SOMETHING ABOUT THE APPARATUS AND ABOUT THE THEORY UNDERLYING IT
As I look at the title of this chapter before setting to work on it,
the sight of the word “Theory” makes me apprehensively aware that I
am stepping down into very deep water without any great confidence in
my powers as a swimmer. But I recall again the reflection which has
buoyed me up more than once in the composition of these unscientific
impressions, namely that I am addressing an audience no more scientific
than I am, an audience of ordinary, fairly well educated American
parents. Furthermore I am convinced that my book can do no more
valuable service than if by the tentative incompleteness of its account
it drives every reader to the study of the system in Dr. Montessori’s
own carefully written treatise.
It is always, I believe, essential to an understanding of any
educational system to comprehend first of all the underlying principle
before going on to its adaptation to actual conditions. This adaptation
naturally varies as the actual conditions vary, and should change in
many details if it is to embody faithfully, under differing conditions,
the fundamental principle. But the master idea in every system is
unvarying, eternal, and it should be stated, studied, and grasped,
before any effort is made to learn the details of its practical
application. A statement of this fundamental principle will be found in
different phrasings, several times in the course of this book, because
it is essential not only to learn it once, but to bear it constantly
in mind. _Any attempt to use the Montessori apparatus or system by
anyone who does not fully grasp or is not wholly in sympathy with its
bed-rock idea, results inevitably in a grotesque, tragic caricature of
the method_, such a farcical spectacle as we now see the attempt to
Christianize people by forcible baptism to have been.
The central idea of the Montessori system, on which every smallest
bit of apparatus, every detail of technic rests solidly, is a full
recognition of the fact that no human being can be educated by anyone
else. He must do it himself or it is never done. And this is as true at
the age of three as at the age of thirty; even truer, for the man of
thirty is at least as physically strong as any self-proposed mentor is
apt to be, and can fight for his own right to chew and digest his own
intellectual food.
It can be readily seen how this dominating idea changes completely
the old-established conditions in the schoolroom, turning the high
light from the teacher to the pupil. Since the child can really be
taught nothing by the teacher, since he himself must do every scrap
of his own learning, it is upon the child that our attention centers.
The teacher should be the all-wise observer of his natural activity,
giving him such occasional quick, light-handed guidance as he may for a
moment need, providing for him in the shape of the ingenious Montessori
apparatus stimuli for his intellectual life and materials which enable
him to correct his own mistakes; but, by no means, as has been our
old-time notion, taking his hand in hers and leading him constantly
along a fixed path, which she or her pedagogical superiors have laid
out beforehand, and into which every childish foot must be either
coaxed or coerced.
We have admitted the entire validity of this theory in physical life.
We no longer send our children for their outdoor exercise bidding them
walk along the street, holding to Nurse’s hand like little ladies and
gentlemen. If we can possibly manage it we turn them loose with a
sandpile, a jumping-rope, hoops, balls, bats, and other such stimuli to
their natural instinct for vigorous body-developing exercise. And we
have a “supervisor” in our public playgrounds only to see that children
are rightly started in their use of the different games, not at all to
play every game with them. We do this nowadays because we have learned
that little children are so devoted to those exercises which tend to
increase their bodily strength that they need no urging to engage in
them. The Montessori child, analogously, is allowed and encouraged to
let go the hand of his mental nurse, to walk and run about on his own
feet, and an almost endless variety of stimuli to his natural instinct
for vigorous mind-developing, intellectual exercise is placed within
his reach.
The teacher, under this system, is the scientific, observing supervisor
of this mental “playground” where the children acquire intellectual
vigor, independence, and initiative as spontaneously, joyfully,
and tirelessly as they acquire physical independence and vigor as
a by-product of physical play. We have long realized that children
do not need to be driven by force, or even persuaded, to take the
amount of exercise necessary to develop their growing bodies. Indeed
the difficulty has been to keep them from doing it so continuously
as to interfere with our sedentary adult occupations and tastes. We
have learned that all we need to do is to provide the jumping-rope
and then leave the child alone with other children. The most
passionately inspired pedagogue can never learn to skip rope for a
child, any more than in after years he can ever learn the conjugation
of a single irregular verb for a pupil. The learner must do his own
learning, and, this granted, it follows naturally that the less he
is interfered with by arbitrary restraint and vexatious, unnecessary
rules, the more quickly and easily he will learn. An observation of
the typical, joyfully busy child in a Casa dei Bambini furnishes more
than sufficient proof that he enjoys acquiring mental as well as
physical agility and strength, and asks nothing better than a fair and
unhindered chance at this undertaking.
