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 uncompromisingly, 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 religion 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 weaknesses as society
has to safeguard ours, in forbidding grade railways in big cities for
instance, but we have no more right than society has to interfere 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 purpose 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 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. “... Benefits 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 protégé 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 walking on terra firma; 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 assuming the rôle 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 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 unadulterated egotism, and that I
“couldn’t bear to have the babies grow up” because I wanted to continue
longer in my complacent, self-assumed rôle 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 possible 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 something infinitely more searching and subtle.
Modern 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
bewildered 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 ambushes of egotism, to
conceive a new, high 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 down their own weaknesses, which 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 has been taken conclusively. That question
has been settled for all time and has been crystallized in popular
opinion. We may still tyrannize coarsely over the weak, but we are
quite conscious that we are doing something to be ashamed of. We can
therefore, without fear of reactionary setbacks, devote ourselves to
creating a popular consciousness 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
affectionate parent with his three-year-old child. How, practically,
concretely, at once, to-day, can we begin to avoid paternal despotism
over little children?
To begin with, by giving them the practical training necessary to
physical independence of life. Anyone who knows a woman who lived
in the South during the old régime must have heard stories of the
pathetic, grotesque helplessness to which the rich white population
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 paralytic who cannot take
off his boots because of a pathological 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 household
routine, the impatient mother, the one who is “no teacher and never
can tell anybody how to do things,” all these diverse personalities,
though actuated by quite differing motives, are doing the same thing,
unconsciously, benevolently, overbearingly insisting upon living the
child’s life for him.
But it is evident that simply 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-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 inconvenience, no matter how ingeniously we
arrange the matter. We must feel a whole-hearted willingness to forego
a superfluity in life for the sake of safeguarding an essential of
life. When I feel the temptation, into which my impatient temperament
is constantly leading me, to perform some action for a child which he
would better do for himself, because his slowness interferes with my
household schedule, I bring rigorously to mind the Montessori 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 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 analyze the various restrictions we put
upon the child’s freedom to live his own life. These restrictions
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-control, and independence,
almost the most valuable outfit 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 régime with little children
are astonished to find that it is 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 laborious 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 complicated, let it be
remembered that the Children’s Home looms close at hand, ominously
ready to devote 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.
[Illustration: MATERIALS FOR TEACHING ROUGH AND SMOOTH.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
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 small children. It is
visibly apparent that, as far as physical surroundings are concerned,
he is Gulliver 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 surprise
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 children’s interests, is now better adapted for
child-life 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 in 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 disciplinary
forces to the most turbulent nature.