ears very profound and psychological, about whether this capacity of Montessori children to write can be considered as a truly " intellectual achievement," or only a sort of unconsciouslj^ learned trick. This is a fine theoretic distinction which I think most mothers will feel they can safely ignore. Whatever it is from a psychological standpoint, and however it may be rated in the Bradstreet of pure science, it is an inestimable treasure for our chil- dren. Reading comes after writing in the Montessori sys- tem, and has not apparently as inherently close a connection with it as is sometimes thought. That is, a child who can foiTQ letters perfectly with his pen- cil and can compose words with the movable alphabet may still be unable to recognize a word which he himself has neither written nor composed. But, of course, with such a start as the Montessori system gives him, the gap between the two processes is soon bridged. There are various reasons why a detailed account of the Montessori method of teaching read- ing need not be given here. One is that this book is written for mothers and not teachers, and since the methods for teaching reading in our schools are much better than those used for teaching writing, mothers will naturally, as a rule, leave reading until the child is under a teacher. Furthermore, there is nothing so very revolutionary in the Montessori method in this regard and there exist already in this country several excellent methods for teaching read- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 89 ing. And yet a few notes on some features of the Montessori system will be of interest. Like many variations of our own system it begins with the recognition of single words. At first these are composed with the movable alphabet. Later, when the child can interpret readily words composed in this way, they are written in large clear script on slips of paper. The child spells the word out letter by letter, and then pronounces these sounds more and more rapidly until he runs them together and perceives that he is pronouncing a word faii>iliar to him. This is always a moment of great satis- faction to him and of encouragement to his teacher. After this has continued until the children recog- nize single words quickly, the process is extended to phrases. Here the teacher goes very slowly, with great care, to avoid undue haste and lack of thor- oughness. There is a danger here that the children will fall into the mechanical habit (familiar to us all) of reading aloud a page with great glibness, although the sense of the words has made no impression on their minds. To avoid this the Montessori Directress adopts the simple expedient of not allowing them at first to read aloud. She carries on, instead, a series of silent conversations with the children, writing on the board some simple request for an action on their part. " Please stand up," " Please shut your eyes," and so on. Later longer and more comphcated sentences are written on slips of paper and distributed to the children. . They read these to themselves (not 90 A MONTESSORI MOTHER being misled by their oral fluency into thinking they understand what they do not), and show that they have understood by performing the actions requested. In other words, these are short lettei*s addressed by the teacher to the children, and answered b}^ silent action on the part of the children. Like all of the Montessori devices, this is self-corrective. It^ is per- fectly easy for the child to be sure whether he has understood the sentence or not, and his attention is fixed, not on pronouncing correctly (which has nothing to do with understanding the sentences be- fore him), but on the comprehension of the written symbols. As for the teacher, she has an absolutely perfect check on the child. If he does not under- stand, he does not do the light thing. It means the elimination of the " fluent bluffer," a phenomenon not wholly unfamiliar to teachers, even when they are dealing with very young children. CHAPTER VI SOME GKNKRAL REMARKS ABOUT THE MON- TESSORl API»ARATUS IN THE AMERICAN HOME TllK first tiling to do, if you cnn nuinago it, is to sccmv ,'i set of the IMontessori }if)f)!ir.'ilus. It is the result of the ripest thought, ingenuity, iuu\ prac- tical experience of a gifted specialist who has concen- trjited all her forces on the invention of the (lilferent devices of hor apparatus. But there are various sup- plementary statements lo he made which modify this simple advice. One is, that the arrival in your home of the box containing the INIontessori apparatus means just aw much for the mental welfare of your children as the arrival in the kitchen of a box of miscellaneous gro- ceries means for their physical h(\HUh. 'I'he pres- ence on the p/mfry shelf of a bag of the best flour ever made will fiot satisfy your childnMi's hunger un- less you add brains and good judgment to it, and make edible, digestible bread for Ihem. There is nothing magical or miraculous about the Montessori apparatus. It is as yet the best raw material pro- duced for satisfying tbe intellectual hunger of nor- mal children from three to six, but it will have prac- tically no effect /)n them if its use is not regulated by 01 92 A MONTESSORI MOTHER the most attentive care, supplemented by a keen and never-ceasing objective scrutiny of the children who are to use it. This is one reason why mothers find it harder to educate their children by the Montessori system (as by all other systems) than teachers do, for they have an age-long mental habit of clasping their little ones so close in their arms that, fig- uratively speaking, they never get a fair, square look at them. This study of the children is an essential part of all education which Dr. Montessori is among the first pointedly and definitely to emphasize. The neces- sity for close observation of conditions before any attempt is made to modify them is an intellectual habit which is the direct result of the methods of positive sciences, in the study of which she received her intellectual training. Just as the astronomer looks fixedly at the stars, and the biologist at the protoplasm before he tries to generalize about their ways of life and action, so we must learn honestly and whole-heartedly to try to see what sort of chil- dren Mary and Bob and Billy are^ as well as to love them with all our might. This should not be, as it is apt to be, a study limited to their moral character- istics, to seeing that Mary's fault is vanity and Bob's is indifference, but should be directed with the most passionate attention to their intellectual traits as well, to the way in which they naturally learn or don't learn, to the doors which are open, and those which are shut, to their intellectual interest. For A MONTESSORI MOTHER 93 children of three and four have a life which it is no exaggeration to call genuinely intellectual, and their constant presence under the eyes of their parents gives us a chance to know this, which helps to make up for our lack of educational theory and experience in which almost any teacher outstrips us. There are no two plants, in all the infinity of vegetable life, which are exactly alike. There are not, so geologists tell us, even two stones precisely the same. To lump children (even two or three chil- dren closely related) in a mass, with generalizations about what will appeal to them, is a mental habit that experience constantly and luridly proves to be the extremest folly. This does not mean individu- alism run wild. There are some general broad prin- ciples which hold true of all plants, and which we will do well to learn from an experienced gardener. All plants prosper better out-of-doors than in a cellar, and all children have activity for the law of their na- ture. But lilies-of-the-valley shrivel up in the amount of sunshine which supplies just the right condi- tions for nasturtiums, and your particular three-year- old may need a much quieter (or more boisterous) activity than his four-year-old sister. Neither of them may be, at first, in the least attracted by the problem of the geometric insets, or by the idea of matching colors. They may not have reached that stage, or they may have gone beyond it. You will need all your ingenuity and your good judgment to find out where they are, intellectually, and what they 94 A MONTESSORI MOTHER are intellectually. The Montessori iiile is never to try to force or even to coax a child to use any part of the apparatus. The problem involved is explained to him clearly, and if he feels no spontaneous desire to solve it, no effort is made to induce him to under- take it. Some other bit of apparatus is what, for the moment, he needs, and one only wastes time in trying to persuade him to feel an interest which he is, for the time, incapable of. If you doubt this, and most of us feel a lingering suspicion that we know better than the child what he wants, look back over your own school-life and con- fess to yourself how utterly has vanished from your mind the information forced upon you in courses which did not arouse your interest. My own private example of that is a course on " government." I was an ordinarily intelligent and conscientious child, and I attended faithfully all the interminable dreary reci- tations of that subject, even filling a note-book with selections from the teacher's remarks, and, at the end of the course, passing a fairly creditable exam- ination. The only proof I have of all this is the rec- ord of the examination and the presence, among my relics of the past, of the note-book in my hand- writing; for, among all the souvenirs of my school- life, there is not one faintest trace of any knowledge about the way in which people are governed. I can- not even remember that I ever did know anything about it. My mind is a perfect, absolute blank on the subject, although I can remember the look of the A MONTESSORI MOTHER 95 schoolroom in which I sat to hear the lectures on it, I can see the face of the teacher as plainly as though she still stood before me, I can recall the pictures on the wall, the very graining of the wood on my desk. There is only no more recollection of the subject than if the lectures had been delivered in Hin- dustani. The long hours I spent in that classroom are as wholly wasted and lost out of my all-too-short life as though I had been thrust into a dark closet for those three hours a week. Even the amount of ^' discipline " I received, namely the capacity to sit still and endure almost intolerable ennui, would have been exactly as great in one case as in the other, and would have cost the State far less. All of us must have some such recollection of our school-life to set beside the vivifying, exciting, never to be forgotten hours when we first really grasped a new abstract idea, or learned some bit of scientific information thrillingly in touch with our own under- standable lives ; and we need no other proof of the truth of the maxim, stated by all educators, but stated and constantly acted upon by Dr. Montessori, that the prerequisite of all education is the interest of the student. There is no question here to be dis- cussed as to whether he learns more or less quickly, more or less well, according as he is interested or not. The statement is made flatly by the Italian educator that he does not, he cannot learn at all, anything, if he is not interested. There is no use trying to call in the old war-horse of " mental discipline " and say 96 A MONTESSORI MOTHER that it is well to force him to learn whether he has an interest in the subject or not, because the fact is that he cannot learn without feeling interest; and the appearance of learning, the filled note-books, the attended recitations, the passed examinations, we all know in our hearts to be but the vainest of illusions and to represent only the most hopelessly wasted hours of our youth. Dr. Montessori, with her usual bold, startlingly consistent acceptance as a practical guide to con- duct of a fact which her reason tells her to be true, acts on this principle with her characteristic whole- souled fervor. If the children are not interested, it is the business of the educator to furnish something which will interest them (as well as instruct them) rather than to try to force their interest to center it- self on some occupation which the educator has thought beforehand would turn the trick.* When we capture and try to tame a little wild creature of un- known habits (and is not this a description of each little new child?) our first effort is to find some food which will agree with him, and experimentation is al- ways our first resort. We offer him all sorts of things * A note here may perhaps clear up a possible misconception. It is to be remembered that all these statements about the neces- sity for interest in the child's mind refer only to educative proc- esses. Occasions may arise when it is desirable that a child shall do something which does not interest him— for instance, sit still in a railway train until the end of the journey. But no one need think that he will ever acquire a taste for this occupation through being forced to it. A MONTESSORI MOTHER 97 to eat, and observe which he selects. It is true that we do make some broad generaHzations from the results of our experiences with other animals, and we do not try to feed a little creature who looks like a wood- chuck on honey and water, nor a new variety of moth on lettuce-leaves. But even if the unknown animal looks ever so close a cousin of the woodchuck family, we do not try to force the lettuce-leaves down his throat if, after a due examination of them, he shows plainly that he does not care for them. We cast about to see what else may be the food he needs ; and though we msLj feel very impatient with the need for making all the troublesome experiments with diet, we never feel really justified in blaming the little creature for having preferences for turnip-tops, nor do we have a half-acknowledged conviction that, perhaps, if we had starved him to eat lettuce-leaves, it might have been better for him. We are only too thankful to hit upon the right food before our little captive dies of hunger. Something of all this is supposed to go through the mind of the Montessori mother as she refrains from arguing with her little son about the advisability of his being interested in one, rather than another, of the Montessori contrivances ; and these considerations are meant to explain to her the prompt acquiescence of the Montessori teacher in the child's intellectual " whims." She is not foolishly indulging him to make herself less trouble, or to please him. She is only trying to find out what his natural interest 98 A MONTESSORI MOTHER is, so that she may pounce upon it and utilize it for teaching him without his knowing it. She is only taking advantage of her knowledge of the fact that water runs down-hill and not up, and that you may keep it level by great efforts on your part, and even force it to climb, but that you can only expect it to work for you when you let it follow the course marked out for it by the laws of physics. In other words, she sees that her business is to make use of every scrap of the children's interest, rather than to waste her time and theirs trying to force it into channels where it cannot run ; to carry her waterwheel where the water falls over the cliff, and not to struggle to turn the river back towards the watershed. And anyone who thinks that a Montessori teacher has " an easy time because she is almost never really teaching," underestimates grotesquely the amount of alert, keen ingenuity and capacity for making fine dis- tinctions, required for this new feat of educational engineering. On the other hand, the advanced modern educators who cry jealously that there is nothing new in all this, that it is the principle underlying their own systems of education, need only to ask themselves why their practice is so different from that of the Italian doctor, why a teacher who can force, coerce, coax, or persuade all the members of a class of thirty children to " acquire " practically the same amount of information about a given fixed number of topics within a given fixed period of time, is called a " good " A MONTESSORI MOTHER 99 teacher? Thej will answer inevitably that chaos and anarchy in the educational world would result from any course of study less fixed than that in their schools. And an impartial observer, both of our schools and of history, might reply that chaos and anarchy have been prophesied every time a more lib- eral form of government, giving more freedom to the individual, has been suggested, anywhere in the world. In any case, the Montessori mother, with the newly acquired apparatus spread out before her, needs to gird herself up for an intellectual enterprise where she will need not only all the strength of her brain, but every atom of ingenuity and mental flexibility which she can bring to bear on her problem. She will do well, of course, to fortify herself in the first place by a careful perusal of Dr. Montessori's own descrip- tion of the apparatus and its use, or by reading any other good manual which she can find. The booklet sent out with the apparatus gives some very useful detailed instructions which it is not necessary to re- peat here, since it comes into the hands of everyone who secures the apparatus. One of the main things for the Montessori mother to remember is that the teachers in the Casa dei Bambini are trained to make whatever explanations are necessary, as brief as pos- sible, given in as few words as they can manage, and with good long periods of silence in between. Much of the apparatus is so ingeniously devised that any normally inventive child needs but to have 100 A MONTESSORI MOTHER it set before him to divine its correct use. The but- toning-frames, and the solid and plane geometric in- sets need not a single word of explanation, even to start the child upon the exercise. But the various rods and blocks, used for the Long and Broad Stair and the Tower, are so much like ordinary building- blocks that, the first time they are presented, the child needs a clear presentation of how to handle them. This can be made an object-lesson conducted in perfect silence ; although later, when the child be- gins to use the sandpaper numbers with them as he learns the series of numbers up to ten, he needs, of course, to be guided in this exercise. With these rods and blocks especially, care should be taken to observe the Montessori rule that ap- paratus is to be used for its proper purpose only, in order to avoid confusion in the child's mind. He should never use the color spools, for instance, to build houses with. Not that, by any means, he should be coaxed to continue the exercises in color if he feels like building houses; but other material should be given him — a pack of cards, building-blocks, small stones, anything handy, but never apparatus in- tended for another exercise. In the exercises for learning the difference between rough and smooth, the child needs at first a little guidance in learning how to draw his finger-tips lightly from left to right over the sandpaper strips ; and in the exercises of discrimination between differ- ent fabrics, he needs someone to tie the bandage over A MONTESSORI MOTHER 101 his eyes and, the first time, to show him how to set to work. A silent object-lesson, or a word or two, are needed to show him how to separate and distinguish between the pieces of wood of different weights in the baric exercises, and a similar introduction is needed to the cylindrical sound-boxes. As he progresses both in age and ability, and be- gins some of the more complicated exercises, he needs a little longer explanation when he begins a new ex- ercise, and a little more supervision to make sure that he has understood the problem. In the later part of the work with plane geometric insets, and in the work with colored crayons, he needs occasional supervision, not to correct the errors he makes, but to see that he keeps the right aim in sight. Of course, when he begins work with the alphabet he needs more real " teaching," since the names of the letters must be told him, and care must be taken that he learns firmly the habit of following their outlines in the right direction, of having them right side up, etc. But throughout one should remember that most " supervision " is meddling, and that one does the child a real injury in correcting a mistake which, with a little more time and experience, he would have been able to correct for himself. It is well to keep in mind, also, that little children, some of them at least, have a peculiarity shared by many of us adults, and that is a nervousness under even silent inspection. I know a lajidscape painter of real ability who is re- 102 A MOXTESSORI MOTHER duced almost to nervous tears and certainly to para- lyzed impotence, b}^ the harmless presence of the group of silent, staring spectators who are apt to gather about a person making a sketch out of doors. Even though we may refrain from actually interfering in the child's fumbling efforts to conquer his own lack of muscular precision, we may wear on him nervously if we e:ive too close an attention to liis efforts. The right thing is to show him (if necessary) what he is to try to do, and then if it arouses his interest so that he sets to work upon it, we will do well to busy ourselves somewhat ostentatiously with something else in the room. Occasionally a child, even a little child, has acquired already the habit of asking for help rather than struggling with an obstacle liimself. The best way to deal with this unfortunate tendency is to proA'ide simpler and simpler exercises until, through making a very slight effort " all himself," the child learns the joy of self -conquest and re-acquires his natural taste for independence. Most of us, with healthy normal children, however, meet with no trouble of this kind. The average child of three, or even younger, set before the solid geometric insets, clears the board for action by the heartiest and most instinctive rejection of any aid, suggestions, or even sympathy. His cry of " Let me do it ! " as he reaches for the little cylinders with one hand and pushes away his would-be instructor with the other, does one's heart good. It is to be seen that Dr. Montessori's demand for A MONTESSORI MOTHER 103 child-liberty does not mean unbridled and unregulated license for him, even intellectual license ; nor does her command to her teachers to let him make his own for- ward advance mean that they are to do nothing for him. They may, indeed, frequently they must, set him carefully on a road not impossibly hard for him, and head him in the right direction. What they are not to do, is to go along with him, pointing out with a flood of words the features of the landscape, smoothing out all the obstacles, and carrying him up all the hills. More important than any of the details in the use of the apparatus is the constant firm intellectual grasp on its ultimate purpose. The Montessori mother must assimilate, into the very marrow of her bones, the fundamental principle underlying every part of every exercise, the principle which she must never forget an instant in all the detailed complexity of its ingenious practical application. She is to re- member constantly that the Montessori exercises are neither games to amuse the children (although they do this to perfection), nor ways for the children to acquire information (although this is also accom- plished admirably, though not so directly as in the kindergarten work). They are, like all truly edu- cative methods, means to teach the child how to learn. It is of no great importance that he shall remember perfectly the form of a square or a tiiangle, or even the sacred cube of Froebelian infant-schools. It is of the highest importance that he shall acquire the men- 104 A MONTESSORI MOTHER tal habit of observing quickly and accurately the form of any object he looks at or touches, because if he does, he will have, as an adult, a vision which will be that of a veritable superman, compared to the un- reliable eyesight on which his parents have had to de- pend for information. It is of no especial im- portance that he shall learn quickly to distinguish with his eyes shut that a piece of maple the same size as a piece of pine is the heavier of the two. It is of the utmost importance that he shall learn to take in accurate information about the phenomena of the world, from whichever sense is most convenient, or from all of them at once, collecting and supple- menting each other as they so seldom do with us badly trained adults. CHAPTER VII THE POSSIBILITY OF AMERICAN ADAPTA- TIONS OF, OR ADDITIONS TO, THE MON- TESSORI APPARATUS HOLDING firmly in mind the guiding principle formulated in the paragraph preceding, it may not be presumptuous for us, in addition to exer- cising our children with the apparatus devised by Dr. Montessori, to attempt to apply her main prin- ciples in ways which she has not happened to hit upon. She herself would be the first to urge us to do this, since she constantly reiterates that she has but begun the practical application of her theories, and she calls for the co-operation of the world in the task of working out complete applications suitable for different conditions. It is my conviction that, as soon as her theories are widely known and fairly well assimilated, she will find, all over the world, a multitude of ingenious co-partners in her enterprise, people who, quite un- conscious of her existence, have been for years ap- proximating her system, although never doing so systematically and thoroughly. Is it not said that each new religion finds a congregation ready-made, of those who have been instinctively practising the as yet unformulated doctrines? 