SOME GENERAL REMARKS ABOUT THE MONTESSORI APPARATUS IN THE AMERICAN
HOME
The first thing to do, if you can manage it, is to secure a set of
the Montessori apparatus. It is the result of the ripest thought,
ingenuity, and practical experience of a gifted specialist who has
concentrated all her forces on the invention of the different devices
of her apparatus. But there are various supplementary statements to be
made which modify this simple advice.
One is, that the arrival in your home of the box containing the
Montessori apparatus means just as much for the mental welfare of
your children as the arrival in the kitchen of a box of miscellaneous
groceries means for their physical health. The presence on the pantry
shelf of a bag of the best flour ever made will not satisfy your
children’s hunger unless you add brains and good judgment to it, and
make edible, digestible bread for them. There is nothing magical or
miraculous about the Montessori apparatus. It is as yet the best raw
material produced for satisfying the intellectual hunger of normal
children from three to six, but it will have practically no effect
on them if its use is not regulated by 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, figuratively
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 necessity 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 children
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 characteristics, 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 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
children 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
individualism run wild. There are some general broad principles 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 nature.
But lilies-of-the-valley shrivel up in the amount of sunshine which
supplies just the right conditions 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 are
intellectually. The Montessori rule 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 undertake 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 confess 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 recitations
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 examination. The only proof I have of all this is the record
of the examination and the presence, among my relics of the past, of
the note-book in my handwriting; 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 cannot 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 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 Hindustani. 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 understandable
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 discussed 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 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 conduct 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
itself on some occupation which the educator has thought beforehand
would turn the trick.[B] When we capture and try to tame a little wild
creature of unknown 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 always our first resort. We
offer him all sorts of things to eat, and observe which he selects.
It is true that we do make some broad generalizations from the results
of our experiences with other animals, and we do not try to feed a
little creature who looks like a woodchuck 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 may 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 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 distinctions, 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” teacher? They 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 liberal 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 description 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 repeat 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 possible, 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 it set before him to divine its
correct use. The buttoning-frames, and the solid and plane geometric
insets 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 begins 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 apparatus 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 intended 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 different fabrics, he needs
someone to tie the bandage over his eyes and, the first time, to
show him how to set to work.
[Illustration: TRAINING THE “STEREOGNOSTIC SENSE”--COMBINING MOTOR AND
TACTUAL IMAGES.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
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 begins some of the more
complicated exercises, he needs a little longer explanation when he
begins a new exercise, 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 landscape painter of
real ability who is reduced almost to nervous tears and certainly to
paralyzed impotence, by 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 give too close an
attention to his 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 himself. The best way to
deal with this unfortunate tendency is to provide 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 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 forward 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 remember
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 accomplished
admirably, though not so directly as in the kindergarten work). They
are, like all truly educative 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 triangle, or even the sacred cube
of Froebelian infant-schools. It is of the highest importance that he
shall acquire the mental 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 unreliable eyesight on which his parents
have had to depend for information. It is of no especial importance
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, correcting and
supplementing each other as they so seldom do with us badly trained
adults.