SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON THE NATURE OF “DISCIPLINE”
With the last affirmation of the preceding chapter I have brought
myself to another bed-rock principle of this new religion of childhood,
one which at first I was unable to understand and hence to accept.
In my very blood there runs that conviction of the necessity for
discipline which colored so profoundly all early New England life. At
the sight of this too-pleasant and too-smiling world of children, some
old Puritan of an ancestor sprang to life in me and cried out sourly,
“But it’s good for children to do what they don’t like to do, and to
keep on with something after they want to stop. They must in later
life. They should begin now.”
The answer to this objection is one I have had practically to work
out for myself, since the Italian exponents of the system, having
back of them an unbroken line of life-loving and life-trusting Latin
forefathers, found it practically impossible to understand what was
in my mind. There was much talk of “discipline” in their discussion
of the theories of the method; but evidently they did not attach the
same meaning to the word as the one I had been trained to use. This
fact led me to meditate on what I myself really meant by discipline: a
process of definition which, as it always does, clarified my ideas and
proved them in some respects quite different from what I had thought
them.
Discipline means, of course, “the capacity for self-control.” I had
no sooner formulated this definition than I saw that I had been, in
my practical use of the word, omitting half of it, and that the vital
half. It was not discipline I had been vainly seeking at the Casa dei
Bambini, it was compulsion.
Now, compulsion is a force very much handier to use in education than
self-control, since it depends on the adult and not on the child, and
practically any adult with a club (physical or moral) can compass it,
if the child in his power is small enough. But the most elementary
experience of life proves that the effects of compulsion last exactly
as long as the physical or moral club can be applied. Evidently its use
can scarcely prepare the child for the searching tests of independent
adult life when no one has any longer even a pseudo-right to club him
into moral action.
And yet self-control, like all other vital processes of individual
life, is tantalizingly elusive and subtle. My untrained mind, face to
face at last with the real problem, despaired of securing this real
self-control and not the valueless compulsory obedience to external
force or persuasion with which I had been confusing it. I saw that it
is secured in the Children’s Home and betook myself once more to an
examination of their methods.
Their method for solving this problem is like the one they use in all
other problems of child-life. They use the adult brain to analyze
minutely all the complex processes involved, and then they begin at the
beginning to teach the children all the different actions, one after
another.
For instance, the capacity for close, consecutive attention to any
undertaking is a very valuable form of self-control and self-discipline
(one which a good many adults have never mastered). The natural
tendency of childhood, as of all untrained humanity, is for
flightiness, for mental vagrancy, for picking up and fitfully dropping
an enterprise. It is obvious that the sternest of external so-called
discipline cannot lay a finger on this particular mental fault, because
all it can command is physical obedience, which ceases when the
compulsion is no longer active. In the Children’s Home, the child is
provided with a task so exactly suited to the instinctive needs of his
growing organism, that his own spontaneous interest in it overcomes his
own equally spontaneous aversion to mental concentration. Later on in
life he must learn to concentrate mentally, whether he feels a strong
spontaneous interest in the subject or not; but it is evident that he
cannot do that, if he has not learned first to control his wandering
wits when the subject does interest him. And that this last is not the
perfectly easy undertaking it seems, is apparent when one considers
all the hopelessly flighty women there are in the world, who could not,
to save their lives, mentally concentrate on anything. The Montessori
apparatus sets a valuable vital force in the child’s own intellectual
make-up to master an undesirable instinct, and naturally the valuable
force grows stronger with every exercise of its power, just as a muscle
does. The little boy who was so much interested in his buttoning-frame
that he stuck to his enterprise from beginning to end without so much
as glancing up at the activities of the other children, showed real
self-control, even though it was not associated with the element of
pain which my grim ancestors led me to think was essential.
It is true that self-control in the face of pain or indifference is
a necessary element in adult moral and intellectual life, but it now
appears that, like every other factor in life, it must start from
small beginnings and grow slowly. The buttoning boy showed not only
self-control, but the only variety of it which a baby is capable of
manifesting. When I had the notion that I ought (for his own good, of
course) to demand of him self-control in the face of pain, even of
a very small pain, I was asking something which he could not as yet
give, and of which compulsory obedience could only obtain an empty and
misleading appearance, an appearance really harmful to the child’s
best interests since it completely blinded me to the fact that he had
not made the least beginning towards attaining a real self-control. He
must begin slowly to learn self-control, as he must begin slowly to
learn how to walk. I am quite satisfied if he takes a single step at
first, because I know that is the essential. If he can do that, he will
ultimately learn to climb a mountain. If he can overcome the naturally
vagrant impulses of his mind through intellectual interest (for it is
none other) in the completion of his task of buttoning up the cloth on
his frame, he has begun a mental habit the value of which cannot be
overestimated, and which will later, in its full development, make it
possible for him to master calculus without the agonizing, too-tardy
effort at mental self-control which embittered my own struggle with
that subject.