105 106 A MONTESSORI MOTHER An incident in my own life which happened years ago, is an example of this. One of the children of the family, an adored, delicate little boy of five, fell ill while we were all in the country. We sent at once in the greatest haste to the city for a trained nurse, and while awaiting her arrival, devoted ourselves to the task of keeping the child amused and quiet in his little bed. The hours of heart-sickening difficulty and anxiety which followed can be imagined by any- one who has, without experience, embarked on that undertaking. We performed our wildest antics before that pale, listless little spectator, we offered up our choicest possessions for his restless little hands, we set in motion the most complicated of his mechanical toys ; and we quite failed either to please or to quiet him. The nurse arrived, cast one glance at the situation, and swept us out with a gesture. We crept away, exhausted, beaten, wondering by what possible mi- raculous tour de force she meant single-handed to accomplish what had baffled us all, and holding our- selves ready to secure for her anything she thought necessary, were it the horns of the new moon. In a few moments she thrust her head out of the door and asked pleasantly for a basket of clothes-pins, just common wooden clothes-pins. When we were peraiitted to enter the room an hour or so later, our little patient scarcely glanced at us, so absorbed was he in the fascinatingly various angles at which clothes-pins may be thrust into each other's A MONTESSORI MOTHER 107 clefts. When he felt tired, he shut his eyes and rested quietly, and when returning strength brought with it a wave of interest in his own cleverness, he returned to the queer agglomeration of knobby wood which grew magically under his hands. Now Dr. Mon- tessori could not possibly have used that " sensory exercise," as they have no clothes-pins in Italy, fastening their washed garments to wires, with knotted strings ; and the nurse was probably married with children of her own before Dr. Montessori opened the first Casa dei Bambini ; but that was a true Mon- tessori device, and she was a real " natural-born " Montessori teacher. And I am sure that everyone must have in his circle of acquaintances several per- sons who have such an intuitive understanding of children that Dr. Montessori's arguments and theo- ries will seem to them perfectly natural and axiomatic. One of my neighbors, the wife of a farmer, a plain Yankee woman who would be not altogether pleased to hear that she is bringing up her children according to the theories of an inhabitant of Italy, has, by the instinctive action of her own wits, hit upon several inventions which might, without surprising the Di- rectress, be transferred bodily to any Casa dei Bam- bini. All of her children have gone through what she calls the " folding-up fever," and she has laid away in the garret, waiting for the newest baby to grow up to it, the apparatus which has so enchanted and in- structed all the older ones. This " apparatus," to use the. unfortunately mouth-filling and inflated name 108 A MONTESSORI MOTHER which has become attached to Dr. Montessori's simple expedients, is a set of cloths of all shapes and sizes, ranging from a small washcloth to an old bedspread. When the first of mj neighbor's children was a little over three, his mother found him, one hot Tuesday, busily employed in " folding up," that is, crumpling and crushing the fresh shirtwaists which she had just laboriously ironed smooth. She snatched them away from him, as any one of us would have done, but she was nimble-witted enough to view the situation from an impersonal point of view which few of us would have adopted. She really " observed " the child, to use the Montessori phrase ; she put out of her mind with a conscious effort her natural, extreme irritation at having the work of hours destroyed in minutes, and she turned her quick mind to an analysis of the child's action, as acute and sound as any the Roman psychologist has ever made. Not that she was in the least conscious of going through this elaborate mental process. Her own simple narration of what fol- lowed, runs : " I snatched 'em away from him and I was as mad as a homit for a minit or two. And then I got to thinkin' about it. I says to myself, ' He's so little that 'tain't nothin' to him whether shirtwaists are smooth or wrinkled, so he couldn't have taken no satisfaction in bein' mischievous. Seems 's though he was wantin' to fold up things, without really sensin' what he was doin' it with. He's seen me fold things up. There's other things than shirtwaists he could fold, that 'twouldn't A MONTESSORI MOTHER 109 do no harm for him to fuss with.' And I set th' iron down and took a dish-towel out'n the basket and says to him, where he set cryin', ' Here, Buddy, here's somethin' you can fold up.' And he set there for an hour by the clock, foldin' and un- foldin' that thing." That historic dish-towel is still among the " ap- paratus " in her garret. Five children have learned deftness and exactitude of muscular action by means if it, and the sixth is getting to the age when his mother's experienced eye detects in him signs of the " fever." Now, of course, the real difference between that woman and Dr. Montessori, and the real reason why Dr. Montessori's work comes in the nature of a revela- tion of new forces, although hundreds of " natural mothers " long have been using devices strongly re- sembling hers, is that my neighbor hasn't the slightest idea of what she is doing and she has a very erroneous idea of why she is doing it, inasmuch as she regards the fervor of her children for that fascinating sense exercise, as merely a Providential means to enable her to do her housework untroubled by them. She could not possibly convince any other mother of any good reason for following her examples because she is quite ignorant of the good reason. Dr. Montessori, on the other hand, with the keen self-consciousness of its own processes which char- acterizes the trained mind, is perfectly aware He^t not only of wh£|,t she is doing, but of a broadly 110 A MONTESSORI MOTHER fundamental and wholly convincing philosophical reason for doing it ; namely, that the cliild's body is a machine which he will have to use all his life in whatever he does, and the sooner he learns the ac- curate and masterful handling of every cog of this machine the better for him. Now, whenever frontier conditions exist, people generally are forced to learn to employ their senses and muscles much more competently than is possible under the usual modem conditions of specialized labor performed almost entirely away from the home ; and though for most of us the old-fashioned conditions of farm-life so ideal for children, the free roaming of field and wood, the care and responsibility for ani- mals, the knowledge of plant-life, the intimate ac- quaintance with the beauties of the seasons, the en- forced self-dependence in crises, are impossibly out of reach, we can give our children some of the bene- fits to be had from them by analyzing them and seeing exactly which are the elements in them so tonic and invigorating to child-life, and by adapting them to our own changed conditions. There are even a few items which we might take over bodily. A number of families in my acquaintance have inherited from their ancestors odd " games " for children, which follow perfectly the Montessori ideas. One of them is called the " hearth-side seed-game " and is played as the family sits about the hearth in the evening, — though it might just as well be played about a table in the dining-room with the light turned low. Each child A MONTESSORI MOTHER 111 is given a cup of mixed grains, corn, wheat, oats, and buckwheat. The game is a competition to see who can the soonest, by the sense of touch only, separate them into separate piles, and it has an endless fascination for every child who tries it — if he is of the right age, for it is far too fatiguing for the very little ones. Another family makes a competitive game of the daily task of peeling the potatoes and apples needed for the family meals. Once the general prin- ciple of the " Montessori method " is grasped, there is no reason why we should not apply it to every activity of our children. Indeed Dr. Montessori is as impatient as any other philosopher, of a slavishly close and unelastic interpretation of her ideas. Fur- thermore, it is to be remembered that the set of Mon- tessori apparatus was not intended by its inventor to represent all the possible practical applications of her theories. For instance, there are in it none of the devices for gymnastic exercises of the whole body which she recommends so highly, but which as yet she has been able to introduce but little into her schools. Here, too, what she would wish us to do is to make an effort to comprehend intelligently what her general ideas are and then to use our own invention to adapt them to our own conditions. A good example of this is the enlightenment which comes to most of us, after reading her statement about the relative weakness of little children's legs. She calls our attention to the fact that the legs of the new- bom baby are the most negligible members he pos- 112 A MONTESSORI MOTHER sesses, small and weak out of all proportion to his body and arms. Then with an imposing scientific array of carefully gathered statistics, she proves that this disproportion of strength and of size continues during early childhood, up to six or seven. In other words, that a little child's legs are weaker and tire more quickly than the rest of him, and hence he craves not only those exercises which he takes in running about in his usual active play, but others which he can take without bearing all his weight on his still rather boneless lower extremities. This fact, although doubtless it has been common property among doctors for many years, was en- tirely new to me ; and probably will be to many of the mothers who read this book, but an ingenious per- son has only to hear it to think at once of a num- ber of exercises based on it. Dr. Montessori herself suggests a little fence on which the children can walk along sideways, supporting part of their weight with their arms. She also describes a swing with a seat so long that the child's legs stretched out in front of him are entirely supported by it, and which is hung before a wall or board against which the child presses his feet as he swings up to it, thus keeping himself in motion. These devices are both so simple that almost any child might have the benefit of them, but even without them it is possible to profit by the above bit of physiological information, if it is only by restraining ourselves from forbidding a child the in- stinctive gesture we must all have seen, when he A MONTESSORI MOTHER 113 throws himself on his stomach across a chair and kicks his hanging legs. If all the chairs in the house are too good to allow this exercise, or if it shocks too much the adult ideas of propriety, a bench or kitchen- chair out under the trees will serve the same purpose. Everyone who is familiar with the habits of natural children, or who remembers his own childish passions, knows how they are almost irresistibly fascinated by a ladder, and always greatly prefer it to a stair- case. The reason is apparent. After early infancy they are not allowed to go upstairs on their hands and knees, but are taught, and rightly taught, to lift the whole weight of their bodies with their legs, the in- herent weakness of which we have just learned. Of course this very exercise in moderation is just what weak legs need ; but why not furnish also a length of ladder out of doors, short enough so that a fall on the pile of hay or straw at the foot will not be seri- ous.'^ As a matter of fact, you will be astonished to see that even with a child as young as three, the hay or straw is only needed to calm your own mind. The child has no more need of it than you, nor so much, his little hands and feet clinging prehensilcly to the rounds of the ladder as he delightedly ascends and descends this substitute for the original tree-home. The single board about six inches wide and three or four inches from the ground (a length of joist or studding serves very well) along which the child walks and runs, is an exercise for equilibrium which is elsewhere described (page 149). This can be 114 A MONTESSORI MOTHER varied, as he grows in strength and poise, by having him try some of the simpler rope-walking tricks of balance, walking on the board with one foot, or back- ward, or with his eyes shut. It is fairly safe to say, however, that having provided the board, you need exercise your own ingenuity no further in the mat- ter. The variety and number of exercises of the sort which a group of active children can devise goes far beyond anything the adult brain could conceive. The exercises with water are described (page 151). These also can be varied to infinity, by the use of receptacles of different shapes, bottles with wide or narrow mouths, etc. The folding-up exercises seem to me excellent, and the hearth-side seed-game is, in a modified form, al- ready in use in the Casa dei Bambini. Small, low see-saws, the right size for very young children, are of great help in aiding the little one to learn the trick of balancing himself under all conditions ; and let us remember that the sooner he learns this all- important secret of equilibrium, the better for him, since he will not have the heavy handicap of the bad habit of uncertain, awkward, misdirected movements, and he will never know the disheartening mental dis- tress of lack of confidence in his own ability deftly, strongly, and automatically to manage his own body under all ordinary circumstances. A very tiny spring-board, ending over a heap of hay, is another expedient for teaching three- and four-year-olds that they need not necessarily fall in A MONTESSORI MOTHER 115 a heap if their balance is quickly altered. If this simple device is too hard to secure, a substitute which any woman and even an older child can ar- range for a little one, is a long thin board, with plenty of " give " to it, supported at each end by big stones, or by two or three bits of wood. The little child bouncing up and down on this and " jumping himself off " into soft sand, or into a pile of hay, learns un- consciously so many of the secrets of bodily poise that walking straight soon becomes a foregone con- clusion. One of the blindfold games in use in Montessori schools is played with wooden solids of different shapes, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, etc. The blind- folded child picks these, one at a time, out of the pile before him and identifies each by his sense of touch. In our family this has become an after-dinner game, played in the leisure moments before we all push away from the table and go about our own affairs, and managed with a napkin for blindfold, and with the table-furnishings for apparatus. The identification of different stuffs, velvet, cot- ton, satin, woolen, etc., can be managed in any house which possesses a rag-bag. I do not see why the pos- session of a doll, preferably a rag-doll, should not be as valuable as the Montessori frames. Most dolls are so small that the hooks and eyes and the buttons and buttonholes on their minute garments are too difficult for little fingers to manage, whereas a doll which could wear the child's own clothes would cer- 116 A MONTESSORI MOTHER tainly teach him more about the geography of his raiment than any amount of precept. I can lay no claim to originality in this idea. It was suggested to my mind by the constant appearance in new cos- tumes of the big Teddy-bear of a three-year-old child, whose impassioned struggles with the buttons of her bear's clothes forms the most admirable of self- imposed manual gymnastics. Lastly, it must not be forgotten that the " sets of Montessori apparatus " must be supplemented by sev- eral articles of child-furniture. There is not in it the little light table, the small low chair so necessary for children's comfort and for their acquiring cor- rect, agreeable habits of bodily posture. Such little chairs are easily to be secured but, alas ! rarely found in even the most prosperous households. We must not forget the need for a low washstand with light and easily handled equipment; the hooks set low enough for little arms to reach up to them, so that later we shall not have to struggle with the habit fixed in the eight-year-old boy, of careless irresponsibility about those of his clothes which are not on his back; the small brooms and dust-pans so that tiny girls will take it as a matter of course that they are as much interested as their mothers in the cleanliness of a room ; in short, all the devices possible to contrive to make a little child really at home in his father's house. CHAPTER VIII SOME REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYSTEM WHEN I first began to understand to some extent the thoroughgoing radicalism of the philosophy of liberty which underlies all the intricate detail of Dr. Montessori's system, I used to wonder why it went home to me with such a sudden inward conviction of its truth, and why it moved me so strangely, almost as the conversion to a new religion. This Italian woman is not the first, by any means, to speak eloquently of the righteousness of personal lib- erty. As far back as Rabelais' " Fay ce que vouldras " someone was feeling and expressing that. Even the righteousness of such liberty for the child is no invention of hers. Jean Jacques Rousseau's " Emile," in spite of all its disingenuous evading of the principle in practice, was founded on it in theory ; and Froebel had as clear a vision as any seer, as Montessori herself, of just the liberty his followers admit in theory and find it so hard to allow in practice. Why, then, should those who come to Rome to study the Montessori work, stammerers though they might be, wish, all of them, to go away and prophesy? For almost without exception this was the common 117 118 A MONTESSORI MOTHER result among the widely diverse national types I saw in Rome; always granting, of course, that they had seen one of the good schools and not those which present a farcical caricature of the method. In thinking the matter over since, I have come to the conclusion that the vividness of inward convic- tion arises from the fact that the founder of this " new " philosophy bases it on the theory of democ- racy ; and there is no denying that the world to-day is democratic, that we honestly in our heart of hearts believe, as we believe in the law of gravity, that, on the whole, democracy, for all its shortcomings, has in it the germ of the ideal society of the future. Now, our own democracy was based, a hundred or so years ago, on the idea that men reach their high- est development only when they have, for the growth of their individuality, the utmost possible freedom which can be granted them without interfering with the rights and freedom of others. Little by little dur- ing the last half-century the idea has grown that, inasmuch as women form half the race, the betterment of the whole social group might be hastened if this beneficial principle were applied to them. If you will imagine yourself living sixty or so years ago, when, to conservative minds, this idea of personal liberty for women was like the sight of dynamite under the foundations of society, and to radical minds shone like the dawn of a brighter day, you can imagine how startling and thrilling is the first glimpse of its application to children. I felt, A MONTESSORI MOTHER 119 during the beginning of my consideration of the question, all the sharp pangs of intellectual growing- pains which must have racked my grandfather when it first occurred to him that my grandmother was a human being like himself, who would very likely thrive under the same conditions which were good for him. For, just as my grandfather, in spite of the sincerest affection for his wife, had never conceived that he might be doing her an injury by insisting on doing her thinking for her, so I, for all my love for my children, had never once thought that, by my competent, loving " management " of them, I might be starving and stunting some of their most valuable moral and intellectual qualities. In theory I instantly granted this principle of as much personal liberty as possible for children. I could not help granting it, pushed irresistibly for- ward as I was by the generations of my voting, self- governing ancestors ; but the resultant splintering up- heaval of all my preconceived ideas about children was portentous. The first thing that Dr. Montessori's penetrating and daring eye had seen in her survey of the problem of education, and the fact to which she devotes throughout her most forceful, direct, and pungent explanation, had simply never occurred to me, in spite of Froebel's mild divination of it; namely, that chil- dren are nothing more or less than human beings. I was as astonished by this fact as I was amazed that I had not thought of it myself ; and I instantly per- 120 A MONTESSORI MOTHER ceived a long train of consequences leading off from it to a wholly unexplored country. True, children are not exactly like adults ; but then, neither are women exactly like men, nor are slow, phlegmatic men exactly like the red-headed, quick-tempered type ; but they all belong to the genus of human beings, and those principles which slow centuries of progress have proved true about the genus as a whole hold true about subdivisions of it. Children are much weaker physically than most adults, their judgment is not so seasoned by experience, and their attention is more fit- ful. Hence, on the whole, they need more guidance than grown-ups. But, on the other hand, the motives, the instincts, the needs, the potential capacities of chil- dren are all human and nothing but human. Their resemblances to adults are a thousand times more numerous and vital than their differences. What is good for the one must, in a not excessively modified form, be good for the other. With this obvious fact firmly in mind. Dr. Mon- tessori simply looked back over history and drew upon the stores of the world's painfully acquired wisdom as to the best way to extract the greatest possibilities from the world's inhabitants. If it is true, she rea- soned, that men and women have reached their highest development only when they have had the utmost pos- sible liberty for the growth of their individualities, if it is true that slavery has been the most ruinously unsatisfactory of all social expedients, both for mas- ters and slaves, if society has found it necessary for A MONTESSORI MOTHER 121 its own good to abolish not only slavery but caste laws and even guild rules ; if, with all its faults, we are agreed that democracy works better than the wisest of paternal despotisms, then it ought to be true that in the schoolroom's miniature copy of so- ciety there should be less paternal despotism, more democracy, less uniformity of regulation and more, — very much more, — individuality. Therefore, although we cannot allow children as much practical freedom as that suitable for men of ripe experience, it is apparent that it is our first duty as parents to make every effort to give them as full a measure of liberty as possible, exercising our utmost ingenuity to make the family life an enlightened democracy. But this is not an easy matter. A democracy, being a much more complicated machine than an autocracy, is always harder to organize and conduct. Moreover the family is so old a human in- stitution that, like everything else very old, it has acquired barnacle-like accretions of irrelevant tradi- tion. Elements of Russian tyranny have existed in the institution of the family so long that our very familiarity with them prevents us from recognizing them without an effort, and prevents our conceiving family life without them ; quite as though in this age of dentistry, we should find it difficult to conceive of old age without the good old characteristic of tooth- lessness. To renovate this valuable institution of the family (and one of the unconscious aims of the Mon- tessori system is nothing more or less than the renova- 122 A MONTESSORI MOTHER tion of family life), we must engage upon a daily battle with our own moral and intellectual inertia, rising each morning with a fresh resolve to scrutinize with new eyes our relations to our children. We must realize that the idea of the innate " divine right of parents " is as exploded an idea as the " divine right of kings." Fathers and mothers and kings nowadays hold their positions rightfully only on the same con- ditions as those governing other modern office-holders, that they are better fitted for the job than anyone else. I speak from poignant personal experience of the difficulty of holding this conception in mind. When I said above that I " saw at once a long train of consequences following this new principle of personal liberty for children," I much overstated my own acu- men; for I am continually perceiving that I saw these consequences but very vaguely through the dimmed glasses of my unconscious, hidebound con- servatism, and I am constantly being startled by the possibility of some new, although very simple ap^ plication of it in my daily contact with the child- world. A wholesome mental exercise in this connec- tion is to run over in one's mind the dramatic changes in human ideas about family life which have taken place gradually from the Roman rule that the father was the governor, executioner, lawgiver, and absolute autocrat, down to our own days. For all our cling- ing to the idea of a closely intimate family-life, most of us would turn with horror from any attempt to re- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 123 turn to such tyranny as that even of our own Puritan forebears. It is possible that our descendants may look back on our present organization with as much astonished and uncomprehending revulsion. The principle, then, of the Montessori school is the ideal principle of democracy, namely, that human beings reach their highest development (and hence are of most use to society) only when for the growth of their individuality they have the utmost possible liberty which can be granted them without interfering with the rights of others. Now, when Dr. Montessori, five years ago, founded the first Casa dei Bambini, she not only believed in that principle but she saw that children are as human as any of us ; and, acting with that precipitate Latin faith in logic as a guide to practical conduct which is so startling to Anglo- Saxons, she put these two convictions into actual practice. The result has electrified the world. She took as her motto the old, old, ever-misunder- stood one of " Liberty ! " — that liberty which we still distrust so profoundly in spite of the innumerable hard knocks with which the centuries have taught us it is the only law of life. She was convinced that the " necessity for school discipline " is only another ex- pression of humanity's enduring suspicion of that freedom which is so essential to its welfare, and that schoolroom rules for silence, for immobility, for uni- formity of studies and of results, are of the same nature and as outworn as caste rules in the world of adults, or laws against the free choice of residence 124. A MONTESSORI MOTHER for a workman, against the free choice of a profession for women, against the free advance of any individual to any position of responsibility which he is capable of filling. All over again in this new field of education Dr. Montessori fought the old fight against the old idea that liberty means red caps and riots and guillotines. All afresh, as though the world had never learned the lesson, she was obliged to show that liberty means the only lasting road to order and discipline and self- control. Once again, for the thousandth time, people needed to be reminded that the reign of the tyrant who imposes laws on human souls from the outside (even though that tyrant intends nothing but the best for his subjects and be called " teacher"), produces smothered rebellion, or apathy, or broken submissive- ness, but never energetic, forward progress. For this constant turning to that trust in the safety of freedom which is perhaps the only lasting spiritual conquest of our time, is the keynote of her system. This is the real answer to the question, " What is there in the Montessori method which is so different from all other educational methods ? " This is the vital principle often overlooked in the fertility of invention and scientific ingenuity with which she has applied it. This reverence for the child's personality, this su- preme faith that liberty of action is not only safe to give children, but is the prerequisite of their growth, is the rock on which the edifice of her sys- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 125 tern is being raised. It is also the rock on which the barks of many investigators are wrecked. When they realize that she really puts her theory into exe- cution, they cry out aghast, " What ! a school with- out a rule for silence, for immobility, a school with- out fixed seats, without stationary desks, where chil- dren may sit on the floor if they like, or walk about as they please; a school where children may play all day if they choose, may select their own occupations, where the teacher is always silent and in the back- ground — why, that is no school at all — it is anarchy ! " One seems to hear faint echoes from another gen- eration crying out, " What ! a society without hereditary aristocracy, without a caste system, where a rail-splitter may become supreme governor, where people may decide for themselves what to believe without respect for authority, and may choose how they wish to earn their livings, . . . this is no society at all ! It is anarchy ! " Dr. Montessori has two answers to make to such doubters. One is that the rule in her schools, like the rule in civilized society, is that no act is allowed which transgresses against the common welfare, or is in itself uncomely or off*ensive. That the children are free, does not mean that they may throw books at each other's heads, or light a bonfire on the