But even when this deep-laid foundation principle of self-education
has been grasped, all is not plain sailing for the adventurer on the
Montessori ocean. A set of theories relating to such complicated
organisms as human beings, cannot in the nature of things be of
primer-like simplicity. For my own convenience I very soon made two
main divisions of the different branches on which the Montessori
system is developed out of its central main idea. One division, the
practical, is made up of theories based on acute, scientific knowledge
of the child’s body, his muscles, brain, and nerves, such as only a
doctor and a physiological psychologist combined can have. The second
division is made up of theories based on the spiritual nature of man,
as disclosed by the study of history, by unbiased direct observation
of present-day society, and by that divining fervor of enthusiastic
reverence for the element of perfectibility in human nature which has
always characterized founders of new religions.
This chapter is to be devoted to the narration of what a person,
neither a doctor nor a physiological psychologist, was able to
understand of the first division.
I think the first point which struck me especially was the insistence
on the fact that very little children have no greater natural interest
than in learning how to do something with their bodies. We all know
how much more fascinating a place our kitchens seem to be for our
little children than our drawing-rooms. I have heard this inevitable
gravitation towards those back regions of the house accounted for on
the theory the “children seem to like servants better than other
people. There seems to be some sort of natural affinity between a child
and a cook.” One morning spent in the Casa dei Bambini showed me the
true reason. Children like cooks and chamber-maids better than callers
in the parlor, because servants are always doing something imitable;
and they like kitchens and pantries better than drawing-rooms because
the drawing-room is a museum full of objects, interesting it is true,
but inclosed in the padlocked glass-case of the command, “Now, don’t
touch!” while the kitchen is a veritable treasure-house of Montessori
apparatus.
The three-year-old child who, eluding pursuit from the front of
the house, sits down on the kitchen floor with a collection of
cookie-cutters of different shapes in his lap, and amuses himself
by running his fingers around their edges, is engaged in a true
“stereognostic exercise” as it is alarmingly dubbed in scientific
nomenclature. If there is a closet of pots and pans, and he has
time before he is dragged off to clean clothes and the vacuity of
adult-invented toys, to fit the right covers to the pots and see
which pan goes inside which, he has gone through a “sensory exercise
for developing his sense of dimension.” If he is struck by the fact
that the package of oatmeal, although so large, weighs less than the
smaller bag of salt, he has been initiated into a “baric exercise”;
while if there are some needles of ice left on the floor by a careless
iceman, with these and a permitted dabbling in warm dishwater, he
unconsciously invents for himself a “thermic exercise.” If the cook is
indulgent or too busy to notice, there may be added to these interests
the creative rapture to be evolved from a lump of dough, or a fumbling
attempt to fathom the mysterious inwardness of a Dover egg-beater.
I have heard it said of the Montessori method that a system of
education accomplished with such simple everyday means could scarcely
claim that it is either anything new or the discovery of any one
person. It seems to me that is about like denying any novelty to
the discovery that pure air will cure consumption. The pure air has
always been there, consumptives have had nothing to do but to breathe
it to get well, but the doctors who first drove that fact into our
impervious heads deserve some credit and can certainly claim that they
were innovators with their descent upon the stuffy sickrooms and their
command to open the windows.
Children from time immemorial have always done their best, struggling
bravely against the tyranny of adult good intentions, to educate
themselves by training their senses in all sorts of sense exercise.
They have always been (generations of exasperated mothers can bear
witness to it!) “possessed” to touch and handle all objects about
them. What Dr. Montessori has done is to appear suddenly, like the
window-breaking doctors, and to cry to us, “Let them do it!” Or rather,
to suggest something better for them to touch and handle since it
is neither necessary nor desirable that one’s three-year-old should
perfect his sense of form either on one’s cherished Sèvres vase or on a
more or less greasy cooking utensil. Nor has he that perverse fondness
for the grease of the kettle, or that wicked joy in the destruction of
valuable bric-à-brac which our muddle-headed observation has led us to
attribute to him. Those are merely fortuitous, and for him negligible,
accompaniments to the process of learning how to distinguish accurately
different forms. Dr. Montessori assures us, and proves her assertion,
that his sole interest is in the varying shapes of the utensils he
handles, and that if he is given cleaner, lighter articles with more
interesting shapes, he requires no urging to turn to them from his
greasy and heavy pots and pans.
