THE POSSIBILITY OF AMERICAN ADAPTATIONS OF, OR ADDITIONS TO, THE
MONTESSORI APPARATUS
Holding firmly in mind the guiding principle formulated in the
paragraph preceding, it may not be presumptuous for us, in addition
to exercising our children with the apparatus devised by Dr.
Montessori, to attempt to apply her main principles 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
unconscious of her existence, have been for years approximating 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?
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 anyone 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 miraculous _tour de force_ she meant single-handed to
accomplish what had baffled us all, and holding ourselves 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 permitted 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 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. Montessori 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 Montessori device, and she was a real
“natural-born” Montessori teacher. And I am sure that everyone must
have in his circle of acquaintances several persons who have such an
intuitive understanding of children that Dr. Montessori’s arguments
and theories 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 Directress, be transferred bodily to
any Casa dei Bambini. 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 instructed all the older ones. This “apparatus,” to
use the unfortunately mouth-filling and inflated name 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 my 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 followed, runs: “I snatched
’em away from him and I was as mad as a hornit 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 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 unfoldin’ that thing.”
That historic dish-towel is still among the “apparatus” 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 revelation of new forces, although hundreds of “natural
mothers” long have been using devices strongly resembling 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 characterizes the trained mind, is perfectly
aware not not only of what she is doing, but of a broadly fundamental
and wholly convincing philosophical reason for doing it; namely, that
the child’s body is a machine which he will have to use all his life in
whatever he does, and the sooner he learns the accurate 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 modern 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
animals, the knowledge of plant-life, the intimate acquaintance with
the beauties of the seasons, the enforced self-dependence in crises,
are impossibly out of reach, we can give our children some of the
benefits 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 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
principle 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. Furthermore, it is to
be remembered that the set of Montessori 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-born baby are the most negligible members he possesses, 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 entirely new to me; and probably will be to many
of the mothers who read this book, but an ingenious person has only
to hear it to think at once of a number 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 instinctive gesture we must all have seen,
when he 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 staircase. 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 inherent 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 serious?
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 prehensilely 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 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 backward,
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 matter. 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, already 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 distress 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 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 arrange 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 unconsciously so many of the secrets of bodily
poise that walking straight soon becomes a foregone conclusion.
One of the blindfold games in use in Montessori schools is played with
wooden solids of different shapes, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, etc. The
blindfolded 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, cotton, satin, woolen,
etc., can be managed in any house which possesses a rag-bag. I do not
see why the possession 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 certainly 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 costumes 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 several 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 correct,
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.
[Illustration: COLOR BOXES COMPRISING SPOOLS OF EIGHT COLORS AND EIGHT
SHADES OF EACH COLOR.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]