floor, any more than free citizens of a republic may obstruct traffic, or run a drain into the water-supply of a town. It means simply that they are subject to no unnecessary resti^aint, and above all to no meddling 126 A MONTESSORI MOTHER with their instinctive private preferences. The second answer, even more convincing to hard-headed people than the first, is the work done in the Case dei Bam- bini, where every detail of the Montessori theory has been more than proved, with an abundance of con- firmatory detail which astonishes even Dr. Montessori herself. The bugbear of discipline simply does not exist for these schools. By taking advantage of their natural instincts and tendencies, the children are made to perform feats of self-abnegation, self-control, and collective discipline, impossible to obtain under the most rigid application of the old rules, and, as for the amount of information acquired unconsciously and painlessly by those babies, it is one of the fairy- stories of modem times. CHAPTER IX APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY TO AMERICAN HOME LIFE NATURALLY, the question which concerns us is, how the spiritual discoveries made in this new institution in a far-away city of Italy, can be used to benefit our own children, in our own everyday, American family life. It must be stated uncom- promisingly, to begin with, that they can be applied to our daily lives only if we experience a " change of heart." The use of the vernacular of rehgion in this connection is not inappropriate, for what we are facing, in these new principles, is a new phase of the religion of humanity. We are simply, at last, to include children in humanity, and since despotism, even the most enlightened varieties of it, has been proved harmful to humanity, we are to abstain from being their despots, even their paternal, wise, and devoted despots. This does not mean that they are not to live under some form of government of which we are the head. We have as much right to safeguard their interests against their own weak- nesses as society has to safeguard ours, in forbid- ding grade railways in big cities for instance, but we have no more .right than society has to interfere 127 128 A MONTESSORI MOTHER with inoffensive individual tastes, preferences, needs, and, above all, initiative. At this point I can hear in my mind's ear a chorus of indignant parents' voices, crying out that nothing is further from their theory or practice than despotism over the children, and that, so far from ruling their little ones, they are the absolute slaves of their offspring (forgetting that in many cases there is no more despotic master than a slave of old standing). To answer this natural protest I wish here to be allowed a digression for the pur- pose of attempting a brief analysis of a trait of human egotism, the understanding of which bears closely on this phase of the relations of parent and child. I refer to the instinctive pleasure taken by us all in the dependence of someone upon us. This is so closely connected with benevolence that it is usually wholly unrecognized as a separate and quite different characteristic. Even when it is seen, it is identified only by those who suffer from it, and any intimation of its existence on their part savors so nearly of ingratitude that they have not, as a rule, ventured to complain of what is frequently an almost intolerable tyranny. Just as it is the spiteful member of a family who is the only one to blurt out home-truths which run counter to the traditional family illusions, so it is only a thoroughly bad- tempered analyst, one who takes a malicious pleasure in dwelling on human meannesses, who can perform A MONTESSORI MOTHER 129 the useful function of diagnosing this little suspected, very prevalent, human vice. Here is the sardonic Hazlitt, derisively relieving his mind on the subject of benefactors. "... Ben- efits are often conferred out of ostentation or pride. As the principle of action is a love of power, the complacency in the object of friendly regard ceases with the opportunity or the necessity for the manifest display of power ; and when the unfortunate protege is just coming to land and expects a last helping hand, he is, to his surprise, pushed back in order that he may be saved from drowning once more. You are not haled ashore as you had supposed by those kind friends, as a mutual triumph, after all your struggles and their exertions on your behalf. It is a piece of presumption in you to be seen walk- ing on terra fiiTna; you are required at the risk of their friendship to be always swimming in troubled waters that they may have the credit of throwing out ropes and sending out life-boats to you without ever bringing you ashore. The instant you can go alone, or can stand on your own ground, you are discarded." Now the majority of us in these piping times of mediocrity have no grounds, fancied or real, for as- suming the role of tyrannical Providence to other people. But the instinct, in spite of the decreased opportunity for its exercise, is none the less alive in our hearts; and when chance throws in our way a little child, our .primitive, instinctive affection for 130 A MONTESSORI MOTHER whom confuses in our minds the motives underlying our pseudo-benevolent actions, do we not wreak upon it unconsciously all that latent desire to be depended upon, to be the stronger, to be looked up to, to gloat over the weakness of another? If this seems an exaggerated statement, consider for a moment the real significance of the feeling expressed by the mothers we have all met, when they cry, " Oh, I can't bear to have the babies grow up ! " and when they refuse to correct the pretty, lisping, inarticulate baby talk. I have been one of those mothers myself, and I certainly would have regarded as malicious and spiteful any person who had told me that my feelings sprang from almost unadul- terated egotism, and that I " couldn't bear to have the babies grow up " because I wanted to continue longer in my complacent, self-assumed role of God, that I wished to be surrounded by little sycophants who, knowing no standard but my personality, could not judge me as anything but infallible, and that I was wilfully keeping the children granted me by a kind Heaven as weak and dependent on me as pos- sible that they might continue to secrete more food for my egotism. What I now see to be a plain statement of the ugly truth underlying my sentimental reluctance to have the babies grow up would have seemed to me the most heartless attack on mother-love. It now occurs to me that mother-love should be some- thing infinitely more searching and subtle. Modern A MONTESSORI MOTHER 131 society with its enforced drains and vaccinations and milk inspection and pure-food laws does much of the physical protecting which used to fall to the lot of mothers. Our part should not be, like be- wildered bees, to live idly on the accumulation of virtues achieved for us by the hard won battles of our ancestors against their lower physical instincts ; but to catch up the standard and advance into the harder battle against the hidden, treacherous am- bushes of egotism, to conceive a new, liigh devotion for our children, a devotion which has in it courage for them as well as care for them; which is made up of faith in their better, stronger natures, as well as love for them, and which begins by the ruthless slaughter, so far as we can reach it, of the selfishness which makes us take pleasure in their dependence on us, rather than in seeing them grow (even though it may mean away from us) in the ability wisely to regulate their own lives. We must take care that we mothers do not treat our children as we reproach men for having treated women, with patronizing, enfeebling protection. We must learn to wish, above all things, to see the babies grow up since there is no condition (for any creature not a baby) more revolting than babyishness, just as there is no state more humiliating (for any but a child) than childishness. Let us learn to be ashamed of our too imperious care, which deprives them of every chance for action, for self-reliance, for fighting doTj^n their own weaknesses, which 132 A MONTESSORI MOTHER snatches away from them every opportunity to strengthen themselves by overcoming obstacles. We must learn to see in a little child not only a much- loved little body, informed by a will more or less pliable to our own, but a valiant spirit, longing for the exercise of its own powers, powers which are different from ours, from those of every human being who has ever existed. There is no danger that in combating this subtle vice, we will fall back into the grosser one of physical tyranny over women, children, or the poor. That step forward lias been taken conclusively. That ques- tion has been settled for all time and has been crystallized in popular opinion. We may still tyran- nize coarsely over the weak, but we are quite con- scious that we are doing something to be ashamed of. We can therefore, without fear of reactionary setbacks, devote ourselves to creating a popular con- sciousness of the sin of moral and intellectual tyranny. Now all this reasoning has been conducted by means of abstract ideas and big words. It may seem hardly applicable to the relations of an affec- tionate parent with his three-year-old child. How, practically, concretely, at once, to-day, can we be- gin to avoid paternal despotism over little children? To begin with, by giving them the practical train- ing necessary to physical independence of life. Any- one who knows a woman who lived in the South during the old regime must have heard stories of the pathetic, grotesque helplessness to which the rich white popula- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 133 tion was reduced by the presence and personal service of the slaves . . . the grown women who could not button their own shoes, the grown men who had never in their lives assembled all the articles necessary for a complete toilet. Dr. Montessori says, " The para- lytic who cannot take off his boots because of a patho- logical fact, and the prince who dare not take them off because of a social fact, are in reality reduced to the same condition." How many mothers whose willing fingers linger lovingly over the buttons and strings and hooks and eyes of the little costume are putting themselves in the pernicious attitude of the slave? How many other bustling, competent, quick- stepping mothers, dressing and undressing, washing and feeding and regulating their children, as though they were little automata, because " it's so much easier to do it for them than to bother to teach them how to do it," are reducing the little ones to a state of practical paralysis.? As if ease were the aim of a mother in her relations to her child ! It would be easier, as far as that is concerned, to eat the child's meals for it ; and a study of the " competent " brand of mother almost leads one to suspect that only the physical impossibility of this substituted activity keeps it from being put into practice. The too loving mother, the one who is too competent, the one who is too wedded to the regularity of her house- hold routine, the impatient mother, the one who is " no teacher and never can tell anybody how to do things," all these diverse personalities, though acta- 134 A MONTESSORI MOTHER ated by quite differing motives, are doing the same thing, unconsciously, benevolently, overbearingly in- sisting upon living the child's life for him. But it is evident that simpl}^ keeping our hands off is not enough. To begin with the process of dressing himself, the first in order of the day's routine, a child of three, with no training, turned loose with the usual outfit of clothes, could never dress himself in the longest day of the year. And here, with a serious problem to be solved, we are back beside the buttoning boy of the Children's Home. The child must learn how to be independent, as he must learn how to be anything else that is worth being, and the only excuse for existence of a parent is the possibility of his furnishing the means for the child to acquire this information with all speed. Let us take a long look at the buttoning boy over there in Rome and return to our own three-year-old for a more systematic survey of his problem, which is none other than the beginning of his emancipation from the prison of babyishness. Let him learn the different ways of fastening garments together on the Montessori frames if you have them, or in any other way your ingenuity can devise. Old garments of your own, put on a cheap dress form, are not a bad substitute for that part of the Montessori apparatus, or the large doll suggested on page 115 may serve. Then apply your mind, difficult as that process is for all of us, to the simplification of the child's costumes, even if you are led into such an unheard- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 135 of innovation as fastening the little waists and dresses up the front. Let me wonder, parenthetically, why children's clothes should all be fastened at the back? Men manage to protect themselves from the weather on the opposite principle. Then, finally, give him time to learn and to practise the new process ; and time is one of the necessary elements of life most often denied to little children, who always take vastly longer than we do to complete a given process. I am myself a devoted adherent of the clock, and cannot endure the formless irregularity of a daily life without fixed hours, so that I do not speak without a keen realization of the fact that time cannot be granted to little children to live their own lives, without our undergoing considerable in- convenience, no matter how ingeniously we arrange the matter. We must feel a whole-hearted willing- ness to forego a superfluity in life for the sake of safeguarding an essential of life. When I feel the temptation, into which my impatient tempera- ment is constantly leading me, to perform some action for a child which he would better do for him- self, because his slowness interferes with my house- hold schedule, I bring rigorously to mind the Mon- tessori teacher who did not tuck in the child's napkin. And I severely scrutinize the household process, the regularity of which is being upset, to see if that regularity is really worth a check to the child's growth in self-dependence. Once in a while it really does seem to me, on 136 A MONTESSORI MOTHER mature consideration, that regularity is worth that sacrifice, but so seldom as to be astonishing. One of the few instances is the regularity of the three meals a day. This seems to be an excellent means of inculcating real social feeling in the child, of making him understand the necessity for occasional sacrifices of individual desires to benefit the common weal. One should take care not to neglect or pass over the few genuine opportunities in the life of a little child, when he may feel that in common with the rest of the family he is making a sacrifice which counts for the sake of the common good. But most other situations yield very different results when analyzed. For instance, if a child must dress in a cold room it is better for an adult to stuff the little arms and legs into the clothes with all haste, rather than run the risk of chilling the child. But as a rule, if the conditions are really honestly examined, these two alternatives are seen not to be the only ones. He is set perhaps to dress in a cold room because we have a tradition that it is " messy " and " common " to have dressing and undressing going on anywhere except in a bedroom. The question I must then ask myself is no longer, " Is there not danger that the child will take cold if I give him time to dress himself? " but, " Is the ordered respectability of my warm parlor worth a check to my child's normal growth? " And it is to some such quite unexpected question that one is constantly led by the attempt really to A MONTESSORI MOTHER 137 analyze the various restrictions we put upon the child's freedom to live his own life. These restric- tions multiply in such a perverse ratio with the material prosperity and conventionality of our lives that it is a truism that the children of the very poor fare better than ours in the opportunities offered them for the development of self-reliance, self-con- trol, and independence, almost the most valuable out- fit for the battle of life a human being can have. It is impossible, of course, to consider here all the processes of the child's day in as minute detail as this question of his morning toilet. But the same procedure of " hands off " should be followed, because help that is not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing organism. It is well to put strings for your vines to climb up, but it does them no good to have you try to " help " them by pulling on the tips of the tendrils. The little child should be allowed time to wash his own face and hands, to brush his teeth, and to feed himself, although it would be quicker to continue our Strasbourg goose tradition of stuffing him ourselves. He should, as soon as possible, learn to put on and take off his own wraps, hat, and rubbers. He should carry his own playthings, should learn to open and shut doors, go up and down stairs freely, hang up his own clothes (hooks placed low must not be forgotten), and look himself for articles he has misplaced. Adults who, for the first time, try this regime with little children are astonished to find that it is 138 A MONTESSORI MOTHER not the patience of the little child, but their own, which is inadequate. A child (if he is young enough not to have acquired the invalid's habit of being waited upon) will persevere unendingly through a series of grotesquely awkward attempts, for instance, to climb upon an adult's chair. The sight of this la- borious attempt to accomplish a perfectly easy feat reduces his quick-stepping, competent mother to nervous fidgets, requiring all her self-control to resist. She is almost irresistibly driven to rushing forward and lifting him up. If she does, she is very apt to see him slide to the floor and begin all over again. It is not elevation to the chair which he desires. It is the capacity to attain it himself, unaided, which is his goal, a goal like all others in his life which his mother cannot reach for him. And if all this sounds too troublesome and com- plicated, let it be remembered that the Children's Home looms close at hand, ominously ready to de- vote itself to making conditions exactly right for the child's growth, never impatient, with no other aim in life and no other occupation but to do what is best for the child. If we are to be allowed to keep our children with us, we must prove worthy the sacred trust. For, practically, the highly successful existence of the Casa dei Bambini, keeping the children as it does all day, takes for granted that the average parent cannot or will not make the average home into a place really suited for the development of Materials for Teaching Rough axd S3100TH. Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir A MONTESSORI MOTHER 139 small children. It is visibly apparent that, as far as physical surroundings are concerned, he is Gulli- ver struggling with the conditions of Brobdingnag. He eats his meals from a table as high for him as the mantelpiece would be for us, he climbs up and down stairs with the painful effort we expend on the ascent of the Pyramids, he gets into an armchair as we would climb into a tree, and he can no more alter the position of it than we could that of the tree. As for the conduct of life, he is considered " naughty " if he interferes with adult occupations, which, going on all about him all the time and being entirely incomprehensible to him, are very difficult to avoid ; and he is " good " like the " good Indian " according to the degree of his silent passivity. When we return after a brief absence and inquire of a little child, " Have you been a good child.'' " do we not mean simply, " Have you been as little inconvenient as possible to your elders ^ " To most of us who are honest with ourselves it comes as rather a sur- prise that this standard of virtue should not be the natural and inevitable one. I leave to the last chapter the question, a most searching and painful one for me, as to whether the Casa dei Bambini will not ultimately be the Home for all our children, and here confine myself to the statement, which no unprejudiced mind can deny, that such an institution, arranged as it has been with the most single-hearted desire to further the chil- dren's interests, i's now better adapted for child-life 140 A MONTESSORI MOTHER than our average homes, into which children may be welcomed lovingly, but which are adapted in every detail of their material, intellectual, and spiritual life for adults only. It is my firm conviction that, in my own case, a working compromise may be effected, thanks to my alarmed jealousy of the greater perfection of the Montessori Children's Home; but I realize that it required the alarming sight and study of that institution to make me see that I was forcing my children to live under a great many unnecessary restrictions. And, if there is one thing above all others to be kept in mind by a convert to these new ideas it is that an unnecessary restriction m a child's life is a crime. The most puritanical soul among us must see that there are quite enough necessary restrictions for the child, if they are all recognized and rigorously obeyed, to serve as dis- ciplinary forces to the most turbulent nature. CHAPTER X SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON THE NATURE OF "DISCIPLINE" WITH the last affirmation of the preceding chapter I have brought myself to another bed-rock principle of this new religion of childhood, one which at first I was unable to understand and hence to accept. In my very blood there runs that conviction of the necessity for discipline which colored so profoundly all early New England life. At the sight of this too-pleasant and too-smiling world of children, some old Puritan of an ancestor sprang to life in me and cried out sourly, " But it's good for children to do what they don't like to do, and to keep on with something after they want to stop. They must in later life. They should begin now." The answer to this objection is one I have had practically to work out for myself, since the Italian exponents of the system, having back of them an un- broken line of life-loving and life-trusting Latin fore- fathers, found it practically impossible to understand what was in my mind. There was much talk of "dis- cipline" in their discussion of the theories of the method; but evidently they did not attach the same meaning to the word as the one I had been trained to 141 142 A MONTESSORI MOTHER use. This fact led me to meditate on what I myself really meant by discipline: a process of definition which, as it always does, clarified my ideas and proved them in some respects quite different from what I had thought them. Discipline means, of course, " the capacity for self-control." I had no sooner formulated this defini- tion than I saw that I had been, in my practical use of the word, omitting half of it, and that the vital half. It was not discipline I had been vainly seeking at the Casa dei Bambini, it was compulsion. Now, compulsion is a force very much handier to use in education than self-control, since it depends on the adult and not on the child, and practically any adult with a club (physical or moral) can compass it, if the child in his power is small enough. But the most elementary experience of life proves that the effects of compulsion last exactly as long as the physical or moral club can be applied. Evidently its use can scarcely prepare the child for the search- ing tests of independent adult life when no one has any longer even a pseudo-right to club him into moral action. And yet self-control, like all other vital processes of individual life, is tantalizingly elusive and subtle. My untrained mind, face to face at last with the real problem, despaired of securing this real self-control and not the valueless compulsory obedience to exter- nal force or persuasion with which I had been con- fusing it. I saw that it is secured in the Children's A MONTESSORI MOTHER 143 Home and betook myself once more to an examina- tion of their methods. Their method for solving this problem is like the one they use in all other problems of child-life. They use the adult brain to analyze minutely all the com- plex processes involved, and then they begin at the beginning to teach the children all the different ac- tions, one after another. For instance, the capacity for close, consecutive attention to any undertaking is a very valuable form of self-control and self-discipline (one which a good many adults have never mastered). The natural tendency of childhood, as of all untrained humanity, is for flightiness, for mental vagrancy, for picking up and fitfully dropping an enterprise. It is obvious that the sternest of external so-called discipline can- not lay a finger on this particular mental fault, be- cause all it can command is physical obedience, which ceases when the compulsion is no longer active. In the Children's Home, the child is provided with a task so exactly suited to the instinctive needs of his grow- ing organism, that his own spontaneous interest in it overcomes his own equally spontaneous aversion to mental concentration. Later on in life he must learn to concentrate mentally, whether he feels a strong spontaneous interest in the subject or not; but it is evident that he cannot do that, if he has not learned first to control his wandering wits when the sub- ject does interest him. And that this last is not the perfectly easy undertaking it seems, is apparent when 1445 A MONTESSORI MOTHER one considers all the hopelessly flighty women there are in the world, who could not, to save their lives, mentally concentrate on anything. The Montessori apparatus sets a valuable vital force in the child's own intellectual make-up to master an undesirable instinct, and naturally the valuable force grows stronger with every exercise of its power, just as a muscle does. The little boy who was so much inter- ested in his buttoning-frame that he stuck to his enterprise from beginning to end without so much as glancing up at the activities of the other children, showed real self-control, even though it was not asso- ciated with the element of pain which my grim an- cestors led me to think was essential. It is true that self-control in the face of pain or indiff^erence is a necessary element in adult moral and intellectual life, but it now appears that, like every other factor in life, it must start from small begin- nings and grow slowly. The buttoning boy showed not only self-control, but the only variety of it which a baby is capable of manifesting. When I had the notion that I ought (for his own good, of course) to demand of him self-control in the face of pain, even of a very small pain, I was asking something which he could not as yet give, and of which compul- sory obedience could only obtain an empty and mis- leading appearance, an appearance really harmful to the child's best interests since it completely blinded me to the fact that he had not made the least begin- ning towards attaining a real self-control. He must A MONTESSORI MOTHER 145 begin slowly to learn self-control, as he must begin slowly to learn how to walk. I am quite satisfied if he takes a single step at first, because I know that is the essential. If he can do that, he will ultimately learn to climb a mountain. If he can overcome the naturally vagrant impulses of his mind through in- tellectual interest (for it is none other) in the com- pletion of his task of buttoning up the cloth on his frame, he has begun a mental habit the value of which cannot be overestimated, and which will later, in its full development, make it possible for him to master calculus without the agonizing, too-tardy ef- fort at mental self-control which embittered