Bearing in mind, therefore, the humble and familiar relatives of the
Montessori apparatus to be found in our own kitchens and dining-rooms,
let us look at it a little more in detail.
The buttoning-frames have been described (page 13). One’s invention
can vary them nearly to infinity. In the Casa dei Bambini there are
these frames arranged for buttons and buttonholes, for hooks and eyes,
for lacings, patent snap-fasteners, ribbon-ends to tie, etc., etc.
The aim of this exercise is so apparent that it is scarcely necessary
to mention it, except for the constant temptation of a child-lover
before the Montessori apparatus to see in it only the most enchanting
diversion for a child, which amuses him, though so simply, far more
than the most elaborate of mechanical toys. But, and here is where our
wool-gathering wits must learn a lesson from purposeful forethought: we
should never forget that _there is no smallest item in the Montessori
training which is intended merely to amuse the child_. He is given
these buttoning-frames not because they fascinate him and keep him out
of mischief, but because they help him to learn to handle, more rapidly
than he otherwise would, the various devices by which his clothes and
shoes are held together, on his little body. As for the profound and
vitally important reason why he should be taught and allowed as soon as
possible to dress himself, that will be treated in the discussion of
the philosophical side of this baby-training (page 129 ff.).
It is apparent, of course, that the blindfolded child who was
identifying the pieces of different fabrics was training his sense
of touch. The sight of this exercise reminds the average person with
a start of surprise that he too was born with a sense of touch which
might have been cultivated if anyone had thought of it; for most of
us, by the enormity of our neglect of our five senses, reduce them,
for all practical purposes to two, sight and hearing, and distrust
any information which comes to us by other means. Our complacency
under this self-imposed deprivation is astonishing. It is as if a man
should wear a patch over one eye because he is able to see with one
and thinks it not worth while to use two. Now, it is apparent that
our five senses are our only means of conveying information to our
brains about the external world which surrounds us, and it is equally
apparent that to act wisely and surely in the world, the brain has need
of the fullest and most accurate information possible. Hence it is a
foregone conclusion, once we think of it at all, that the education of
all the senses of a child to rapidity, agility, and exactitude is of
great importance, not at all for the sake of the information acquired
at the time by the child, but for the sake of the five, finely accurate
instruments which this education puts under his control. The child
who was identifying the different fabrics was blindfolded to help him
concentrate his sense of touch on the problem and not aid this sense or
mislead it, as we often do, with his sight.
[Illustration: EXERCISES IN PRACTICAL LIFE.]
[Illustration: BUILDING “THE TOWER.”
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
It may be well here to set down a few facts about the relative
positions of the senses of touch and of sight, facts which are not
known to many of us, and the importance of which is not realized by
many who happen to know them. Everyone knows, to begin with, that
a new-born baby’s eyes, while physically perfect, are practically
useless, and that the ability to see with them accurately comes very
gradually. It seems that it comes much more gradually than the people
usually in charge of little children have ever known, and that, roughly
speaking, up to the age of six, children need to have their vision
reinforced by touch if, without great mental fatigue, they are to get
an accurate conception of the objects about them.
It appears furthermore that, as if in compensation for this slow
development of vision, the sense of touch is extraordinarily developed
in young children. In short, that the natural way for little ones to
learn about things is to touch them. Dr. Montessori found that the
finger-tips of little children are extremely sensitive, and she claims
that there is no necessity, granted proper training, why this valuable
faculty, only retained by most adults in the event of blindness, should
be lost so completely in later life.
Now it is plain to be seen that we adults, with our fixed habit of
learning about things from looking at them, have, in neglecting
this means of approach to the child-brain, been losing a golden
opportunity. If children learn more quickly and with less fatigue
through their fingers than through their eyes, why not take advantage
of this peculiarity--a peculiarity which extends even more vividly
to child-memory, for it is established beyond question that a little
child can remember the “feel” of a given object much more accurately
and quickly than the look of it. It is easy to understand, once this
explanation is given, the great stress that is laid, in Montessori
training, on the different exercises for developing and utilizing the
sense of touch.
One of the first things a child just admitted to a Casa dei Bambini is
taught is to keep his hands scrupulously clean, because we can “touch
things better” with clean finger-tips than with dirty ones. And, of
course, he is allowed to take the responsibility of keeping his own
hands clean, and encouraged to do it by the presence of the little
dainty washstands, just the right height for him, supplied with bowl,
pitcher, etc., just the right size for him to handle. The joy of the
children in these simple little washstands, and their deft, delighted,
frequent use of them is a reproach to us for not furnishing such an
easily secured amelioration in the life of every one of our babies.