From time immemorial, the child himself has always instinctively used
in his games and plays this method of learning self-control and mental
concentration, as much as adults would allow him. The admirable,
thoroughgoing concentration of a child on a game of marbles or ball
is proverbial; but while the rest of us, with some unsystematic
exceptions, have looked idly on at this great natural stream of mental
vigor pouring itself out in profusion before our eyes, Dr. Montessori
has stepped in with an ingeniously devised waterwheel and set it to
work.
The child in the Casa dei Bambini advances from one scientifically
graded stage of mental self-control to the next, from the
buttoning-frames to the geometric insets, from these to their use in
drawing and the control of the pencil, and then on into the mastery
of the alphabet, always with a greater and greater control of the
processes of his mind.
The control of the processes of his body are learned in the same
analyzed, gradual progression from the easy to the difficult. He
learns in the “lesson of silence” how to do nothing with his body,
an accomplishment which his fidgety elders have never acquired; he
learns in all the sensory exercises the complete control of his five
servants, his senses; and in moving freely about the furniture suited
to his size, in handling things small enough for him to manage, in
transferring objects from one place to another, he learns how to go
deftly through all the ordinary operations of everyday life.
This physical adroitness has a vitally close relation to discipline
of all sorts. When we say to the average, untrained, muscularly
uncontrolled child of four, “Now do sit still for a while!” we are
making a request about as reasonable as though we cried, “Do stand
on your head!” And then we shake him or reprove him for not obeying
what is for him an impossible command. By so doing we start in his
mind the habit, both of not obeying and of being punished for it; and
as Nature is exuberant in her protective devices, he very soon grows
a fine mental callous over his capacity for remorse at not obeying.
The effort required to accede to our request is entirely too great
for him, even if he wholly understands what we wish, which is often
doubtful. And because he often has been forced to disobey a command
to do something impossible, he falls into the way of disobeying a
command which is within his powers. The Montessori training makes every
impassioned attempt to teach a child exactly how to do a thing before
he is requested to do it.
We give a child the enormously compendious command, “Don’t be so
careless!” without reflecting that it is about as useful and specific
an exhortation as if one should cry to us, “Do be more virtuous!” Dr.
Montessori is continually admonishing us to use our grown-up brains to
analyze into its component parts the child’s carelessness, so that,
part by part, it can be corrected. Suppose that it has manifested
itself (as it not infrequently does) by a reckless plunge across the
room, carrying a plateful of cookies which have most of them fallen
to the floor by the end of the trip. Almost without exception, what
we all cry impatiently to a child, even to a very little child, under
those circumstances, is “For mercy’s sake, _do_ look at what you’re
doing!” which is, considered at all analytically, exactly what it is
our business as his leaders and guides in the world to do for him.
A little reflection on the subject makes us realize, in spite of the
sharpness of our reproof to him, that he takes no pleasure in spilling
the cookies and falling over the chairs; that is, that he had no set
purpose to do this, instead of walking correctly across the room
and setting the plate down on the table. The question we should ask
ourselves, is obviously, “Why then, did he do all those troublesome
and careless things?” Obviously because we were requiring him to go
through a complicated process, the separate parts of which he has not
mastered; as though a musician should command us to play the chromatic
scale of D minor, and then blame us for the resultant discord. He
should have taught us a multitude of things before requiring such a
complicated achievement,--how to hold our fingers over the piano-keys,
how to read music, how to play simpler scales.
The child with the cookie-plate needs, in the first place, a course of
exercises in learning to walk in a straight line directly to the spot
where he means to go, exercises continued until this process becomes
automatic, so that the greatest haste on his part will not send him
reeling about as most children (and a considerable number of their
ill-trained elders) do when they undertake to move from one side of the
room to another.