my own struggle with that subject. From time immemorial, the child himself has al- ways instinctively used in his games and plays this method of learning self-control and mental concen- tration, as much as adults would allow him. The ad- mirable, thoroughgoing concentration of a child on a game of marbles or ball is proverbial ; but while the rest of us, with some unsystematic exceptions, have looked idly on at this great natural stream of mental vigor pouring itself out in profusion before our eyes, Dr. Montessori has stepped in with an ingeniously devised waterwheel and set it to work. The child in the Casa dei Bambini advances from one scientifically graded stage of mental self-control to the next, from the buttoning-frames to the geo- metric insets, from these to their use in drawing and the control of the .pencil, and then on into the mas- 146 A MONTESSORI MOTHER tery of the alphabet, always with a greater and greater control of the processes of his mind. The control of the processes of his body are learned in the same analyzed, gradual progression from the easy to the difficult. He learns in the " lesson of silence " how to do nothing with his body, an accom- plishment which his fidgety elders have never ac- quired ; he learns in all the sensory exercises the com- plete control of his five servants, his senses ; and in moving freely about the furniture suited to his size, in handling things small enough for him to manage, in transferring objects from one place to another, he learns how to go deftly through all the ordinary operations of everyday life. This physical adroitness has a vitally close re- lation to discipline of all sorts. When we say to the average, untrained, muscularly uncontrolled child of four, " Now do sit still for a while ! " we are mak- ing a request about as reasonable as though we cried, " Do stand on your head ! " And then we shake him or reprove him for not obeying what is for him an impossible command. By so doing we start in his mind :the habit, both of not obeying and of being punished fo^it ; and as Nature is exuberant in her protective devices, he very soon grows a fine mental callous over his capacity for remorse at not obeying. The effort required to accede to our request is entirely too great for him, even if he wholly understands what we wish, which is often doubtful. And because he often has been forced to disobey a command to do something A MONTESSORI MOTHER 147 impossible, he falls into the way of disobeying a command which is within his powers. The Montes- sori training makes every impassioned attempt to teach a child exactly how to do a thing before he is requested to do it. We give a child the enormously compendious com- mand, " Don't be so careless ! " without reflecting that it is about as useful and specific an exhortation as if one should cry to us, " Do be more virtuous ! " Dr. Montessori is continually admonishing us to use our grown-up brains to analyze into its component parts the child's carelessness, so that, part by part, it can be corrected. Suppose that it has manifested itself (as it not infrequently does) by a reckless plunge across the room, carrying a plateful of cookies which have most of them fallen to the floor by the end of the trip. Almost without exception, what we all cry impatiently to a child, even to a very little child, under those circumstances, is "For mercy's sake, do look at what you're doing ! " which is, considered at all analytically, exactly what it is our business as his leaders and guides in the world to do for him. A little reflection on the subject makes us realize, in spite of the sharpness of our reproof to him, that he takes no pleasure in spilling the cookies and falling over the chairs ; that is, that he had no set purpose to do this, instead of walking correctly across the room and setting the plate down on the table. The question we should ask ourselves, is obviously, " Why then, did he do all those troublesome and careless things "^ " Ob- 148 A MONTESSORI MOTHER viouslj because we were requiring him to go through a complicated process, the separate parts of which he has not mastered ; as though a musician should com- mand us to play the chromatic scale of D minor, and then blame us for the resultant discord. He should have taught us a multitude of things before requiring such a complicated achievement, — how to hold our fingers over the piano-keys, how to read music, how to play simpler scales. The child with the cookie-plate needs, in the first place, a course of exercises in learning to walk in a straight line directly to the spot where he means to go, exercises continued until this process becomes auto- matic, so that the greatest haste on his part will not send him reeling about as most children (and a con- siderable number of their ill-trained elders) do when they undertake to move from one side of the room to another. How can he learn to do this ? Dr. Montessori sug- gests drawing a chalk-line on the floor and having the children play the " game " (either with or without music) of trying to walk along it without stepping off. I myself, remembering the forbidden joys of my reckless childhood in walking the top-rail of a fence, have tried the expedient of providing a less dangerous top-rail laid flat on the ground. Did any healthy child ever need more than one chance to walk along railway tracks? The objection in the past to these exercises has been that they were connected with something dangerous and undesirable. I do not { A MONTESSORI MOTHER 149 blame my parents for forbidding me to try to balance myself either on the top-rail of a fence or on a rail- way track. Both of these were highly risky diver- 'sions. But it does seem odd that neither they nor I ever thought of providing, in some safe form, the exercises in equilibrium so violently craved by all healthy children. A narrow board, or length of so- called " two-by-four " studding, laid on the ground, furnishes a diversion as endlessly entertaining for a child of three as the most dangerously high fence- rail for an older child, and the never-failing zest with which a little child practises balancing himself on this narrow " sidewalk " is a proof that the exercise is one for which he unconsciously felt a need. Another trick of equilibrium, which is hard for a little child, is to lift one foot from the floor and perform any action without falling over. If he is provided with a loose rope-end, hanging where he can easily reach it, his parent and guardian can sug- gest any number of entertaining things to do while his equilibrium is assured by his grasp on the rope. My experience has been that one suggestion is enough. The child's invention does the rest. Another exer- cise which is of great benefit for very little children is to walk backwards, a process which needs no more gymnastic apparatus than a helping hand from father or mother, an apparatus which is equally effect- ive in teaching a young child the fascinating game of crossing one foot over the other without falling down. Does all this physical training of tiny children 150 A MONTKSsoRi M(rrin:R seem too remote from the older child who spilled the cookies? lie stands at the end of the road over which the bahincing, backward-walking, highly entertained three-year-old is advancing. Although it is not mentioned in any Montcssori suggestions I have seen (possibly because of the dif- ficulty of managing it in a schoolroom), it occurred to me one day that water is a neglected but very valuable factor in training a little child to accuracy of muscular movement. This reflection occurred to me just after I had instinctively led away a little child from a basin of water in which I had " caught her" dabbling her iiands. Making a desperate eff^ort to put into practice my new resolution to question myself sharply each time that I denied a child any activity he seemed to desire, I perceived that in this case, as so often, I was acting traditionally, without considering the essential character of the situation. I could not, of course, allow the child to dabble in that basin of water, there, because she would be apt to spatter it on the floor and to get her clothes wet. But on that warm summer day, why could I not set her outdoors on the grass, with a bit of oilcloth girded about her waist so that she should not spoil her dress? Her evident interest in the water was an in- dication of a natural force which it might be possible to utilize to give her some muscular training which would entertain her at the same time. When I really came to think about it, there is nothing inherently wicked in playing in water. A MONTESSORI MOTHER 151 For the almost supcrliuiiian effort necessary to use reason al)oiit a fact tlie outlines of which arc dulled by familiarity, I was rewarded many times over by the discovery of a " sensory exercise " which apparently is of tlie highest value. The child in question, pro- vided with a pan of water, and various cups and jelly-molds of different sizes, which I snatched at random from the kitchen-shelf, was in a state of silent bliss. She filled the little cups up to the brim, she lifted them with an anxious care which no exhortation of mine could have induced her to apply, she drank from them, she poured their contents into each other, discovering for herself that the smaller ones must be emptied into the bigger ones and not vice versa, she filled them again with a spoon. At first she did all this very clumsily, although always with the most painstaking care, but as the days went on with repeti- tions of this game, her dexterity became astonishing, as was her eternal interest in the monotonous pro- ceeding. Now she is not only kept quiet and happy for about an hour a day by this amusement, and she has not only learned to fill and handle her little cups and jelly-molds very deftly, but the operation of drink- ing out of a water-glass at the table is of a simplicity fairly beneath her contempt. I smile to sec our guests gasp and dodge in dismay as, with the reck- less abandon of her age, she grasps her water-glass with one hand, not deigning even to look at it, and conveys it to h^r lips. Rut as a matter of fact, no 15S A MONTESSORI MOTHER matter how hastily or carelessly she does this, she almost never spills a drop. The control of utensils containing liquids has been so thoroughly learned by her muscles in the long hours of happy play with her little cups that it is perfectly automatic. She no more spills water from her glass than I fall down on the floor when I cross a room, even though I may be quite absent-minded about that undertaking. CHAPTER XI MORE ABOUT DISCIPLINE, WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE 1MUST stop at this point and devote a paragraph or two to laying the ghost of another Puritan ancestor who demands, " But where does the disci- pline come in here, if it is all automatic and uncon- scious? Why sneak exactitude of muscular action into the child's life by the back door, so to speak? Would it not be better for her moral nature to com- mand her outright not to spill the water from her glass at table, and force her to use her will-power by punishing her if she does?" There are several answers to this searching ques- tion, which is by no means so simple and direct as it sounds. The most obvious one is the retort brutal, i.e., that a great many generations have experi- mented with that simple method of training children, with the result that family life has been considerably embittered and the children very poorly trained. In other words, that practical experience has shown it to be a very bad method indeed and in use only be- cause we know no better one. One of the reasons why it is bad is because it con- fuses two radically different activities in the child's life, including both under one far too-sweeping com- 153 154 A MONTESSORI MOTHER mand. The child's ability to handle a glass of water is an entirely different function from its will- ingness to obey orders. To require of its nascent capacities at the same instant a new muscular skill and the moral effort necessary to obey a command is to invite almost certain failure. Worse than this, and in fact as bad as anything can be, the result of this impossibly compendious command is to bring about a hopeless confusion in the child's mind which means unnecessary nervous tension and friction and the beginning of an utterly deplorable mental habit of nervous tension and irritated resistance in the child's mind, whenever a command is given. That this in- stinct of irritated resistance is not a natural one is proved by the happily obedient older children in the Casa dei Bambini in Rome. Furthermore, anyone who will, under ordinary circumstances, try the sim- ple experiment of asking a little child (too young to have acquired this bad mental habit) to perform some operation which he has thoroughly mastered, will be convinced that obedience in itself involves no pain to a child. As to the second demand of my Puritan ancestor, which runs, " And force her to use her will-power by punishment," the same flat denial must be given that proposition. Experience proves that you can prevent a child from performing some single special action by means of external punishment, but that stimulat- ing the proper use of the will-power is something entirely different. Apparently the will-power is more A MONTESSORI MOTHER 155 apt to be perverted into grotesque and unprofitable shapes by the use of punishment than to be encour- aged into upright, useful, and vigorous growth. And here it is well to question our own hearts deeply to make sure that we really wish, honestly, without mental reservations, to stimulate the will-power of our children — their will-power, be it remembered, not our own. Is there, in the motives which actuate our at- tempts at securing obedience from children, a trace of the animal-trainer's instinct.? For, though it is true that children are little animals, and that they can be successfully trained by the method of the animal- trainer, it is not to be forgotten that they are trained by those methods only to feats of exactly the same moral and intellectual caliber as those performed by trick dogs and cats. They are forced to struggle blindly, and wholly without aid, towards whatever human achievements they may later accomplish, with the added disadvantage of the mental habit either of sullen dissembled revolt or crushed mental servil- ity, according to their temperaments. The end and aim of the horse-breaker's effort is to create an animal who will obey literally, with no voli- tion of his own, any command of any human being. The conscientious parent who faces squarely this ultimate logical conclusion of the animal-trainer's system, must see that his own aim, being entirely opposed to that, must be attained by very different means ; and that, since his final goal is to produce a being wholly and wisely self-governing, the sooner 156 A MONTESSORI MOTHER the child can be induced to begin the exercise of the faculty of self-government, the more seasoned in ex- perience it will be when vital things begin to depend on it. It is highly probable that in the heart of the mod- ern parent of the best type, if there is still some of the animal-trainer's instinct, he is quite and hon- estly unconscious of it and would be ashamed of it if he recognized it. I think most of us can say sin- cerely that we have no conscious wish for anything but the child's best welfare. But in saying this, we admit at once that our problem is vastly more subtle and complicated than the horse-breaker's, and that we are in need of every ray of light from any source possible. The particular, vivifying truth which we must im- print on our minds in this connection is that spon- taneity of action is the absolute prerequisite jfor any moral or intellectual advance on the part of any human being. Nor is this, though so constantly in- sisted upon by Dr. Montessori, any new invention of hers. Dimly felt, it has regulated more or less the best action of the best preachers, the best teachers and lawgivers since the beginning of the w^orld. Pestalozzi formulated it in the hard sayings all the more poignant because it came from a man who had devoted himself with such passionate affection to his pupilsj.J* I have found that no man in God's wide earth is able to help any other man. Help must cgjue j from the bosom alone." Froebel, in all his general A MONTESSORI MOTHER 157 remarks on education, states this principle clearly. Finally, it has been crystallized in the homely adage of old wives, " Every child's got to do its own growing." We all admit the truth of this theory. What is so startling about Dr. Montessori's attitude towards it, is that she really acts upon it! More than that, she expects us to act on it, all the time, in all the multiform crises of our lives as parents, in this intri- cate problem of discipline and the training of the will-power as well as in the simpler form of physically refraining from interfering with the child's efforts to feed and dress himself. And yet it is natural enough that we should find at first sight such general philosophic statements rather vague and remote, and not at all sufficiently reassuring as we stand face to face with the prob- lem of securing obedience from a lively child of three. We may have seen how we overlooked the obvious reason why a child who cannot obey a command will not; and we may be quite convinced that the first step in securing both self-control and obedience from a child is to put the necessary means in his power ; and yet we may be still frankly at a loss and deeply apprehensive about what seems the hopeless under- taking of directly securing obedience even after the child has learned how to obey. All that Dr. Montes- sori has done for us so far is to call our attention to the fact, which we did not in the least perceive be- fore, that a child i* no more bom into the world with 158 A MONTESSORI MOTHER a full-fledged capacity to obey orders, than to do a sum in arithmetic. But though we agree that we must first teach him his numbers before expecting him to add and subtract, how, we ask ourselves anxiously, can we be in the least sure that he will be willing to use his numbers to do sums with, that he will be will- ing to utilize his careful preparatory training when it comes to the point of really obeying orders. At this juncture I can recommend from successful personal experience a courageous abandonment of our traditional attitude of deep distrust towards life, of our medieval conviction that desirable traits can only be hewed painfully out across the grain of human nature. The old monstrous idea which under- lay all schooling was that the act of educating him- self was fundamentally abhorrent to a child and that he could be forced to do it only by external violence. This was an idea, held by more generations of school- teachers and parents than is at all pleasant to con- sider, when one reflects that it would have been swept out upon the dump-heap of discarded superstitions by one single, unprejudiced survey of one normal child under normal conditions. Dr. Montessori, carrying to its full extent a theory which has been slowly gaining ground in the minds of all modern enlightened teachers, has been the first to have the courage to act without reservation on the strength of her observation that the child prefers learning to any other occupation, since the child is the true representative of our race which does ad- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 159 vance, even with such painful slowness, away from ignorance towards knowledge. Now, in addition she tells us just as forcibly, that they prefer right, or- derly, disciplined behavior to the unregulated dis- obedience which we slanderously insist is their natural taste. As a result of her scientific and unbiased observation of child-life she informs us that our usual lack of success in handling the problems of obedience comes because, while we do not expect a child at two or three or even four to have mastered completely even the elements of any other of his activities, we do expect him to have mastered all the complex muscular, nervous, mental, and moral ele- ments involved in the act of obedience to a command from outside his own individuality. She points out that obedience is evidently a deep- rooted instinct in human nature, since society is founded on obedience. Indeed, on the whole, history seems to show that the average human being has alto- gether too much native instinct to obey anyone who will shout out a command ; and that the advance from one bad form of government to another only slightly better, is so slow because the mass of grown men are too much given to obeying almost any positive order issued to them. Going back to our surprised recog- nition of the child as an inheritor of human nature in its entirety, we must admit that obedience is almost certainly an instinct latent in children. The obvious theoretic deduction from this rea- soning is, that we need neither persuade nor force a 160 A MONTESSORI MOTHER child to obey, but only clear-sightedly remove the various moral and physical obstructions which lie in the way of his obedience, with the confident expecta- tion that his latent instinct will develop spontaneously in the new and favorable conditions. When we plant a bean in the ground we do not feel that we need to try to force it to grow ; indeed, we know very well that we can do nothing whatever about that since it is governed entirely by the pres- ence or absence in the seed of the mysterious element of life; nor do we feel any apprehension about the capacity of that smooth, small seed, ultimately to develop into a vine which will climb up the pole we have set for it, will blossom, and bear fruit. We know that, barring accidents (which it is our business as gardeners to prevent), it cannot do anything else, because that is the nature of beans, and we know all about the nature of beans from a long acquaintnce with them. We would laugh at an ignorant, city-bred person gardening for the first time, who, the instant the two broad cotyledons showed above the ground, began tying strings to them to induce them to climb his pole. Our advice to him would be the obvious coun- sel, " Leave them alone until they grow their tendrils. You not only can't do any good by trying to induce those first primitive leaves to climb, but you may hurt your plant so that it will never develop nor- mally." The question seems to be, whether we will have the A MONTESSORI MOTHER 161 courage and good sense to take similar sound advice from a more experienced and a wiser child-gardener. Dr. Montessori not only expounds to us theoretically this doctrine tljat the child, properly trained, will spontaneously obey reasonable orders suited to his age with a prompt willingness which grows with his growth, but she shows us in the garden of her schools, bean-poles wreathed triumphantly with vines to the very top. Or, to drop a perhaps too-elaborated metaphor, she shows us children of three or four who willingly obey suggestions suited to their capacities, developing rapidly and surely into children of six and seven whose obedience in all things is a natural and delightful function of their lives. She not only says to us, " This theory will work in actual practice," but, " It has worked. Look at the result ! " Of course the crux of the matter lies in that phrase, " proper training." It means years of patient, in- telligent, faithful effort on the part of the guardian, to clear away from before the child the different ob- stacles to the free natural growth of this, as of all other desirable instincts of human nature. To give our children this " proper training " it is not enough to have intellectually grasped the theory of the Mon- tessori method. With each individual child we have a fresh problem of its application to him. Our mother-wits must be sharpened and in constant use. Dr. Montessori has only compiled a book of recipes, which will not feed c ur families, unless we exert our- selves, and unless we provide the necessary ingredients 162 A MONTESSORI MOTHER of patience, intelligence, good judgment, and devo- tion. The prize which seems possible to attain by such efforts makes them, however, worthy of all the time and thought we may possibly put upon them. Ap- parently, judging by the results obtained in the Casa dei Bambini among Italian children, and by Miss George in her school for American children, there is no more need for the occasional storms of temper or outbreaks of exasperated egotism which are so fa- miliar to all of us who care for children, than there is for the occasional " fits of indigestion," " feverish- ness," or " teething-sickness " the almost universal absence of which in the lives of our scientifically- reared children so astonishes the older generation. For the notable success of Miss George's Tarry- town school disposes once and for all of the theory that " it may work for Italians, but not with our naturally self-indulgent, spoiled American children." Fresh from the Casa dei Bambini in Rome, I visited Miss George's Children's Home and, except for the language, would have thought myself again on the Via Giusti. The same happy, unforced interest in the work, the same Montessori atmosphere of spon- taneous life, the same utter unconsciousness of visi- tors, the same astonishing industry. When theoretically by talk and discussion with ex- perts on the subject and practically by the sight of the astonishing results shown m the enlightenment and self-mastery of the older children who had been A MONTESSORI MOTHER 163 trained in the system, I was led towards the convic- tion that children really have not that irresistible tendency towards naughtiness which my Puritan blood led me unconsciously to assume, but that their natural tendency is on the whole to prefer to do what is best for them, I felt as though someone had tried to prove to me that the world before my eyes was emancipating itself from the action of some sup- posedly inexorable natural law. Naturally, being an Anglo-Saxon, an inhabitant of a cold climate, and the descendant of those trouble- some Puritan forefathers, who have interfered so much with the composition of this book, I could not, all in a breath, in this dizzying manner lose that firm conviction of Original Sin which, though no longer insisted upon openly in the teachings of the church, which I no longer attend as assiduously as my par- ents, still is, I discovered, a very vital element in my conception of life. No, the doctrine of Original Sin is in the very marrow of my New England bones, but, as a lover of my kind, I rejoice to be convinced of the smallness of its proportion in relation to other elements of human nature, and I bear witness gladly that I never saw or heard of a single case of wilful naughtiness among all the children in the Casa dei Bambini in Rome. And though I still cling unreasonably to my superstition that there is, at least in some American children, an irreducible minimum of the quality which our country pe6ple picturesquely call " The Old 164^ A MONTESSORI MOTHER Harry," I am convinced that there is far, far less of it than I supposed, and I am overcome with retro- spective remorse for all the children I have mis- judged in the course of mj life. To put it statistically, I would estimate that out of every thousand cases of " naughtiness " among little children, nine hundred and ninety-nine are due to something else than a " bad " impulse in the child's heart. Old-wife wisdom has already reduced by one- half the percentage of infantile wickedness, in its fire- side proverb, " Give a young one that's acting bad something to eat and put him to bed. Half the time he's tired or starved and don't know what ails him." It now seems likely that the other half of the time he is either hungry for intellectual food, weary with the artificial stimulation of too much mingling with adult life, or exasperated by perfectly unnecessary insistence on a code of rules which has really nothing to do with the