The education of the sense of touch, like all the Montessori exercises
for the senses, begins with a few simple and strongly contrasting
sensations and proceeds little by little, to many only very slightly
differing sensations, following the growth of the child’s ability to
differentiate. The child with clean finger-tips begins, therefore, with
the first broad distinction between rough and smooth. He is taught to
pass his finger-tips lightly, first over a piece of sandpaper, and then
over a piece of smoothly polished wood, or glossy enameled paper, and
is told briefly, literally in two words, the two names of those two
abstract qualities.
Here, in passing, with the first mention of this sort of exercise, it
should be stated that the children are taught to make these movements
of the hand and all others like them _always_ from left to right, so
that a muscular habit will be established which will aid them greatly
later when they come to “feel” their letters, which are, of course,
always written from left to right.
The children are encouraged to keep their eyes closed while they are
“touching” things, because they can concentrate their attention in
this way. And here another general observation should be made: that in
the Montessori language “touching” does not mean the brief haphazard
contact of hand with object which we usually mean, but a systematic
examination of an object by the finger-tips such as a blind person
might make.
After the first broad distinction is learned between rough and
smooth, there are then to be conquered all the intervening shades and
refinements of those qualities. The children take the greatest delight
in these exercises and almost at once begin to invent new ones for
themselves, “feeling” whatever materials are near them and giving
them their proper names, or asking what their names are. It is as if
their little minds were suddenly opened, as our dully perceptive adult
minds seldom are, to the infinite variety of surfaces in the world.
They notice the materials of their own dresses, the stuffs used in
upholstering furniture, curtains, dress fabrics, wood, smooth and
rough, steel, glass, etc., etc., with exquisitely fairy-light strokes
of their sensitive little finger-tips, which seem almost visibly to
grow more discriminating.
The “technical apparatus” for continuing this training is varied, but
always simple. A collection of slips of sandpaper of varying roughness
to be placed in order from fine to coarse by the child (blindfolded
or not, as he seems to prefer); other collections of bits of fabrics
of all sorts to be identified by touch only; of slips of cardboard,
enameled or rough; blotting-paper, writing-paper, newspaper, etc.,
etc.; of objects of different shapes, cubes, pyramids, balls,
cylinders, etc., for the blindfolded child to identify; later on of
very small objects like seeds of different shapes or sizes; finally, of
any objects which the child knows by sight, his playthings, articles
around the house, to be recognized by his touch only.
There is one result on the child’s character of this sort of exercise
which Dr. Montessori does not specifically mention but which has struck
me forcibly in practical experimentation with it. I have found that
little hands and fingers trained by these fascinating “games” to light,
attentive, discriminating, and unhurried handling of objects, lose very
quickly that instinctive childish, violent but very uncertain clutch
at things, which has been for so many generations the cause of so much
devastation in the nursery. Little tots of four, trained in this way,
can be trusted with glassware and other breakable objects, which would
go down to certain destruction in the fitfully governed hands of the
average undisciplined child of twelve. In other words the child of four
has fitted himself by means of a highly enjoyable process to be, in one
more respect, an independent, self-respecting, trustworthy citizen of
his world.
