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 liberty. 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 “Émile,” 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 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 conviction arises from the fact that the
founder of this “new” philosophy bases it on the theory of democracy;
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 highest 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 during 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, 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 forward as I was by the generations of my voting,
self-governing ancestors; but the resultant splintering upheaval 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 children 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 perceived 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 fitful. 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 children 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. Montessori 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
reasoned, that men and women have reached their highest development
only when they have had the utmost possible 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 masters and
slaves, if society has found it necessary for 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 society 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 institution that, like everything else very
old, it has acquired barnacle-like accretions of irrelevant tradition.
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 toothlessness. To renovate this valuable institution
of the family (and one of the unconscious aims of the Montessori system
is nothing more or less than the renovation 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 conditions 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 acumen; for I am continually
perceiving that I saw these consequences but very vaguely through the
dimmed glasses of my unconscious, hidebound conservatism, and I am
constantly being startled by the possibility of some new, although very
simple application of it in my daily contact with the child-world. A
wholesome mental exercise in this connection 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 clinging to the idea of a closely intimate
family-life, most of us would turn with horror from any attempt to
return 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-misunderstood 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 expression of humanity’s enduring
suspicion of that freedom which is so essential to its welfare, and
that schoolroom rules for silence, for immobility, for uniformity
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 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
submissiveness, 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 supreme 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
system 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 execution, they cry out aghast, “What! a school without a
rule for silence, for immobility, a school without fixed seats, without
stationary desks, where children 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 background--why, that is no school at all--it
is anarchy!”
One seems to hear faint echoes from another generation 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 offensive. 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_ restraint, and
above all to no meddling 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 Bambini, where every detail
of the Montessori theory has been more than proved, with an abundance
of confirmatory 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 modern times.