question of right or wrong conduct. When it comes to choosing between really right and really wrong conduct, apparently the majority of the child's natural instincts are for the really right, as is shown by his real preference for the orderly, educat- ing activity of the Children's Home over disorderly " naughtiness." Our business should be to see to it that he is given the choice. CHAPTER XII DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF A UNIVERSAL ADOPTION OF THE MONTESSORI IDEAS NOW, of course, it is infinitely easier in the first place to cry out to a child, " Oh, don't be so careless ! " than to consider thus with painful care all the elements lacking in his training which make him heedless, and throughout years of conscientious effort to exercise the ingenuity necessary to supply those lacking elements. But serious-minded parents do not and should not expect to find life a flowery bed of ease, and it is my conviction that most of us will welcome with heartfelt joy any possible solution of our des- perately pressing problems, even if it involves the process of oiling and setting in motion the little- used machinery of our brains. I am opposed in this optimistic conviction by that small segment of the circle of my acquaintances com- posed of the doctors whom I happen to know person- ally. They take a gloomy view of the matter and tell me that their experience with human nature leads them to fear that the rules of moral and intellectual hygiene of childhood, of this new system, excellent though they are, will be observed with as little faith- fulness as the equally wise rules of physical hygiene for adults which the doctors have been endeavoring 165 166 A MONTESSORI MOTHER vainly to have us adopt. They inform me that they have learned that, if obedience to the laws of hygiene requires continuous effort, day after day, people will not obey them, even though by so doing they would avoid the pains and maladies which they so dread. " People will take pills," physicians report, " but they will not take exercise. If your new system told them of some one or two supreme actions which would benefit their children, quite a number of par- ents would strain every nerve to accomplish the neces- sary feats. But what you are telling them is only another form of what we cry so vainly, namely that they themselves must observe nature and follow her laws, and that no action of their doctors, wise though they may be, can vicariously perform this function for them. You will see that your Dr. Montessori's exhortations will have as little effect as those of any other physician." I confess that at first I was somewhat cast down by these pessimistic prophecies, for even a casual glance over any group of ordinary acquaintances shows only too much ground for such conclusions. But a more prolonged scrutiny of just such a casually selected group of acquaintances, and a little more searching inquiry into the matter has brought out facts which lead to more encouraging ideas. In the first place, the doctors are scarcely correct when they assume that they have always been the re- pository of a wisdom which we laity have obstinately refused to take over from them. Comparatively A MONTESSORI MOTHER 167 speaking, it is only yesterday that the doctors them- selves outgrew the idea that pills were the divinely appointed cures for all ills. So recent is this revo- lution in ideas that there are still left among us in eddies, out of the main stream, elderly doctors who lay very little of the modem fanatical stress on diet, and bum very little incense before the modern altar of fresh air and exercise. It seems early in the day to conclude that the majority of mankind will not take good advice if it is offered them, a sardonic con- clusion disproved by the athletic clubs all over the country, the sleeping-porches burgeoning out from large and small houses, the millions of barefooted children in rompers, the regiments of tennis-playing adolescents and golf-playing elders, the myxiads of diet-studying housewives, the gladly accepted army of trained nurses. We may not do as well as we might, but we certainly have not turned deaf ears to all the exhortations of reason and enlightenment. Furthermore, beside the fact that doctors have been preaching *' hygiene against drugs " to us only a short time, it is to be borne in mind that, as a class, they do not add to their many noble and glorious qualities of mind and heart a very ardent proselytiz- ing fervor. It seems to be against the " tempera- ment " of the profession. If you go to a doctor's office, and consult him professionally he will, it is true, tell you nowadays not to take pills, but to take plenty of exercise and sleep, to eat moderately, avoid worry, and drink plenty of pure water ; but you do not ever 168 A MONTESSORI MOTHER run across him preaching these doctrines from a bar- rel-head on the street-corner, to all who will hear. The traditional dignity of his profession forbids such Salvation Army methods. The doctors of a town are apt, prudently, to boil the water used in their own households and to advise this course of action to any who seek their counsel, rather than to band together in an aggressive, united company and make themselves disagreeably conspicuous by clamoring insistently at the primaries and polls for better water for the town. It is perhaps not quite fair to accuse us laity of ob- stinacy in refusing advice which has been offered with such gentlemanly reserve. Then, there is the obvious fact that doctors, like lawyers, see professionally only the ailing or mal- contents of the human family, and they suffer from a tendency common to us all, to generalize from the re- sults of their own observation. Our own observa- tion of our own community may quite honestly lead us to the opposite of their conclusions, namely that it is well worth while to make every effort for the diffusion of theories which tend to improve daily life, since, on the whole, people seem to have picked up very quickly indeed the reasonable doctrine of the prevention of illness by means of healthy lives. If they have done this, and are, to all appearances, try- ing hard to learn more about the process, it is rea- sonable to hope that they will catch at a similar rea- sonable mental and moral hygiene for their children, and that they will learn to leave off the unnecessary A MONTESSORI MOTHER 169 mental and moral restrictions, the unwise interference with the child's growth and undue insistence on con- formity to adult ideas of regularity, just as they have learned how to leave off the innumerable layers of starched petticoats, the stiff scratchy pantalets, and the close, smothering sunbonnets in which our lov- ing and devoted great-grandmothers required our grandmothers to grow up. Lastly, there is a vital element in the situation which is perhaps not sufficiently considered by peo- ple anxious to avoid the charge of sentimentality. This element is the strength of parental affection, perhaps the strongest and most enduring passion which falls to the lot of ordinary human beings. Only a Napoleon can carry ambition to the intensity of a passion. Great, overmastering love between man and woman is not so common as our romantic tradi- tion would have us believe. In the world of religion, saints are few and far between. Most of us manage to live without being consumed by the reforming fever of those rare souls who suffer under injustice to others as though it were practised on themselves. But nearly every house which contains children, shel- ters also two human beings the hard crust of whose natural egotism and moral sloth has been at least cracked by the shattering force of this primeval pas- sion for their young, two human beings, who, no mat- ter how low their position in the scale of human ethical development, have in them to some extent that divine capacity for willing self-sacrifice which 170 A MONTESSORI MOTHER comes, under other conditions, only to the rarest and most spiritual-minded members of the race. It is not sentimentality but a simple statement of fact to say that there is in parents who take care of their own chil- dren (as most American parents do) a natural fund of energy, patience, and willingness to undergo self- discipline, which cannot be counted upon in any other numerous class of people. The Montessori system, with its fresh, vivid presentation of axiomatic truths, with a fervent hope of a practical application of them to the everyday life of every child, addresses it- self to these qualities in parents ; and, for the sound development of its fundamental idea of self-education and self-government, trusts not only to the wise con- claves of professional pedagogues, but to the co- operation of the fathers and mothers of the world. CHAPTER XIII IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MONTESSORI SYSTEM AND THE KINDERGARTEN? NO one realizes more acutely than I that the com- position of this chapter presupposes an amount of courage on my part which it is perhaps hardly exaggeration to call foolhardiness. That I am really venturing upon a battleground is evident to me from the note of rather fierce anticipatory dis- approval which I hear in the voice of everyone who asks me the question which heads this chapter. It always accented, " Is there any real difference be- tween the Montessori system and the kindergarten ? " with the evident design of forcing a negative answer. Oddly enough, the same reluctance to grant the possibility of anything new in the Italian method characterizes the attitude of those who intensely dis- like the kindergartens, as well as that of its devoted adherents. People who consider the kindergarten " all sentimental, enervating twaddle " ask the ques- tion with a truculent tone which makes their query mean, " This new system is just the same sort of nonsense, isn't it now.?"; while those who feel that the kindergarten is one of the vital, purifying, and uplifting forces in modern society evidently use the 171 172 A MOXTESSORI MOTHER question as a means of stating, " It can't be anything different from the best kindergarten ideas, for they are the best possible." I haTe seen too much beautiful kindergarten work and have too sincere an affection for the sweet and pure character of Fcoebel to have much community of feeling with the rather brutal negations of the first class of inquirers. If they can see nothing in kindergartens but the sentimentality which is undoubtedly there, but which cannot possibly, even in the most exaggerated manifestations of it, vitiate aU the finely uplifting elements in those institutions, it is of no use to expect from them an understanding of a system which, Hke the Froebelian, rests ulti- mately upon a rehgious faith in the strength of the instinct for perfection in the himian race. It is therefore largely for the sake of people like myself, with a natural sympathy for the kindergar- ten, that I am setting out upon the difficult undertak- ing of stating what in my mind are the differences between a Froebelian and a Montessori school for infants. I must begin by saying that there are a great ma.ny resemblances, as is inevitable in the case of two methods which work upon the same material — children from three to, six. And of course it is hardly necessary formally to admit that the ultimate aim of the two educators is alike, because the aim which is common to them — an ardent desire to do the best thing possible for the children without regard for A MOXTE550RI MOTHER ITS the convenience of the adults who teach them — is the sign manual throughout all the ages, from Plato and Quintilian down, which distinguishes the educator from the mere school-teacher. There are a good many differences in the didactic apparatus and use„o£. it, some of which are too tech- nical to be treated fully here, such as the fact that Froebel, moved by his own extreme interest in crystals and their forms, provides a number of exercises for teaching children the analysis of geometrical forms, whereas Dr. Montessori thinks best not to undertake this with children so young. Kindergarten children are not tauo:ht readincp and writinor. and Montessori children are. Kindergarten children leam more about the relations of whoj^ to parts in their " number work," while in the Casa dei Bam- bini there is more attention paid to numbers in their series. There are of course many other differences in technic and apparatus, such as might be expected in two systems founded by educators separated from each other by the passage of sixty years and by a difference in race as well as by training and environ- ment. This is especially true in regard to the greater emphasis laid by Dr. Montessori on the careful, minute observation of the children before and during any attempt to instruct them. Trained as she has been in the severely unrelenting rule for exactitude of the^ positive sciences, in which intelli- gent observation is elevated to the position of the 174 A MONTESSORI MOTHER cardinal virtue necessary to intellectual salvation, her instinct, strengthened since then by much experience, was to give herself plenty of time always to examine the subject of her experimentation. Just as a scien- tific horticulturist observes minutely the habits of a plant before he tries a new fertilizer on it, and after he has made the experiment goes on observing the plant with even more passionately absorbed attention, so Dr. Montessori trains her teachers to take time, all they need, to observe the children before, during, land after any given exercise. This is, of course, the natural instinct of Froebel, of every born teacher, but the routine of the average school or kindergarten gives the teacher only too few minutes for it, not to speak of the long hours necessary. /' On the other hand, even in the details of the / technic, there is much similarity between the two ' systems. Some of the kindergarten blocks are used I in Montessori " sensory exercises." In both insti- i tutions the ideal, seldom attained as yet, is for the 1 systematic introduction of gardening and the care i of animals. In both the children play games and ^ I dance to music; some regular kindergarten games J I are used in the Casa dei Bambini; in both schools ' tjhe first aim is to make the children happy; in neither are they reproved or punished. Both sys- tems bear in every detail the imprint of extreme \ love and reverence for childhood. And yet the moral \ atmosphere of a kindergarten is as different from \that of a Casa dei Bambini as possible, and the real ^x A MONTESSORI MOTHER 175 truth of the matter is that one is actually and funda- mentally opposed to the other. To explain this, a few words of comment on Froebel, his life, and the subsequent fortunes of his ideas may be useful. These facts are so well known, owing to the universal respect and affection for this great benefactor of childhood, that the merest mention of them will suffice. The dates of his birth and death are significant, 1782-1852, as is a brief bringing to mind of the intensely German Protestant piety of his surroundings. He died sixty years ago, and a great deal of educational water has flowed under school bridges since then. He died be- fore anyone dreamed of modern scientific labora- tories, such as those in which the Italian educator received her sound, practical training, a training wliich not only put at her disposition an amount of accurate information about the subject of her in- vestigation which would have dazzled Froebel, but formed her in the fixed habit of inductive reasoning which has made possible the brilliant achievements of modern positive sciences, and which was as little com- mon in Froebel's time as the data on which it works. That he felt instinctively the needs for this solid foundation is shown by his craving for instruction in the natural sciences, his absorption of all the scanty information within his reach, his subsequent deep meditation upon this information, and his at- tempts to generalize from it. Another factor in Froebel's life which scarcely 176 A MONTESSORI MOTHER exists nowadays was the tradition of physical vio- lence and oppression towards children. That this has gradually disappeared from the ordinary civilized family, is partly due to the general trend away from physical oppression of all sorts, and partly to Froebel's own softening influence, for which we can none of us feel too fervent a gratitude. He was forced to devote considerable of his energy to com- bating this tendency, which was not a factor at all in the problems which confronted Dr. Montes- sori. Some time after his death his ideas began to spread abroad not only in Europe (the kindergartens of which I know nothing about, except that they are very successful and numerous), but also in the United States, about whose numerous and success- ful kindergartens we all know a great deal. The new system was taken up by teachers who were in- tensely American, and hence strongly characterized by the American quality of force of individuality. It is a universally accepted description of American women (sometimes intended as a compliment, some- times as quite the reverse) that, whatever else they are, they are less negative, more forceful, more direct, endowed with more positive personalities than the women of other countries. These women, full of energy, quivering with the resolution to put into full practice all the ideas of the German educator whose system they espoused, ** organized a cam- paign for kindergartens " which, with characteristic A MONTESSORI MOTHER 177 thoroughness, determination, and devotion, thej have carried through to high success. They, and the educators among men who became interested in the Froebelian ideas, have been by no means willing to consider all advance impossible because the founder of the system is no longer with them. They have been progressively and in- telligently unwilling to let 1852 mark the culmina- tion of kindergarten improvement, and they have changed, and patched, and added to, and taken away from the original method as their best judgment and the increasing scientific data about children enabled them. This process, it goes without saying, has not taken place without a certain amount of friction. Naturally everyone's " best judgment " scarcely coin- cided with that of everyone else. There have been honest differences of opinion about the interpretation of scientific data. True to its nature as an essen- tially religious institution, the kindergarten has un- dergone schisms, been rent with heresies, has been divided into orthodox and heterodox, into liberals and conservatives, although the whole body of the work has gone constantly forward, keeping pace with the increasing modern preoccupation with child- hood. Indeed it seems to me that one may say without being considered unsympathetic that it has now cer- tain other aspects of a popular, prosperous religious sect, among which is a feeling of instinctive jealousy of similar regenerating influences which have their 178 A MONTESSORI MOTHER origin outside the walls of the original orthodox church. Undoubtedly they have some excuse in the ab- surdly exaggerated current reports and rumors of the miracles accomplished by the Montessori appa- ratus ; but it seems to outsiders that what we have a right to expect from the heads of the organized, established kindergarten movement is an open-minded, unbiased, and extremely minute and thorough investi- gation into the new ideas, rather than an inspection of popular reports and a resultant condemnation. It is because I am as much concerned as I am aston- ished at this attitude on their part that I am ven- turing upon the following slight and unprofessional discussion of the differences between the typical kin- dergarten and the typical Casa dei Bambini. To begin with, kindergarteners are quite right when they cry out that there is nothing new in the idea of self -education, and that Froebel stated as plainly as Montessori does that the Q^^of all edu- cation is to waken voluntary action in the child. For that matter, what educator worthy of the name has not felt this? The point seems to be, not that Froebel states this vital principle any less clearly, but so much less forcibly than the Italian educator. Not foreseeing the masterful women, with highly developed personalities, who were to be the apostles of his ideas in America, and not being surrounded by the insistence on the value of each individuality which marks our modern motal atmosphere, it did A MONTESSORI MOTHER 179 not occur to him, apparently, that there was any special danger in this direction. For, of course, our modem high estimate of the value of individuality results not only in a vague though growing realiza- tion of the importance of safeguarding the nascent personalities of children, but in a plenitude of strongly marked individualities among the adults who teach children, and in a fixed habit of using the strength of this personality as a tool to attain de- sired ends. The difference in this regard between the two educators may perhaps be stated fancifully in the following way: Froebel gives his teachers, among many other maxims- to hang up where they may be constantly in view, a statement running somewhat in this fashion: "All growth must come from a voluntary action of the child himself." Dr. Mon- tessori not only puts this maxim first and foremost, and exhorts her teachers to bear it incessantly in mind during the consideration of any and all other maxims, but she may be supposed to wish it printed thus : " All growth must come from a VOLl^JTARY action of the child HIMSELF." The first thing she requires of a directress in her school is a complete avoidance of the center of the stage, a self-annihilation, the very desirability (not to mention the possibility) of which has never oc- curred to the kindergarten teacher whose normal position is in .the middle of a ring of children with every eye on her, with every sensitive, budding 180 A MONTESSORI MOTHER personality receiving the strongest possible impres- sions from her own adult individuality. Without the least hesitation or doubt, she has always considered that her part is to make that individuality as perfect and lovable as possible, so that the impression the children get from it may be desirable. The idea, thai she is to keep herself strictly in the background for fear of unduly influencing some childish soul whjch has not yet found itself, is an idea totally unheard of. I find in a catalogue of kindergarten material this sentence in praise of some new device. " It obviates the need of supervision on the part of the teacher as far as is consistent with conscientious child-training J** Now the Montessori ideal is a device which shall be so entirely self-corrective that absolutely no inter- ference by the teacher is necessary as long as the child is occupied with it. I find in that sentence the keynote of the difference between the two systems. In the kindergarten the emphasis is laid, consciously, or unconsciously, but- very practically always, on the fact that the teachVr teaches. In the Casa dei Bambini the emphasis is all on the fact that the child learns. U|^^te^s(.yi In the beginning of her study the kindergarten teacher is instructed, it is true, as a philosophic consideration, that Pestalozzi held and Froebel ac- cepted the dictum that, just as the cultivator creates nothing in his trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the children under his care. This is duly set down in her note-book, but the apparatus A MONTESSORI MOTHER 181 given her to work with, the technic taught her, what she sees of the work of other teachers, the whole tendency of her training goes to accentuate what is already racially strong in her temperament, a fixed conviction of her own personal and individual re- sponsibility for what happens about her. She feels keenly (in the case of nervous constitutions, crush- ingly) the weight of this responsibility, really awful when it is felt about children. She has the quick, energetic, American instinct to do something herself, at once to bring about a desired condition. She is the swimmer who does not trust heartily and wholly to the water to keep him up, but who stiffens his muscles and exhausts himself in the attempt by his own efforts to float. Indeed, that she should be re- quired above all things to do nothing, not to inter- fere, is almost intellectually inconceivable to her. This, of course, is a generalization as inaccurate as all generalizations are. There are some kinder- garten teachers with great natural gifts of spiritual- divination, strengthened by the experiences of their beautiful lives, who feel the inner trust in life which is so consoling and uplifting to the Montessori teacher. But the average American kindergarten teacher, like all the rest of us average Americans, needs the calming and quieting lesson taught by the great Italian educator's reverent awe for the spon- taneous, ever-upward, irresistible thrust of the mirac- ulous principle of growth. In spite of the horticultural name of her school 182 A MONTESSORI MOTHER the ordinary kindergarten teacher has never learned the whole-hearted, patient faith in the long, slow processes of nature which characterizes the true gar- dener. She is not penetrated by the realization of the vastness of the forces of the human soul, she is not subdued and consoled by a calm certainty of the Tightness of natural development. jShe is far gayer with her children than the Montessori teacher, but she is really less happy with them because, in her heart of hearts, she trusts them lessw She feels a restless sense of responsibility for each action of each child. It is doubtless this difference in mental attitude which accounts for the physical difference of aspect between our pretty, smiling, ever-active, always beckoning, nervously conscientious kinder- garten teacher, always on exhibition, and the calm, unhurried tranquillity of the Montessori directress, always unobtrusively in the background. The latter is but moving about from one little river of life to another, lifting a sluice gate here for a sluggish nature, constructing a dam there to help a too impetuous nature to concentrate its forces, and much of the time occupied in quietly observing, quite at her leisure, the direction of the channels being constructed by the different streams. The kindergarten teacher tries to do this, but she seems obsessed with the idea, unconscious for the most part, that it is, after all, her duty to manage somehow to increase the flow of the little rivers by pouring into them some of her own superabundant A MONTESSORI MOTHER 183 vital force. In her commendable desire to give her- self and her whole life to her chosen work, she con- cei3;[£s that she is lazj if she ever allows herself a moment of absolute leisure, and unoccupied, im- personal observation of the growth of the various organisms in her garden. She must be always help- ing them grow ! Why else is she there ? she demands with a wrinkled brow of nervous determination to do her duty, and with the most honest, hurt surprise at any criticism of her work. It is possible that this tendency in American kin- dergartens is not only a result of the American temperament, but is inherent in Froebel's original conception of the -kindergarten as the place where the child gets his real social training, as opposed to the home where he gets his individual training. Standing midway between Fichte with his hard dic- tum that the child belongs wholly to the State and to society, and Pestalozzi's conviction that he be- longs wholly to the family, Froebel thought to make a working, compromise by dividing up the bone of contention, by leaving the child in the family most of the time, but giving him definite social training at definite hours every day. Now there is bound to be, in such an effort, some of the same danger involved in a conception of religious life which ordains that it shall be lived chiefly between half-past ten and noon on every Sunday morning. It may very well happen that a child