Of course all these different exercises are much more entertaining
when, like other fun-producing “games,” they are “played” with a crowd
of other children. When one child of a group is blindfolded, and as our
American children say “It,” while the others sit about, watching his
identification of more and more difficult objects, ready, all of them,
for a shout of applause at a success, or at a failure for an instant
laughing pounce on the coveted blindfold and application of it to the
child next in order, of course there is much more jolly laughter, the
interest is keener, and the attention more concentrated by the contact
with other wits, than can be the case with a single child, even with an
audience of the most sympathetic mother or aunt. There is absolutely
no adequate substitute for the beneficial action and reaction of
children upon one another such as form such a considerable part of the
Montessori training in a Casa dei Bambini. On the other hand, those of
us who live, as we almost all do, far from any variety of a Montessori
school, can, with the exercise of our ingenuity and mother-wit, arrange
a great number of more or less adequate temporary expedients. A large
number of the Montessori devices, if they were not called “sensory
exercises,” would be recognized as merely fascinating new games for
children. What is blind-man’s buff but a “sensory exercise for training
the ear,” since what the person who is “It” does is to try to catch
the slight movements made by the other players accurately enough to
pursue and capture them? Children have another game called, for some
mysterious reason of childhood, “Still pond, no more moving!” a
variety of blind-man’s buff, which trains still more finely the sense
of hearing, since the players are required to stand perfectly still,
and the one who is “It” must detect their presence by such almost
imperceptible sounds as their breathing, or the rustling caused by an
involuntary movement. If Montessori herself had invented this game, it
could not be more perfectly devised for bodily control. Children who
wriggle about in ordinary circumstances without the slightest capacity
to control their bodies, even in response to the sternest adult
commands for quiet, will stand in some strained position without moving
a finger, their concentration so intense that even their breathing is
light and inaudible. We must all have seen children happily playing
such games; many of us have spent hours and hours of our childhood
over them; Froebel used them and others like them plentifully in his
system; there are all sorts of more or less hit-or-miss imitations of
them being constructed by modern child-tamers; but no one before this
Italian woman-doctor ever analyzed them so that we plain unprofessional
people could fully grasp their fascination for us; ever told us that
children like them because they afford an opportunity to practise
self-control, and that similar games based on the same idea that it is
“fun” to exercise one’s different senses in company or in competition
with one’s youthful contemporaries, would be just as entertaining as
these self-invented games, handed down for untold generations from
one set of children to another. All the varieties of blindfold sensory
exercises are variations on the theme of blind-man’s buff, which is
so perennially interesting to all children. Any small group of young
children, two or three little neighbors come in to play, will with a
little guidance at first readily “play” any of the “tactile exercises”
described above (pages 60, 61) for hours on end, instead of wrangling
about the rocking-horse--a toy invented for solitary or semi-solitary
consumption. Any group of children, collected anywhere for ever so
short a time, can be converted into a half-hour’s Montessori school,
though as a rule the younger they are the better material they are,
since they have not fallen into bad mental habits.
The various exercises or “games” for exercising the sense of touch,
although not described here in all the detail of their elaboration in
the Casa dei Bambini, can be elaborated from these suggestions as one’s
own, or what is more likely, the children’s inventiveness may make
possible.
The definite education of taste and smell has not been very much
developed by Dr. Montessori, although simple exercises have been
successfully devised, such as dropping on the tongue tiny particles
of substances, sweet, sour, salt, bitter, etc., having the child
rinse his mouth out carefully between each test. Similar exercises
with different-smelling substances can be undertaken with blindfolded
children, asking them to guess what they are smelling. Dr. Montessori
lays no great stress on this, however, as the sense of smell with
children is not highly developed.
Practice in judging weight is given by the use of pieces of wood of
the same size but of different weights, chestnut contrasted with oak,
poplar-wood with maple, etc., etc., the child learning by slightly
lifting them up and down on the palm of his hand. Later on this
can be varied by the use of any objects of about the same size but
of different weights, and later still by single objects of weights
disproportionate to their size, such as a bit of lead or a small pillow.
The difference between these carefully devised exercises and the
haphazard, almost unconscious comparison by the child in the kitchen
of the bag of salt and the box of oatmeal, is a very good example of
the way in which Dr. Montessori has systematized and ordered, graded
and arranged the exercises which every child instinctively craves. The
average mother, with leisure to devote to her much-loved child, calls
him away from the pantry-shelf where he may upset the oatmeal box or
spill the salt, thus “getting into mischief,” and leads him, with
mistaken affection, back to his toy animals. The luckier child of a
poorer, busier, or more indifferent mother is allowed to “mess around”
in the kitchen until he makes himself too intolerable a nuisance. He
goes through in this way many valuable sense exercises, but he wastes a
great deal of his time in misdirected and futile effort, and does, as
a matter of fact, make a great deal of trouble for his elders which
is not at all a necessary accompaniment to his own life, liberty, or
pursuit of information.
Dr. Montessori has neither led the child away from his instinctively
chosen occupations, nor left him in the state of anarchic chaos
resulting from his natural inability to choose, among the bewildering
variety of objects in the world, those which are best suited for his
self-development. She has, so to speak, taken out into the kitchen,
beside the child, busy with his self-chosen amusements, her highly
trained brain, stored with pertinent scientific information, and she
has looked at him long and hard. As a result she is able to show us,
what our own blurred observation never would have distinguished,
just which elements, in the heterogeneous mass of his naturally
preferred toys, are the elements towards which the tendrils of his
rapidly-growing intellectual and muscular organism are reaching.