How can he learn to do this? Dr. Montessori suggests drawing a
chalk-line on the floor and having the children play the “game” (either
with or without music) of trying to walk along it without stepping off.
I myself, remembering the forbidden joys of my reckless childhood in
walking the top-rail of a fence, have tried the expedient of providing
a less dangerous top-rail laid flat on the ground. Did any healthy
child ever need more than one chance to walk along railway tracks?
The objection in the past to these exercises has been that they were
connected with something dangerous and undesirable. I do not blame
my parents for forbidding me to try to balance myself either on the
top-rail of a fence or on a railway track. Both of these were highly
risky diversions. But it does seem odd that neither they nor I ever
thought of providing, in some safe form, the exercises in equilibrium
so violently craved by all healthy children. A narrow board, or length
of so-called “two-by-four” studding, laid on the ground, furnishes a
diversion as endlessly entertaining for a child of three as the most
dangerously high fence-rail for an older child, and the never-failing
zest with which a little child practises balancing himself on this
narrow “sidewalk” is a proof that the exercise is one for which he
unconsciously felt a need.
Another trick of equilibrium, which is hard for a little child, is to
lift one foot from the floor and perform any action without falling
over. If he is provided with a loose rope-end, hanging where he can
easily reach it, his parent and guardian can suggest any number of
entertaining things to do while his equilibrium is assured by his grasp
on the rope. My experience has been that one suggestion is enough. The
child’s invention does the rest. Another exercise which is of great
benefit for very little children is to walk backwards, a process which
needs no more gymnastic apparatus than a helping hand from father or
mother, an apparatus which is equally effective in teaching a young
child the fascinating game of crossing one foot over the other without
falling down.
Does all this physical training of tiny children seem too remote from
the older child who spilled the cookies? He stands at the end of the
road over which the balancing, backward-walking, highly entertained
three-year-old is advancing.
Although it is not mentioned in any Montessori suggestions I have seen
(possibly because of the difficulty of managing it in a schoolroom),
it occurred to me one day that water is a neglected but very valuable
factor in training a little child to accuracy of muscular movement.
This reflection occurred to me just after I had instinctively led
away a little child from a basin of water in which I had “caught her”
dabbling her hands. Making a desperate effort to put into practice
my new resolution to question myself sharply each time that I denied
a child any activity he seemed to desire, I perceived that in this
case, as so often, I was acting traditionally, without considering the
essential character of the situation. I could not, of course, allow the
child to dabble in that basin of water, there, because she would be
apt to spatter it on the floor and to get her clothes wet. But on that
warm summer day, why could I not set her outdoors on the grass, with a
bit of oilcloth girded about her waist so that she should not spoil her
dress? Her evident interest in the water was an indication of a natural
force which it might be possible to utilize to give her some muscular
training which would entertain her at the same time. When I really came
to think about it, there is nothing inherently wicked in playing in
water.
For the almost superhuman effort necessary to use reason about a fact
the outlines of which are dulled by familiarity, I was rewarded many
times over by the discovery of a “sensory exercise” which apparently
is of the highest value. The child in question, provided with a pan
of water, and various cups and jelly-molds of different sizes, which
I snatched at random from the kitchen-shelf, was in a state of silent
bliss. She filled the little cups up to the brim, she lifted them with
an anxious care which no exhortation of mine could have induced her to
apply, she drank from them, she poured their contents into each other,
discovering for herself that the smaller ones must be emptied into the
bigger ones and not vice versa, she filled them again with a spoon. At
first she did all this very clumsily, although always with the most
painstaking care, but as the days went on with repetitions of this
game, her dexterity became astonishing, as was her eternal interest in
the monotonous proceeding.
Now she is not only kept quiet and happy for about an hour a day by
this amusement, and she has not only learned to fill and handle her
little cups and jelly-molds very deftly, but the operation of drinking
out of a water-glass at the table is of a simplicity fairly beneath
her contempt. I smile to see our guests gasp and dodge in dismay as,
with the reckless abandon of her age, she grasps her water-glass with
one hand, not deigning even to look at it, and conveys it to her lips.
But as a matter of fact, no matter how hastily or carelessly she
does this, she almost never spills a drop. The control of utensils
containing liquids has been so thoroughly learned by her muscles in
the long hours of happy play with her little cups that it is perfectly
automatic. She no more spills water from her glass than I fall down on
the floor when I cross a room, even though I may be quite absent-minded
about that undertaking.