does not feel social some morning between nine 184. A MONTESSORI MOTHER and eleven, but would prefer to pursue some laudable individual enterprise. It may be said that the slight moral coercion involved in insisting that he join in one of the group games or songs of the kinder- garten is only good discipline, but the fact remains that coercion has been employed, even though coated with sweet and coaxing persuasion, and the picture of itself conceived by the kindergarten as a place of the spontaneous flowering of the social instinct among children has in it some slight pretense. In the Casa dei Bambini, on the other hand, the children learn the rules and conditions of social life as we must all learn them^ and in the only way we all learn them, and that is by living socially. The kindergarten teacher, set the task of seeing that a given number of children engage in social enterprises practically all the time during a given number of hours every day, can hardly be blamed if she is convinced that she must act upon the chil- dren nearly every moment, since she is required to round them up incessantly into the social corral. The long hours of the Montessori school and the freedom of the children, living their own everyday lives as though they were (as indeed they are) in their own home, make a vital difference here. The children, in conducting their individual lives in com- pany with others, are reproducing the actual con- ditions which govern social life in the adult world. They learn to defer to each other, to obey rules, even to rise to the moral height of making rules, A MONTESSORI MOTHER 185 to sink temporarily their own interests in the com- mon weal, not because it is " nice " to do this, not because an adored, infallible, lovely teacher supports the doctrine by her unquestioned authority, not be- cause they are praised and petted when they do, but (and is not this the real grim foundation of laws for social organization?) because they find they can- not live together at all without rules which all re- spect and obey. In other words, when there is some real occasion for formulating or obeying a law which facilitates social life, they formulate it and obey it from an inward conviction, based on genuine circumstances of their own lives, that they must do so, or life would not be tolerable for any of them ; and when there is no genuine occasion for their making this really great sacrifice for the common weal, they are left, as we all desire to be left, to the pursuit of their own lives. No artificial occasion for this sacrifice is manufactured by the routine of the school — an artificial occasion which is apt to be resented by the stronger spirits among children even as young as those of kindergarten age. They feel, as we all do, that there is nothing intrinsically sacred or valuable about the compromises necessary to attain peaceable social life, and that they should not be demanded of us except when necessary. Crudely stated, Froebel's purpose seems to have been that the child should, in two or three hours at a given time every day, do his social living and have it over with. And 186 A MONTESSORI MOTHER although this statement is both unsympathetic and incomplete, there is in it the germ of a well-founded criticism of the method which many of us have vaguely felt, although we have not been able to formulate it before studying the principles of a sys- tem which seems to avoid this fault. A conversation I had in Rome with an Italian friend, not in sympathy with the Montessori ideas, illustrates another phase of the difference between the average kindergarten and the Casa dei Bam- bini. My friend is a quick, energetic, positive woman who " manages " her two children with a competent ease which seems the most conclusive proof to her that her methods need no improvement. " Oh, no, the Case dei Bambini are quite failures," she told me. " The children themselves don't like them." I recalled the room full of blissful babies which I had come to know so well, and looked, I daresay, some of the amused incredulity I felt, for she went on hastily, " Well, some children may. Mine never did. I had to put both the boy and the girl back into a kinder- garten. My little Ida summed up the whole matter. She said, ' Isn't it queer how they treat you at a Casa dei Bambini ! They ask me, " Now which would you like to do, Ida, this, or this ^ " It makes me feel so queer. I want somebody to tell me what to do ! '" My friend went on to generalize, quite sure of her ground, " That's the sweet and natural child instinct — to depend on adults for guidance. That's A MONTESSORI MOTHER 187 how children are, and all the Dr. Montessoris in the world can't change them." The difference between that point of view and Dr. Montessori's is the fundamental difference be- tween the belief in aristocracy, and the value of authority for its own sake, which still lingers among conservatives even in our day, and the whole-hearted belief in democracy which is growing more and more pronounced among most of our thinkers. Ida is being trained under her mother's masterful eye to carry on docilely what an English writer has called " the dogmatic method with its demand for mechanical obedience and its pursuit of external results." She is acquiring rapidly the habit of stand- ing still until somebody tells her what ,to do, and she has already acquired an unquestioning acqui- escence in the illimitable authority of somebody else, anyone who will speak positively enough to regulate her life in all its details. In other words, a finely consistent little slave is being manufactured out of Ida, and if in later years she should develop more of her mother's forcefulness, it will waste a great deal of its energy in a wild, unregulated revolt against the chains of habit with which she finds her- self loaded, and in the end will probably wreak itself on crushing the individuality out of her children in their turn. Sweet little four-year-old Ida, freed for a mo- ment from the twilight cell of her passive obedience, and blinking pitifully in the free daylight of the 188 A MONTESSORI MOTHER Casa dei Bambini, is a figure which has lingered long in my memory and has been one of the factors in- ducing me to undertake the perhaps too ambitious enterprise of writing this book. In still another way the Montessori insistence on spontaneity of the children's action safeguards them, it seems to me, against one of the greatest dangers of kindergarten life, and obviates one of the justest criticisms of the American development of Froebel's method, namely overstimulation and mental fatigue. When I first thoroughly grasped this fundamental difference, I was reminded of the saying of a wise old doctor who, when I was an intense, violently active girl of seventeen, had given me some sound advice about how to lift the little children with whom I happened to be playing : " Don't take hold of their hands to swing them around ! " he cried to me. " You can't tell when the strain may be too great for their little bones and tendons. You may do them a serious hurt. Have them take hold of your hands ! And when they're tired, they'll let go." It now seems to me that in the kindergarten the teachers are the ones who take hold of the children's hands, and in the Casa dei Bambini it is the other way about. What Dr. Montessori is always crying to her teachers is just the exhortation of my old doctor. What she is endeavoring to contrive is a system which allows the children to " let go " when they themselves, each at a different time, feel the strain of effort. The kindergarten teacher is making LS IX IxsETs Arouxd Which the Child Draws, axd Thex Fh THE OuTijxE With Colored Crayoxs. Copyright 1912. by Carl R. Byoir A MONTESSORI MOTHER 189 all possible conscientious efforts to train herself to an impossible achievement, namely to know (what of course she never can know with certainty) when each child loses his spontaneous interest in his ex- ercises or game. She is as genuinely convinced as the Montessori directress that she must " let go " at that moment, but she is not trained so to take hold of the child that he himself makes that all- important decision. It is true that the best kindergarteners learn from years of experience (which involves making mistakes on a good many children) about when, in general, to let go ; l^ut not the most inspired teacher can tell, as the child himself does, when the strain is first felt in the immature, undeveloped brain. And it is this margin of possibility of mistake on the part of the best kindergarten teachers which results only too frequently, with our nervous, too responsive Amer- ican children, in the flushed faces and unnaturally bright eyes of the little ones who return to us after their happy, happy morning in the kindergarten, unable to eat their luncheons, unable to take their afternoon naps, quivering between laughter and tears, and finding very dull the quiet peace of the home life. This observation finds any amount of confirma- tory evidence in the astonishingly great diversity in mental application among children when really left to their own devices. There is no telling how long or how short a time any given play or game 190 A MONTESSORI MOTHER will hold their attention, and both kindergarteners and Montessori teachers agree that it t= of ^alH^- only so loxxg as it really does ^genuinely- hold thpir_ attention. Some children are interested only so long as they must struggle against obstacles, and once the enterprise runs smoothly, have no further use for it. With others, the pleasure seems to in- crease a hundredfold when they are once sure of their own ability. For it is by no means true that the kindergarten teacher is always apt to continue a given game or exercise too long. It is only too long for some of the children. There are apt to be others whom she deprives, by her discontinuation of the game, of an invigorating exercise which they crave with all their might, and which they would continue, if left free to follow their own inclination, ten times longer than she would dare to think of asking them to do. The pertinacity of children in some exercise which happens exactly to suit their needs is one of the inevitable surprises to people observing them care- fully for the first time. Since my attention has been called to it, I have observed this crazy perse- verance on unexpected occasions in all children act- ing freely. Not long-ago a child of mine con- ceived the idea of climbing up on an easy-chair, . tilting herself over the arm, sliding down into the seat on her head, and so off in a sprawling heap on the floor. I began to count the number of times she went through this extremely violent, fatiguing, A MONTESSORI MOTHER 191 and (as far as I could see) uninteresting exercise, and was fairly astounded by her obstinacy in stick- ing to it. She had done it thirty-four times with unflagging zest, shouting and laughing to herself, and was apparently going on indefinitely when, to my involuntary relief, she was called away to supper. In Rome I remember watching a little boy going through the exercises with the wooden cylinders of different sizes which fit into corresponding holes (page 70). He worked away with a busy, serene, absorbed industry, running his forefinger around the cyhnders and then around the holes until he had them all fitted in. Then with no haste, but with no hesitation, he emptied them all out and began over again. He did this so many times that I felt an impatient fatigue at the sight of the laborious little creature, and turned my attention elsewhere. I had counted up to the fourteenth repetition of his feat before I stopped watching him, and when I glanced back again, a quarter of an hour later, he was still at it. All this, of course, without a particle of that " minimum amount of supervision consistent with con- scientious child- training." He was his own super- visor, thanks to the self-corrective nature of the apparatus he was using. If he put a cylinder in the wrong hole he discovered it himself and was forced to think out for himself what the trouble was. Dr. Montessorisays (and I can easily believe her from my own experience) that nothing is harder for 19^ A MONTESSORI MOTHER even the most earnest and gifted teachers to learn than that their duij is not to solve all the difficultiesL.. in the way of the children, or even to smooth these out as much as possible, but on the contrary ex- pressly to see to it that each child is kept constantlj^ supplied with difficulties and obstacles suitable to his strength. A kindergarten teacher tries faithfully to teach her children so that they will not make errors in their undertakings. She holds herself virtually respon- sible for this. With a Puritan conscientiousness she blames herself if they do make mistakes, if they do not understand, by grasping her explanation, all the inwardness of the process under consideration, and she repeats her explanations with unending patience until she thinks they do. The Montessori teacher, on the other hand, confines herself to pointing out to the child what the enterprise before him is. She does not, it is true, drop down before him the material for the Long Stair and leave him to guess what is to be done with it. She herself constructs the edifice which is the goal desired. She makes sure that he has a clear concept of what the task is, and then she mixes up the blocks and leaves him to work out his own salvation by the aid of the self-corrective material. Dr. Montessori has a great many amusing stories to tell of her first struggles with her teachers to make them realize her point of view. Some of them became offended, and resolved, since they were not A MONTESSORI MOTHER 193 allowed to help the children, to do nothing at all for them, a resolution which resulted naturally in a state of things worse than the first. It was very hard for them to learn that it was their part to set the machinery of an exercise in motion and then let the child continue it himself. I quite appreciate the difficulty of learning the distinction between direct- ing the children's activity and teaching them each new step of every process. My own impulse made me realize the truth of Dr. Montessori's laughing picture of the teacher's instinctive rush to the aid of some child puzzling over the geometric insets, and I knew, from having gone through many such pro- fuse, voluble, vague, confusing explanations myself, that what they always said was, " No, no, dear ; you're trying to put the round one in the square hole. See, it has no corners. Look for a hole that hasn't any corners, etc., etc." It was not until I had sat by a child, restraining myself by a violent effort of self- control from " correcting " his errors, and had seen the calm, steady, untiring hopeful perseverance of his application, untroubled and unconfused by adult ** aid," that I was fully convinced that my impulse was to meddle, not to aid. And I admit that I have many backslidings still. Half playfully and half earnestly, I am continu- ally quoting to myself the curious quatrain of the Earl of Lytton, a verse which I think may serve as a whimsical motto, for all of us energetic American mothers and kindergarteners who may be trying to 194 A MONTESSORI MOTHER learn more self-restraint in our relations with little children : " Since all that I can do for thee ( Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be, ] That thou mayst never guess nor ever see The all-endured, this nothing-done costs me." CHAPTER XIV MORAL TRAINING A PERUSAL of the methods of the Montessori schools and of the philosophy underlying them may lead the reader to question if under this new system the child is regarded as a creature with muscu- lar and intellectual activities only, and without a soul. While the sternest sort of moral training is given to the parent or teacher who attempts to use the Montessori system, apparently very little is ad- dressed directly to the child. Nothing could more horrify the founder of the sys- tem than such an idea. No modern thinker could possibly be more penetrated with reverence for the higher life of the spirit than she, or could bear its needs more constantly in mind. Critics of the method who claim that it makes no direct appeal to the child's moral nature, and tends to make of him a little egotist bent on self-develop- ment onl}^ have misapprehended the spirit of the whole system. One answer to such a criticism is that conscious moral existence, the voluntary following of spirit- ual law, being by far the rarest, highest, and most difficult achievement in human life, is the one 195 196 A MONTESSORI MOTHER which develops latest, requires the longest and most careful preparation and the most mature powers of the individual. It is not only un- reasonable to expect in a little child much of this conscious struggle toward the good, but it is utterly futile to attempt to force it prematurely into exist- ence. It cannot be done, any more than a six-months baby can be forced to an intellectual undertaking of even the smallest dimension. As a matter of fact, a normal child under six is mostly a little egotist bent on self-development, and to develop himself is the best thing he can do, both for himself and others, just as the natural business of a healthy child under a year of age is to extract all the physical profit possible out of the food, rest, care, and exercise given him. And yet even here, the line be- tween the varieties of growth — physical, intellectual, and moral — is by no means hard and fast. The six- months baby, although living an almost exclusively physical life, in struggling to co-ordinate the mus- cles of his two arms so that he can seize a rattle with both hands, is battling for the mastery of his brain- centers, just as the three-year-old, who leads a life composed almost entirely of physical and intellectual interests, still, in the instinct which leads him to pity and water a thirsty plant, is struggling away from that exclusive imprisonment in his own interests and needs which is the Old Enemy of us all. The fact that this altruistic interest is not an overmastering passion which moves him to continuous responsible A MONTESSORI MOTHER 19Y care for the plant, and the other fact that, even while he is giving it a drink, he has very likely forgotten his original purpose in the fascinations of the antics of water poured out of a sprinkling-pot, should not in the least modify our recognition of the sincerely moral character of his first impulse. Now, sincerity in moral impulse is a prerequisite to healthy moral life, the importance of which can- not be overstated by the most swelling devices of rhetoric. It is an essential in moral life as air is in physical life; in other words moral life of any kind is entirely impossible without it. Hypocrisy, con- scious or unconscious, is a far worse enemy than ig- norance, since it poisons the very springs of spiritual life, and yet few things are harder to avoid than un- conscious hypocrisy. A realization of this truth is perhaps the explanation of a recent tendency in America for fairly intelligent, fairly conscientious parents utterly to despair of seeing any light on this problem, and to attempt to solve it by running away from it, to throw up the whole business in dis- may at its difficult^^, to attempt no moral training at all because so much that is given is bad, and to "let the children go, until they are old enough to choose for themselves." It is possible that this method, chosen in des- peration, bad though it obviously is, is better than the older one of attempting to explain to little chil- dren the mysteries of the ordering of the universe be- fore which our own mature spirits pause in bewildered 198 A MONTESSORI MOTHER uncertainty. The children of six who conceive of God as a policeman with a long white beard, oddly enough placed in the sky, lying on the clouds, and looking down through a peephole to spy upon the actions of little girls and boys, have undoubtedly been cruelly wronged by the creation of this gro- tesque and ignoble figure in their little brains, a figure which, so permanent are the impressions of childhood, will undoubtedly, in years to come, uncon- sciously render much more difficult a reverent and spiritual attitude towards the Ultimate Cause. But because this attempt at spiritual instruction is as bad as it can be, it does not follow that the moral nature of the little child does not need training fitted to its capacities, limited though these undoubtedly are in early childhood. There is no more .reason for leaving a child to grow up morally unaided by a life definitely designed to develop his moral nature, than for leaving him to grow up physically unaided by good food, to expect that he will select this instinct- ively by his own unaided browsings in the pantry among the different dishes prepared for the varying needs of his elders. The usual method by which bountiful Nature, striving to make up for our deficiencies, provides for this, is by the action of children upon each other. This factor is, of course, notably present in the Casa dei Bambini in the all-day life in common of twenty children. In families it is especially to be seen in the care and self-sacrifice which older children are A MONTESSORI MOTHER 199 obliged to show towards younger ones. But in our usual small prosperous American families, this ele- ment of enforced moral effort is often wanting. Either there are but one or two children, or if more, the younger ones are cared for by a nurse, or by the mother sufficiently free from pressing material care to give considerable time to the baby of the family. And on the whole it must be admitted that Nature's expedient is at best a rough-and-ready one. Though the older children may miss an opportunity for spiritual discipline, it is manifestly better for the baby to be tended by an adult. But there are other organisms besides babies which are weaker than children, and the care for plants and animals seems to be the natural door through which the little child may first go forth to his lifelong battle with his own egotism. It is always to be borne in mind that the Case dei Bambini now actually existing are by no means ideal embodiments of Dr. Montes- sori's ideas (see^page 227J. She has not had a per- fectly free hand with any one of them and herself says constantly that many phases of her central principle have never been developed in practice. Hence the absence of any special morally educative element in the present Casa dei Bambini does not in the least indicate that Dr. Montessori has deliberately omitted it, any more than the perhaps too dryly practical character of life in the original Casa dei Bambini means anything but that the principle was being applied to very poor children who were in need, first 200 A MONTESSORI MOTHER of all, of practical help. For instance, music and art were left out of the life there, simply because, at that time, there seemed no way of introducing them. It is hard for us to realize that the whole movement is so extremely recent that there has not been time to over- come many merely material obstacles. In the same way, although circumstances have prevented Dr. Montessori from developing practically the Casa del Bambini as far in the direction of the care of plants and animals as she would like, she is very strongly in favor of making this an integral and important part of the daily life of little children. In this she is again, as in so many of the features of her system, only using the weight of her scientific reputation to force upon our serious and respectful attention means of education for little children which have all along lain close at hand, which have been mentioned by other educators (Froebel has, of course, his elder boys undertake gardening), but of which, as far as very young children go, our recognition has been fitful and imperfect. She is the modern doctor who proclaims with all the awe-compelling paraphernalia of the pathological laboratory back of him, that it is not medicine, but fresh air which is the cure for tuberculosis. Most parents already make some effort to provide pets (if they are not too much trouble for the rest of the family) with a vague, in- stinctive idea that they are somehow "good for chil- dren," but with no conscious notion of how this " good " is transferred or how to facilitate the proc- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 201 ess ; and child-gardens are not only a feature of some very advanced and modern schools and kindergartens, but are provided once in a while by a family, al- though nearly always, as in Froebel's system, for older children. But as those institutions are now con- ducted in the average family economy, the little child gets about as casual and irregular an opportunity to benefit by them as the consumptive of twenty years ago by the occasional whiffs of fresh air which the protecting care of his nurses could not prevent from reaching him. The four-year-old, as he and his pets are usually treated, does not feel real responsibility for his kitten or his potted plant and, missing that, he misses most of the good he might extract from his relations with his little sisters of the vegetable and animal world. Our part, therefore, in this connection, is to catch up the hint which the great Italian teacher has let fall and use our own Yankee ingenuity in developing it, always bearing religiously in mind the fundamen- tal principle of self-education which must underlie any attempt of ours to adapt her ideas to our condi- tions. For, of course, there is nothing new in the idea of associating children with animals and plants — an idea common to nearly all educators since the first child played with a puppy. What is new is our more conscious, sharpened, more definite idea, awakened by Dr. Montessori's penetrating analysis, of just how these natural elements of child-life can be used to stimulate a righteous sense of re- 202 A MONTESSORI MOTHER sponsibilitj. ^ Our tolerant indifference towards the children's dogs and cats and guinea-pigs, our fa- tigued complaint that it is more bother than it is worth to prepare and oversee the handling of garden- plots for the four- and five-year-olds, would be transformed into the most genuine and ardent interest in these matters, if we were penetrated with the real- ization that their purposeful use is the key to open painlessly and naturally to our children the great kingdom of self-abnegation. There is not, as is apt to be the case with dolls, a more or less acknowledged element of artificiality, even though it be the sweet " pretend " mother-love for a baby doll. The chil- dren who really care for plants and animals are in a sane world of reality, as much as we are in caring for children. Their services are of real value to another real life. The four-year-old youngster who rushes as soon as he is awake to water a plant he had for- gotten the day before, is acting on as genuine and purifying an impulse of remorse and desire to make amends as any we feel for a duty neglected in adult life. The motives which underlie that most valuable moral asset, responsibility, have been awakened, exer- cised, strengthened far more vitally than by any num- ber of those Sunday morning " serious talks " in which we may try fumblingly and futilcly from the outside to touch the child's barely nascent moral con- sciousness. The puppy who sprawls destructively about the house, and the cat who is always under our feet when we are in a hurry, should command respect- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 203 ful treatment from us, since they are rehearsing quaintly with the child a first rough sketch of the drama of his moral life. The more gentleness, thoughtfulness, care, and forbearance the little child learns to show to this creature, weaker than himself, dependent on him, the less difficult he will find the ■V. exercise of those virtues in other circumstances. He is forming spontaneously, urged thereto by a natural good impulse of his heart, a moral habit as valuable to him and to those who are to live with him, as the intellectual habits of precision formed by the use of the geometric insets. Of course, he will in the first place form this habit of unvarying gentleness towards plants and animals, ^nly as he forms so many other habits, in simian imitation of the actions of those about him. He must absorb from example, as well as precept, the idea that plants and animals, being dependent on us, have ^. moral right to our unfailing care — a conception which is otherwise not suggested to him until he is several years older and has back of him the habit of several 'years of indifference toward this duty of the strong. And so here is our hard-working Montessori parent embarked upon the career of animal-rearing, as well as child-training, with the added difficulty that he must care for the animals through the children, and resist stoutly the almost invincible temptation to take over this, like all other activities which belong by right to the child, for the short-cut reason that it is 204 A MONTESSORI MOTHER less trouble. If this impulse of the parent be fol- lowed, the mere furrj presence will be of no avail to the child, except casually. The kitten must be the little girl's kitten if she is really to begin the long preparation which will lead her to the steady and resolute self-abnegations of maternity, the prepara- tion which we hope will make her generation better mothers than we undisciplined and groping creatures are. As for plant-life, the Antseus-like character of hu- manity is too well known to need comment. We are all healthier and saner and happier if we have not entirely severed our connection with the earth, and it is surprising that, recognizing this element as con- sciously as we do, we have made so comparatively little systematic and regular use of it in the family to benefit our little children. It is not because it is very hard to manage. What has been lacking has been some definite, understandable motive to make us act in this way, beyond the sentimental notion that it is pretty to have flowers and children together. No one before has told us quite so plainly and forcibly that this observation of plants and imaginative sympathy with their needs is the easiest and most natural way for little minds to get a first general notion of the world's economy, the struggle between helpful and hurtful forces, and of the duty of not remaining a passive onlooker at this strife, but of entering it instinctively, heartily throwing all one's powers on the side of the good and useful. A MONTESSORI MOTHER 205 I know a child not yet quite three, who, by the maddeningly persistent interrogations characteristic of his age, has succeeded in extracting from a pair of gardening elders an explanation of the difference be- tween weeds and flowers, and who has been so struck by this information that he has, entirely of his own volition, enlisted himself in the army of natural-bom reformers. With the personal note of very little chil- dren, who find it so impossible to think in terms at all abstract, he has constructed in his baby mind an exciting drama in the garden, unfolding itself before his eyes ; a drama in which he acts, by virtue of his comparatively huge size and giant strength, the gen- erous role of deus ex machina, constantly rescuing beauty beset by her foes. He throws himself upon a weed, uproots it, and casts it away with the right- eously indignant exclamation, " Horrid old weed ! Stop eating the flowers' dinner ! " I do not tliink that it can be truthfully said that there are no moral elements in his life. He is a baby Sir Galahad, with roses for his maidens in distress. He has felt and exercised and strengthened the same impulse that drove Judge Lindsey to his battle for the children of Denver against the powers of graft. He has recognized spontaneously his duty to aid the good and useful against their enemies, the respon- sibility into which he was born when he opened his eyes upon the world of mingled good and evil. All this is not a fanciful literary flight of the imagination. It is not sentimentality. It is calling 206 A MONTESSORI MOTHER things by their real names. Because the little child's capacity for a genuine moral impulse is small and has, like all his other capacities, little continuity, is no reason why we should not think clearly about it and recognize it for what it is — ^the key to the future. Because he " makes a play " of his good action and is not priggishly aware of his virtue is all the more rea- son for us to be thankful, for that is a proof of its unforced existence in his spirit. Just as the child " makes a play " out of his geometric insets, and is not pedantically aware that he is acquiring knowl- edge, so, to take an instance from the Casa dei Bam- bini, the little girls who set the tables and bring in the soup are only vastly interested in the fun of " playing waitress." It is their elders who perceive that they are unconsciously and painlessly acquiring the habit of willing and instinctive service to others, which will aid them in many a future conscious and painful struggle against their own natural selfishness and inertia. This use of the sincerely common life in the Chil- dren's Home to promote sincerely social feeling among the children has been mentioned in the pre- ceding chapter. It is one of the most vitally im- portant of the elements in the Montessori schools. The genuine, unforced acceptance by the children of the need for sacrifices by the individual for the good of all, is something which can only be brought about by genuinely social life with their equals, such as they have in the Children's Home and not else- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 207 where. We must do the best we can in the family- life by seeing that the child shares as much as pos- sible and as sincerel}^ as possible in the life of the household. But at home he is inevitably living with his inferiors, plants, animals, and babies ; or his superiors, older children and adults ; whereas in the Children's Home he is living as he will during the rest of his life, mostly with his equals. And it is in the spontaneous adjustments and compromises of this continuous life with his equals that he learns most naturally, most soundly, and most thoroughly, the rules governing social life. As for moral life, it seems to me that we need neither make a vain attempt to subscribe to a too-rosy be- lief in the unmixed goodness of human nature, and blind ourselves to the saddening fact that the battle against one's egotism is bound to be painful, nor, on the other hand, go back to the grim creed of our forefathers, that the sooner children are thrust into the thick of this unending war the better, since they must enter it sooner or later. The truth seems to lie in its usual position, between two extremes, and to be that children should be strengthened by proper moral food, care, and exercises suited to their strength, and allowed to grow slowly into adult endurance before they are forced to face adult moral problems ; and that we may protect them from too great demands on their small fund of capacity for self-sacrifice by allowing them and even encouraging them to wreathe their imaginative " plays " about the 208 A MONTESSORI MOTHER self-sacrificing action, provided, of course, that we keep our heads clear to make sure that the " plays " do not interfere with the action. It is well to make a plain statement to the child of five, that he is requested to wipe the silver-ware because it will be of service to his mother (if he is lucky enough to have a mother who ever does so ob- viously necessary and useful a thing as to wash the dishes herself), but it is not necessary to insist that this conception of service shall uncompromisingly oc- cupy his mind during the whole process. It does no harm if, after this statement, it is suggested that the knives and forks and spoons are shipwrecked people in dire need of rescue, and that it would be fun to snatch them from their watery predicament and re- store them safely to their expectant families in the silver-drawer. By so doing we are not really confus- ing the issue, or " fooling " the child into a good ac- tion, if clear thinking on the part of adults accom- pany the process. We are but suiting the burden to the childish shoulders, but inducing the child-feet to take a single step, which is all that any of us can take at one time, in the path leading to the service of others. Most of this chapter has been drawn from Mon- tessori ideas by inference only, by the development of hints, and it is probable that other mothers, medi- tating on the same problems, may see other ways of applying the principle of self-education and spon- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 209 taneous activity to this field of moral life. It is apparent that the first element necessary, after a firm grasp on the fundamental idea that our children must do their own moral as well as physical growing, and after a vivid realization that the smallest amount of real moral life is better than much simulated and unreal feeling, is clear thinking on our part, a definite notion of what we really mean by moral life, a defini- tion which will not be bounded and limited by the repetition of committed-to-memory prayers. This does not mean that simple nightly aspirations to be a good child the next day may not have a most bene- ficial effect on even a very young child and may sat- isfy the first stirrings to life of the religious instinct, as much as the constant daily kindnesses to plants and animals satisfy the ethical instinct. This latter, however, at his age, is apt to be vastly more developed and more important than the religious instinct. Indeed the religious instinct, which apparently never develops in some natures, although so strong in others, is in all cases slow to show itself and, like other slowly germinating seeds, should not be pushed and prodded to hasten it, but should be left untouched until it shows signs of life. Our part is to prepare, cultivate, and enrich the nature in which it is to grow. CHAPTER XV DR. MONTESSORFS LIFE AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CASA DEI BAMBINI DR. MONTESSORI and the average Ameri- can parent are as different in heredity, train- ing, and environment as two civilized beings can very well be. Every condition surrounding the average American child is as materially different as possible from those about the children in the original Casa dei Bambini. Hence the usual sound rule that the indi- viduality and personal history of the scientist do not concern the student of his work does not hold in this case. The conditions in Rome where Dr. Mon- tessori has done her work, differ so entirely from those of ordinary American life, in the conduct of which we hope to profit by her experiments, that it is only fair to Americans interested in her work, to give them some notion of the varying influences which have shaped the career of this woman of genius. This is so especially in her case, because, as a na- tion, we are more ignorant of modern Italian life than of that of any great European nation. Modern Italy, wrestling with all the problems of modern in- dustrial and city life grafted upon an age-old civi- lization, endeavoring to enlighten itself, to take the 210 A MONTESSORI MOTHER 211 best from twentieth-century progress without los- ing its own individual virtues, this is a country as unknown to us as the regions of the moon. And yet to understand Dr. Montessori's work and the vicis- situdes of her undertakings, we must have at least a summary knowledge that the Italian world of to- day is in a curious ferment of antiquated prejudices and highly progressive thought. To us, as a rule, Rome is " The Eternal City " of our school-Latin days, whereas, in reality, it is, for all practical purposes as a city, much more recent than New York — about as old, let us say, as Detroit. But Detroit planted its vigorously growing seedling in the open ground and not in a cracked pot of small dimensions. Hence the problems of the two mod- ern cities are dissimilar. I heard it suggested by a man of authority in the Italian government that a great mistake had been made when the modem capital of Italy had been dumped down upon the heap of historic ruins which remained of ancient Rome. It had been bad for the ruins and very hard on the modern capital. If a site had been selected just outside the walls of old Rome, a nineteenth-cen- tury metropolis could have sprung up with the effortless haste with which our own Middle Western plains have produced cities. One thing is certain. Dr. Montessori's Case dei Bambini would not have taken their present form under other conditions, and this is what concerns us here. But before the origin of the Case dei Bambini is 212 A MONTESSORI MOTHER taken up, a brief biography of their creator will help us to understand her development. Her early life, before her choice of a profession, need not inter- est us beyond the fact that she is the only child of devoted parents, not materially well-to-do. Now, as a result of a too-rapid social transformation among the Italians, the " middle class " population forms a much smaller proportion of the inhabitants of Italy than in other modern nations. One result of this condition is that the brilliant daughter of parents not well-to-do, finds it much harder to pass into a class of associates and to find an intellectual back- ground which suits her nature, than a similarly in- tellectual and original American girl. Even now in Italy such a girl is forced to fight an unceasing battle against social prejudice and intellectual inertia. It can be imagined that when Dr. Montes- sori was the beautiful, gifted girl-student of whom older Romans speak with enthusiasm or horror, ac- cording to the centuries in which they morally live, her will-power and capacity for concentration must have been finely tempered in order not to break in the long struggle. Judging by the talk one hears in Rome about the fine, youthful fervor of Dr. Montessori's early strug- gle against conditions hampering her mental and spiritual progress, she is a surviving pioneer of social frontier prejudice, who has emerged from the battle with pioneer conditions endowed with the hickory-like toughness of intellectual fiber of will A MONTESSORI MOTHER 213 and of character which is the reward of sturdy pioneers. Certain it is that her battles with preju- dices of all sorts have hardened her intellectual mus- cles and trained her mental eye in the school of absolute moral self-dependence, that moral self- dependence which is the aim and end of her method of education and which will be, as rapidly as it can be realized, the solvent for many of our tragic and apparently insoluble modern problems. It is hard for an American of this date to realize the bomb-shell it must have been to an Italian family a generation ago when its only daughter decided to study medicine. So rapidly have conditions sur- rounding women changed that there is no parallel possible to be made which could bring home to us fully the tremendous will-power necessary for an Italian woman of that time and class to stick to her resolution. The fangs of that particular prejudice have been so well-nigh universally drawn that it is safe to say that an American family would see its only daughter embark on the career of animal-tamer, steeple- jack, or worker in an iron foundry, with less trepidation than must have shadowed the early days of Dr. Montessori's medical studies. One's imagina- tion can paint the picture from the fact that she was the first woman to obtain the degree of Doctor of Medicine, from the University of Rome, an achievement which was probably rendered none the easier by the fact that she was both singularly beau- tiful and singularly ardent. 214 A MONTESSORI MOTHER After graduation she became attached, as assistant doctor, to the Psychiatric Clinic at Rome. At that time, one of the temporary expedients of self- modernizing Italy was to treat the idiot and feeble- minded children in connection with the really insane, a rough-and-ready classification which will serve vividly to illustrate the desperate condition of Italy of that date. The young medical graduate had taken up children's diseases as the " specialty " which no self-respecting modern doctor can be without, and naturally in her visits to the insane asylums (where the subjects of her Clinic lived), her attention was attracted to the deficient children so fortuitously lodged under the same roof. I go into the details of the oblique manner in which she embarked upon the prodigious undertaking of education without any conscious knowledge of the port toward which she was directing her course, in order to bring out clearly the fact that she ap- proached the field of pedagogy from an entirely new direction, with absolutely new aims and with a wholly different mental equipment from those of the tech- nically pedagogical, philosophic, or social-reforming persons who have labored so conscientiously in that field for so many generations. This young doctor, then, trained by hard knocks to do her own thinking and make her own decisions, found that her absorbed study of abnormal and deficient children led her straight along the path taken by the nerves from their unregulated external A MONTESSORI MOTHER 215 activities to the brain-centers which rule them so fitfully. The question was evidently of getting at the brain-centers. Now the name of the process of getting at brain-centers is one not usually encoun- tered in the life of the surgeon. It is education. The doctor at work on these problems was all the time in active practice as a physician, an influence in her life which is not to be forgotten in summing up the elements which have formed her character. She was performing operations in the hospitals, taking charge of grave diseases in her private practice, ex- posing herself to infection of all sorts in the in- fectious wards of the hospitals, liable to be called up at any hour of the night to attend a case anywhere in the purlieus of Rome. It was a soldier tried and tested in actual warfare in another part of the bat- tle for the betterment of humanity, who finally took up the question of the training of the young. She parted company with many of her fellow-students of deficient children, and faced squarely the results of her reasoning. Not for her the position aloof, the observation of phenomena from the detached stand- point of the distant specialist. If nervous diseases of children, leading to deficient intellectual powers, could be best attacked through education, the obvious step was to become an educator. She gave up her active practice as a physician which had continued steadily throughout all her other activities, and accepted the post of Director of the State Orthophrenic School (what we would call an 216 A MONTESSORI MOTHER Institute for the Feeble-Minded), and, throwing her- self into the work, heart and soul, with all the ardor of her race and her own temperament, she utilized her finely-tempered brain and indomitable will, in the hand-to-hand struggle for the actual ameliora- tion of existing conditions. For years she taught the children in the Asylum under her care, devoting her- self to them throughout every one of their waking hours, pouring into the poor, cracked vases of their minds the full, rich flood of her own powerful in- tellect. All day she worked with her children, loved to idolatry by them, exhausting herself over their problems like the simplest, most unthinking, most unworldly, and devout sister of charity ; but at night she was the scientist again, arranging, classifying, clarifying the results of the day's observation, ex- amining with minute attention the work of all those who had studied her problems before her, applying and elaborating every hint of theirs, every clue dis- covered in her own experiments. Those were good years, years before the world had heard of her, years of undisturbed absorption in her work. Then, one day, as such things come, after long, uncertain eff*orts, a miracle happened. A sup- posedly deficient child, trained by her methods, passed the examinations of a public school with more ease, with higher marks than normal children pre- pared in the old way. The miracle happened again and again and then so often that it was no longer a A MONTESSORI MOTHER 21Y miracle, but a fact to be foretold and counted on with certainty. Then the woman with the eager heart and trained mind drew a long breath and, determining to make this first success only the cornerstone of a new tem- ple, turned to a larger field of action, the field to which her every unconscious step had been leading her, the education, no longer only of the deficient, but of all the normal young of the human race. It was in 1900 that Dr. Montessori left the Scuola Ortofrenica, and began to prepare herself consciously and definitely for the task before her. For seven years she followed a course of self-im- posed study, meditation, observation, and intense thought. She began by registering as a student of philosophy in the University of Rome and turned her attention to experimental psychology with espe- cial reference to child-psychology. The habit of her scientific training disposed her naturally as an accompaniment to her own research to examine thoroughly the existing and recognized authorities in her new field. She began to visit the primary schools and to look about her at the orthodox and old-established institutions of the educational world with the fresh vision only possible to a mind trained by scientific research to abhor preconceived ideas and to come to a conclusion only after weighing actual evidence. « No more diverting picture can be imagined than the one presented by this keen-eyed, clear-headed 218 A MONTESSORI MOTHER scientist surveying, with an astonishment which must have been almost dramatically apparent, the rows of immobile little children nailed to their stationary seats and forced to give over their natural birth- right of activity to a well-meaning, gesticulating, explaining, always fatigued, and always talking teacher. It was evident at a glance that she could not find there what she had hoped to find, that first prerequisite of the modern scientist, a prolonged scrutiny of the natural habits of the subject of in- vestigation. The entomologist seeking to solve some of the farmer's problems, spends years with a micro- scope, studying the habits of the potato and of the potato-bug before he tries to invent a way to help the one and circumvent the other. But Dr. Mon- tessori found, so to speak, that all the potatoes she tried to investigate were being grown in a cellar. They grew, somehow, because the upward thrust of life is invincible, but their pale shoots gave no evi- dence of the possibility of the sturdy stems, which a chance specimen or two escaped by a stroke of luck from the cellar, proved to be possible for the whole species. At the same time that she was making these amazed and disconcerted visits to the primary schools, she was devouring all the books which have been written on her subject. My own acquaintance with works on pedagogy is limited, but I observe that people who do know them do not seem surprised that this thoroughly trained modern doctor, with A MONTESSORI MOTHER 219 years of practical teaching back of her, should have found little aid in them. Two highly valuable authorities she did find, significantly enough doctors like herself, one who lived at the time of the French Revolution and one perhaps fifty years later. She tells us in her book what their ideas were and how strongly they modified her own ; but as we are here chiefly concerned with the net result of her thought, it would not be profitable to go exhaustively into the investigation of her sources. It is enough to say that most of us would never in our lives have heard of those two doctors if she had not studied them. We have now followed the course of Dr. Montes- sori's life until it brings us back to that chaotic, ancient-modern Rome, mentioned a few paragraphs above, struggling with all sorts of modern problems of city life. The housing of the very poor is a question troublesome enough, even to Detroit or Indianapolis with their bright, new municipal ma- chinery. In Rome the problem is complicated by the medieval standards of the poor themselves as to their own comfort ; by the existence of many old rookeries where they may roost in unspeakable con- ditions of filth and promiscuity ; and by the lack of a widespread popular enlightenment as to the prog- ress of the best modern communities. But, though Italian public opinion as a whole seems to be in a somewhat dazed condition over the velocity of changes in the social structure, there is no country 220 A MONTESSORI MOTHER in the world which has more acute, powerful, or original intelligences and consciences trained on our modern problems. All the while that Dr. Montessori had been trying to understand the discrepancy be- tween the rapid advance of idiot children under her system and the slow advance of normal children under old-fashioned methods, another Italian, an in- fluential, intelligent, and patriotic Roman, Signor Edoardo Talamo, was studying the problem of bet- tering at once, practically, the housing of the very poor. He had decided what to do and had done it, when the line of his activity and that of Dr. Montessori's met in one of those apparently fortuitous combina- tions of elements destined to form a compound which is exactly the medicine needed for some unhealthy part of the social tissue. The plan of Signor Tala- mo's model tenements was so wise and so admirably executed that, except for one factor, they really deserved their name. This factor was the existence of a large number of little children under the usual school age, who were left alone all day while their mothers, driven by the grinding necessity which is the rule in the Italian lower working classes, w^ent out to help earn the family living. These little ones wandered about the clean halls and stairways, de- facing everything they could reach and constantly getting into mischief, the desolating ingenuity of which can be imagined by any mother of small chil- dren. It was evident that the money taken to repair A MONTESSORI MOTHER 221 the damage done by them would be better employed in preventing them from doing it in the first place. Signor Talamo conceived the simple plan of setting apart a big room in every one of his tenement houses where the children could be kept together. This, of course, meant that some grown person must be there to look after them. Now Rome is, at least from the standpoint of a New Yorker or a Chicagoan, a small city, where " everyone who is anyone knows everyone else." Al- though the sphere of Signor Talamo's activity was as far as possible from that of the pioneer woman doctor specializing in children's brain-centers, he knew of her existence and naturally enough asked her to undertake the organization and the manage- ment of the different groups of children in his tene- ment houses, collected, as far as he was concerned, for the purpose of keeping them from scratching the walls and fouling the stairways. On her part Dr. Montessori took a rapid mental survey of these numerous groups of normal chil- dren at exactly the age when she thought them most susceptible to the right sort of education, and saw in them, as if sent by a merciful Providence, the experimental laboratories which she so much needed to carry on her work and which she had defi- nitely found that primary schools could never be- come. The fusion of two elements which are destined to combine is not a long process once they are brought 222 A MONTESSORI MOTHER together. How completely Dr. Montessori was pre- pared for the opportunity thus given her can be calculated by the fact that the first Casa dei Bambini was opened on the 6th of January, 1907, and that now, only five years after, there arrive in Rome, from every quarter of the globe, bewildered but imperious demands for enlightenment on the new idea. For it was at once apparent that the fundamental principle of self-education, which had been growing larger and larger in Dr. Montessori's mind, was as brilliantly successful in actual practice as it was plausible in abstract thought. Evidently entire free- dom for the children was not only better for the pur- poses of the scientific investigator, but infinitely the best thing for the children. All those meditations about the real nature of childhood, over which she had been brooding in the long years of her study, proved themselves, once put to the test, as axiomatic in reality as they had seemed. Her theories held water. The children justified all her visions of their capacity for perfectibility and very soon went far beyond anything even she had conceived of their ability to teach and to govern themselves. For instance, she had not the least idea, when she began, of teaching children under six how to write. She held, as most other educators did, that on the whole it was too difficult an undertaking for such little ones. It was her own peculiar characteristic, or rather the char- acteristic of her scientific training, of extreme open- ness to conviction which induced her, after practical A MONTESSORI MOTHER 223 experience, to begin her famous experiments with the method for writing. The story of this startKng revelation of unsus- pected forces in human youth and of the almost instant pounce upon it by the world, distracted by a helpless sense of the futility and clumsiness of present methods of education, is too well known to need a long recapitulation. The first Casa dei Bam- bini was established in January, 1907, without at- tracting the least attention from the public. About a year after another one was opened. This time, owing to the marked success of the first, the affair was more of a ceremony, and Dr. Montessori deliv- ered there that eloquent inaugural address which is reprinted in the American translation of her book. By April of 1908, only a little over a year after the first small beginning, the institution of the Casa dei Bambini was discovered by the public, keen on the scent of anything that promised relief from the almost intolerable lack of harmony between modern education and modern needs. Pilgrims of all nationalities and classes found their way through the filthy streets of that wretched quarter, and the barely established institution, still incomplete in many ways, with many details untouched, with many others provided for only in a makeshift manner, was set under the microscopic scrutiny of innumerable sharp eyes. The result, as^ far as we are concerned, we all know: the rumors, vague at first, which blew across 224f A MONTESSORI MOTHER our lives, then more definite talk of something really new, then the characteristically American promptness of response in our magazines and the almost equally prompt appearance of an English translation of Dr. Montessori's book. And, so far, that is all we have from her, and for the present it is all we can have, without taking some action ourselves to help her. It is a strange situation, intensely modern, which could only have occurred in this age of instantly tattling cables and telegrams. It is, of course, a great exaggeration to say that all educated parents and teachers in America are interested in the Montessori system, but the proportion who really seem to be, is astonish- ing in the extreme when one considers the very recent date of the beginning of the whole movement. Over there in Rome, in a tenement house, a woman doctor begins observations in an experimental labora- tory of children, and in five years' time, which is nothing to a real scientist, her laboratory doors are stormed by inquirers from Australia, from Nor- way, from Mexico, and, most of all, from the United States. Teachers of district schools in the Carolinas write their cousins touring in Europe to be sure to go to Rome to see the Montessori schools. Mothers from Oregon and Maine write, addressing their letters, " Montessori, Rome," and make demands for enlightenment, urgent, pressing, peremptory, and shamelessly peremptory, since they conceive of a pos- sibility that their children, their own children, the A MONTESSORI MOTHER 2^5 most important human beings in the world, may be missing something valuable. From innumerable towns and cities, teachers, ambitious to be in the front of their profession, are taking their hoarded savings from the bank and starting to Rome with the naive conviction that their own thirst for informa- tion is sufficient guarantee that someone will in- stantly be forthcoming to provide it for them. When they reach Rome, most of them quite unable to express themselves in Italian or even in French, what do they find, all these tourists and letters of inquiry, and adventuring school-mistresses? They find a dead wall. They have an unformulated idea that they are probably going to a highly organized institution of some sort, like our huge " model schools " attached to our normal colleges, through the classrooms of which an unending file of obsei'vers is allowed to pass. And they have no idea whatever of the inevitability uith which Italians speak Italian. They find — if they are relentlessly persistent enough to pierce through the protection her friends try to throw about her — only Dr. Montessori herself, a private individual, phenomenally busy with very important work, who does not speak or understand a word of English, who has neither money, time, or strength enough single-handed to cope with the flood of inquiries and inquirers about her ideas. In order to devote herself entirely to the great undertaking of transmuting her divinations of the truth into a definite, logical, and scientific system, she has with- 226 A MONTESSORI MOTHER drawn herself more and more from public life. She has resigned from her chair of anthropology in the University of Rome, and last year sent a substitute to do her work in another academic position not con- nected with her present research — and this although she is far from being a woman of independent means. She has sacrificed everything in her private life in order to have, for the development of her educational ideas, that time and freedom so constantly infringed upon by the well-meaning urgency of our demands for instruction from her. She lives now in the most intense retirement, never taking a vacation from her passionate absorption in her work, not even giving herself time for the exercise necessary for health, surrounded and aided by a little group of five devoted disciples, young Italian women who live with her, who call her " mother," and who exist in and for her and her ideas, as ardently and whole-heartedly as nuns about an adored Mother Superior. Together they are giv- ing up their lives to the development of a complete educational system based on the fundamental idea of self-education which gave such brilliant results in the Casa dei Bambini with children from three to six. For the past year, helped spiritually by these disciples and materially by influential Italian friends, Dr. Montessori has been experimenting with the application of her ideas to children from six to nine, and I think It is no violation of her confidence to report that these experiments have been as astonish- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 227 inglj successful as her work with younger children. It is to this woman burning with eagerness to do her work, absorbed in the exhausting problems of intellectual creation, that students from all over the world are turning for instruction in a phase of her achievement which now lies behind her. The woman in the genius is touched and heartened by the sudden homage of the world, but it is the spirit of the in- vestigating scientist which most often inhabits that powerful, bulky, yet lightly poised body and looks out from those dark, prophetic eyes; and from the point of view of the scientist, the world asks too much when it demands from her that she give herself up to normal teaching. For it must be apparent from the sketch of her present position that she would need to give up her very life were she to accede to all the requests for training teachers in her primary method, since she is simply a private individual, has no connection with the official edu- cational system of her country, is at the head of no normal school, gives no courses of lectures, and has no model schools of her own to which to invite vis- itors. It is hard to believe her sad yet unembittered statement that there is now in Rome not one primary school which is entirely under her care, which she authorizes in all its detail, which is really a " Mon- tessori School." There are, it is true, some which she started and which are still conducted according to her ideas in the. majority of details, but not one where she is the leading spirit. 228 A MONTESSORI MOTHER There are a variety of reasons, natural enough when one has once taken in the situation, which account for this state of things, so bewildering and disconcerting to those who have come from so far to learn at headquarters about the new ideas. The Italian Government, straining to carry the heavy burdens of a modern State, feels itself unable to undertake a radical and necessarily very costly re- organization of its schools, the teachers very natu- rally fear revolutionary changes which would render useless their hard-won diplomas, and carry on against the new system a secret campaign which has been so far successful. Hence it happens that investigators coming from across seas have the not unfamiHar ex- perience of finding the prophet by no means head of the official reHgion of his own country. In the other camp, fighting just as bitterly, are the Montessori adherents, full of enthusiasm for her philosophy, devoting all the forces at their com- mand (and they include many of the highest in- tellectual and social forces) to the success of the cause which they believe to be of the utmost im- portance to the future of the race. It can be seen that the situation is not orderly, calm, or in any way adapted to dispassionate investigation. And yet people who have come from California and British Columbia and Buenos Ayres to seek for information, naturally do not wish to go back to their distant homes without making a violent effort to in- vestigate. What they usually try to do is to force A MONTESSORI MOTHER 229 from someone in authority a card of admission either to the Montessori school held in the Franciscan Nunnery on the Via Giusti, or to another conducted by Signora Galli among the children of an extremely poor quarter of Rome, or, innocent and unaware, in all good faith go to visit the institutions in the model tenements, still called Case dei Bambini. But Dr. Montessori's relations with those schools ceased in 1911 as a result of an unfortunate disagreement between Signor Talamo and herself in which, so far as an outsider can judge, she was not to blame; and those infant schools are now thought by impartial judges to be far from good expositions of her methods, and in many cases are actual travesties of it. Furthermore, Dr. Montessori has now no con- nection with Signora Galli's schools. This leaves accessible to her care and guided by her counsels only the school held in the Franciscan nunnery, which is directed by Signorina Ballerini, one of Dr. Mon- tessori's own disciples, as the nearest approach to a school under her own control in Rome. This is, in many ways, an admirable example of the wonder- ful result of the Montessori ideas and is a revelation to all who visit it. But even here, though the good nuns make every effort to give a free hand to Signorina Ballerini, it can be imagined that the eccle- siastical atmosphere, which in its very essence is composed of unquestioning obedience to authority, is not the most congenial one for the growth of a system which uses every means possible to do away^ 230 A MONTESSORI MOTHER witli dogma of any sort, and to foster self-depend- ence and first-hand ideas of things. More than this, if this school admitted freely all those who wish to \asit it, there would be more visitors than children on many a day. It is not hard to sympathize with the searchers for information who come from the ends of the earth, who stand aghast at this futile ending of their long journey. And yet it would be the height of folly for the world to call away from her all-important work an investigator from whom we hope so much in the future. How can we expect her, against all manner of material odds, to organize a normal school in a country with a government indifferent, if not hostile to her ideas, to gather funds, to rent rooms, to arrange hours, hire janitors, and lay our courses! But the proselytizer who lives in every ardent believer makes her as unreconciled to the state of things as we are. She is regretfully aware of the opportunity to spread the new gospel which is being lost with every day of silence, distressed at the thought of sending the pilgrims away empty-handed, and above all naturally distracted with anxiety lest impure, misunderstanding caricatures of her system spread abroad in the world as the only answer to the demand for information about it. Busy as she is with the most absorbing investigations, Dr. Montes- sori is willing to meet the world halfway. If those who ask her to teach them will do the tangible, com- paratively simple work of establishing an Institute NOTE Since this chapter was printed, I have heard the good news that satisfactory arrangements have been made by the Montessori American Committee with Dr. Montessori for a training class to be held in Rome for American teachers. A MONTESSORI MOTHER 231 of Experimental Pedagogy in Rome, the Dottoressa, for all her concentration on her further research, will be more than willing to give enough of her time for making the school as wonderful, beautiful, and in- spiring as only a Montessori school can be. Our part should be to endeavor to learn from her what we can without disturbing too much that free- dom of life which is as essential to her as to the children in her schools, to give generously to an Institute of Experimental Pedagogy, and then freely allow her own inspiration to shape its course. Surely the terms are not hard ones, and it is to be hoped that the United States, with the genuine, if some- what haphazard, willingness to further the cause of education, which is perhaps our most creditable na- tional characteristic, will accept the offered oppor- tunity and divert a little of the money now being spent in America on scientific investigation of every sort to this investigation so vital for the coming generation. The need is urgent, the sum required is not large, the opportunity is one in a century, and the end to be gained valuable beyond the possibility of exaggeration, for, as Dr. Montessori quotes at the end of the preface of her book, " Whoso strives for the regeneration of education strives for the regen- eration of the human race." CHAPTER XVI SOME LAST REMARKS THAT there is little prospect of an immediate adoption in the United States of Montessori ideas of flexibility and unhampered individual growth is apparent to anyone who knows even slightly the hierarchic rigidity of our system of edu- cation with its inexorable advance along fixed fore- ordained lines, from the kindergarten through the primary school, on through the high school to the Chinese ordeal of the college entrance examination, an event which casts its shadow far down the line of school-grades, embittering the intellectual activ- ities and darkening the life of teachers and pupils (even pupils who have not the faintest chance of go- ing to college) for years before the awful moment arrives. All really good teachers have always been, as much as they were allowed to be, some variety of what is called in this book " Montessori teacher." But as the State and private systems of education have swollen to more and more unmanageable proportions, and have settled into more and more exact and cog-like relations with each other, teachers have found them- selves required to " turn out a more uniform 233 A MONTESSORI MOTHER 233 product," a process which is in its very essence ut- terly abhorrent to anyone with the soul of an edu- cator. Our State system of education has come to such an exalted degree of uniformity that a child in a third grade in Southern California can be trans- ported to a third grade in Maine, and find himself in company with children being ground out in pre- cisely the same educational hopper he has left. His temperament, capacity, tastes, surroundings, prob- able future and aspirations may be what you will, he will find all the children about his age of all temperaments, tastes, capacities, probable futures and aspirations practically everywhere in the United States, being " educated " exactly as he was, in his original graded school, wherever it was. School superintendents hold conferences of self-congratu- lation over this " standardizing " of American edu- cation, and some teachers are so hypnotized by this mental attitude on the part of their official su- periors, that they come to take pride in the Procrus- tean quality of their schoolroom where all statures are equalized, and to labor conscientiously to drive thirty or more children slowly and steadily, like a flock of little sheep, with no stragglers and no ad- vance-guard allowed, along the straight road to the next division, where another shepherdess, with the same training, takes them in hand. There is a significant anecdote current in school-circles, of an educator rising to address an educational convention 234 A MONTESSORI MOTHER which had been discussing special treatment for mentally slow and deficient children, and solemnly making only this pregnant exclamation, " We have special systems for the deficient child, and the slow child and the stupid child . . . but God help the bright child! " Now it is only fair to state that this mechanical exactitude of program and of organization has been in the past of incalculable service in bringing educa- tional order out of the chaos which was the inevitable result of the astoundingly rapid growth in popula- tion of our country. Our educational system is a monument to the energy, perseverance, and organiz- ing genius of the various educational authorities, city, county, and state superintendents and so on, who have created it. But like all other complicated machines it needs to be controlled by master-minds who do not forget its ultimate purpose in the fas- cination of its smoothly-running wheels. That there is plenty of the right spirit fermenting among educa- tors is evident. For, even along with the mighty de- velopment of this educational machine, has gone a steadily increasing protest on the part of the best teachers and superintendents, against its quite pos- sible misuse. Few people become teachers for the sake of the money to be made in that business ; it is a profession which rapidly becomes almost intolerable to anyone who has not a natural taste for it ; and, as a con- sequence of these two factors, it is perhaps, of all the A MONTESSORI MOTHER ^35 professions, the one which has the largest propor- tion of members with a natural aptitude for their lifework. With the instinctive right-feeling of human beings engaged in the work for which they were born, a considerable proportion of teachers have protested against the tacit demand upon them by the machine organization of education, to make the children under their care, all alike. They have felt keenly the essential necessity of inculcating initiative and self-dependence in their pupils, and in many cases have been aided and abetted in these heterodox ideas by more or less sympathetic principals and superintendents ; but the ugly, hard fact remains, not a whit diminished for all their efforts, that the teacher whose children are not able to " pass " given examinations on given subjects, at the end of a given time, is under suspicion ; and the principal whose school is full of such teachers is very apt to give way to a successor, chosen by a board of business-men with a cult for efficiency. To advise teachers under such conditions to " adopt Montessori ideas " is to add the grimmest mockery to the difficulties of their position. All that can be hoped for, at present, in that direction, is that the strong emphasis placed by the Montessori method on the necessity for indi- vidual freedom of mental activity and growth, may prove a valuable reinforcement to those American educators who are already struggling along towards that goal. This general state of things in the formal cduca- 236 A MONTESSORI MOTHER tion of our country is one of the many reasons why this book is addressed to mothers and not to teachers. The natural development of Montessori ideas, the natural results of the introduction of " Children's Homes " into the United States, without this already existing fixed educational organization convinced of its own perfection, would be entirely in accord with the general, vague, unconscious socialistic drift of our time. Little by little, various enterprises which used to be private and individual, are being carried on by some central, expert organization. This is especially true as regards the life of women. One by one, all the old " home industries " are being taken away from us. Our laundry-work, bread-making, sewing, house-furnishing, and the like, are all done in impersonal industrial centers far from the home. The education of children over six has already fol- lowed this general direction and is less and less in the hands of the children's mothers. And now here is the Casa dei Bambini, ready to take the younger children out of our yearning arms, and sternly for- bidding us to protest, as our mothers were forbidden to protest when we, as girls, went away to college, or when trained nurses came in to take the care of their sick children away from them, because the best inter- ests of the coming generation demand this sacrifice. But as things stand now, we mothers have a little breathing-space in which to accustom ourselves gradually to this inevitable change in our world. At some time in the future, society will certainly recog- A MONTESSORI MOTHER 237 nize this close harmony of the successful Casa dei Bambini with the rest of the tendencies of our times, and then there will be a need to address a detailed technical book on Montessori ideas to teachers, for the training of little children will be in their hands, as is already the training of older children. And then will be completed the process which has been going on so long, of forcing all women into labor suitable to their varying temperaments. The last one of the so-called " natural," " domestic " occupa- tions will be taken away from us, and very shame at our enforced idleness will drive us to follow men into doing, each the work for which we are really fitted. Those of us who are born teachers and mothers (for the two words ought to mean about the same thing) will train ourselves expertly to care for the children of the world, collected for many hours a day in school-homes of various sorts. Those of us who have not this natural capacity for wise and beneficent association with the young (and many who love chil- dren dearly are not gifted with wisdom in their treatment) will do other parts of the necessary work of the world. But that time is still in the future. At present our teachers can no more adopt the utter freedom and the reverence for individual differences, which con- stitute the essence of the " Montessori method," than a cog in a great machine can, of its own volition, begin to turn backwards. And here is the oppor- tunity for us, the mothers, perhaps among the last 238 A MONTESSORI MOTHER of the race who will be allowed the inestimable delight and joy of caring for our own little children, a de- light and joy of which society, sooner or later, will consider us unworthy on account of our inexpertness, our carelessness, our absorption in other things, oui lack of wise preparation, our lack of abstract good judgment. Our part, during this period of transition, is to seize upon regenerating influences coming from any source, and shape them with care into instruments which will help us in the great task of training little children, a complicated and awful responsibility, our pathetically inadequate training for which is offset somewhat by our passionate desire to do our best. We can collaborate in our small way with the scientific founder of the Montessori method, and can help her to go on with her system (discovered be- fore its completion) by assimilating profoundly her master-idea, and applying it in directions which she has not yet had time finally and carefully to explore, such as its application to the dramatic and aesthetic instincts of children. Above all, we can apply it to ourselves, to our own tense and troubled lives. We can absorb some of Dr. Montessori's reverence for vital processes. In- deed, possibly nothing could more benefit our children than a whole-hearted conversion on our part to her great and cahn trust in life itself. INDEX Adult analysis of children's problems, 143, 147, 154. Animal training different from child training, 155. Apparatus: Big stair, 72, 100. Broad stair, 100. Buttoning-frames, 13, 15, 55, 134. Color spools, 73. Explanation of, 99 ff. Geometric insets, flat, 76. Geometric insets, solid, 70. How to use, 67 ff., 91, 92, 99. Long stair, 100, 192. The Tower, 71, 100. Age of children in Montes- sori schools, 8. Apathetic child, the, 41 ff. Arithmetic, beginnings of, 16, 100. " Bad child," the, treatment of, 32. Big stair, the. See Appa- ratus. Buttoning-frames. See Ap- paratus. Democracy, basis of Montes- sori system, 118, 187. Discipline, 31, 141 ff. Exercises, gymnastic, 146, 148; for legs, 112; for bal- ance, 113, 115, 149. Exercises, sensory: Baric, 65, 101. BUndfolded, 17. Color games, 74. Color matching, 73. Hearth-side seed-game, 110. In dimension, 16. In folding up, 107 ff. Instinctive desire for, 52-54. Not entire occupation of children, 68. Simplicity of, 54. In smelling, 64. Tactile, 59, 60, 100, 115. In tasting, 64. Bv use of water, 150, 'l51. By use of weights, 65, 101. Family life, how affected by Montessori system, 121. Freedom, 31, 103, 118, 119, 123, 131. Gardens, value of, in child- training, 201, 204. Geometric insets. See Ap- paratus. Individuality, respect for, of Montessori system, 40, 93. Interest, a prerequisite to education, 30, 94 ff., 190, Kindergarten compared with Montessori system, 20, 173,, 239 240 INDEX 179; as to self-annihila- tion of teacher, 180; as to absence of supervision, 180; as to social life of children, 184; as to overstimulation, 188, 189. Lesson of silence, 43 flF. Long stair. See Apparatus. Mental concentration, 143, 145. Music, 19. New pupils, 37 ff. Number of pupils in Montes- sori school, 8. Obedience, 155, 159, 161. Observation of children, ne- cessity for, 92. Overstimulation, 188, 189. Patience of children, 137, 138, 190. Plants, care of, for children, 202, 204. Reading, 89. Responsibility, inculcation of, 34, 35, 69, 70, 136, 201. School day, length of, 37. School-equipment, 8, 59. Self-control of children, 142, 144, 145. Self-dependence of children, 23, 102, 110, 133, 137, 156, 186. Slowness of children, 21, 135. Social life of children, 184, 206, 207. Supervision, absence of, 10, 102, 103, 180, 191, 193. Theoretic basis of Montes- sori system, vi, 49, 56, 103, 120, 123, — see also under Democracy, Freedom, In- terest, Individuality, Re- sponsibility, Self-depend- ence. Touch, sense of, 57, 58; exer- cises for, — see Exercises, Sensory. Tower, the. See Apparatus. Writing, training for, begin- nings of, 59; theory under- lying, 79 if.; alphabet, 82; spontaneous writing, 84 ; time required to learn, 87. 3 47 7 *:<:*•;< I-. -*' .•.»*^j ' ' •■■; -i>*,r,t . ,;. ,-' ^'' •■y LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 019 811 158 2 ■ * "^'p. 'Jilt^i'" ;, « ■-*-'■ )•''■■' ■*;*:■-■ 'V ■i^'-'i'.x,:. ' '^j'^ ^■.•■^TSSi'&'is