MORE ABOUT DISCIPLINE, WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO OBEDIENCE
I must stop at this point and devote a paragraph or two to laying the
ghost of another Puritan ancestor who demands, “But where does the
discipline come in here, if it is all automatic and unconscious? Why
sneak exactitude of muscular action into the child’s life by the back
door, so to speak? Would it not be better for her moral nature to
command her outright not to spill the water from her glass at table,
and force her to use her will-power by punishing her if she does?”
There are several answers to this searching question, which is by no
means so simple and direct as it sounds. The most obvious one is the
retort brutal, i.e., that a great many generations have experimented
with that simple method of training children, with the result that
family life has been considerably embittered and the children very
poorly trained. In other words, that practical experience has shown
it to be a very bad method indeed and in use only because we know no
better one.
One of the reasons why it is bad is because it confuses two radically
different activities in the child’s life, including both under one far
too-sweeping command. The child’s ability to handle a glass of water
is an entirely different function from its willingness to obey orders.
To require of its nascent capacities at the same instant a new muscular
skill and the moral effort necessary to obey a command is to invite
almost certain failure. Worse than this, and in fact as bad as anything
can be, the result of this impossibly compendious command is to bring
about a hopeless confusion in the child’s mind which means unnecessary
nervous tension and friction and the beginning of an utterly deplorable
mental habit of nervous tension and irritated resistance in the child’s
mind, whenever a command is given. That this instinct of irritated
resistance is not a natural one is proved by the happily obedient older
children in the Casa dei Bambini in Rome. Furthermore, anyone who will,
under ordinary circumstances, try the simple experiment of asking
a little child (too young to have acquired this bad mental habit)
to perform some operation which he has thoroughly mastered, will be
convinced that obedience in itself involves no pain to a child.
As to the second demand of my Puritan ancestor, which runs, “And force
her to use her will-power by punishment,” the same flat denial must
be given that proposition. Experience proves that you can prevent a
child from performing some single special action by means of external
punishment, but that stimulating the proper use of the will-power is
something entirely different. Apparently the will-power is more apt
to be perverted into grotesque and unprofitable shapes by the use of
punishment than to be encouraged into upright, useful, and vigorous
growth.
And here it is well to question our own hearts deeply to make sure that
we really wish, honestly, without mental reservations, to stimulate the
will-power of our children--their will-power, be it remembered, not our
own. Is there, in the motives which actuate our attempts at securing
obedience from children, a trace of the animal-trainer’s instinct? For,
though it is true that children are little animals, and that they can
be successfully trained by the method of the animal-trainer, it is not
to be forgotten that they are trained by those methods only to feats
of exactly the same moral and intellectual caliber as those performed
by trick dogs and cats. They are forced to struggle blindly, and
wholly without aid, towards whatever human achievements they may later
accomplish, with the added disadvantage of the mental habit either of
sullen dissembled revolt or crushed mental servility, according to
their temperaments.
The end and aim of the horse-breaker’s effort is to create an animal
who will obey literally, with no volition of his own, any command of
any human being. The conscientious parent who faces squarely this
ultimate logical conclusion of the animal-trainer’s system, must see
that his own aim, being entirely opposed to that, must be attained by
very different means; and that, since his final goal is to produce
a being wholly and wisely self-governing, the sooner the child can
be induced to begin the exercise of the faculty of self-government,
the more seasoned in experience it will be when vital things begin to
depend on it.
It is highly probable that in the heart of the modern parent of the
best type, if there is still some of the animal-trainer’s instinct, he
is quite and honestly unconscious of it and would be ashamed of it if
he recognized it. I think most of us can say sincerely that we have no
conscious wish for anything but the child’s best welfare. But in saying
this, we admit at once that our problem is vastly more subtle and
complicated than the horse-breaker’s, and that we are in need of every
ray of light from any source possible.
The particular, vivifying truth which we must imprint on our minds
in this connection is that spontaneity of action is the absolute
prerequisite for any moral or intellectual advance on the part of any
human being. Nor is this, though so constantly insisted upon by Dr.
Montessori, any new invention of hers. Dimly felt, it has regulated
more or less the best action of the best preachers, the best teachers
and lawgivers since the beginning of the world. Pestalozzi formulated
it in the hard saying, all the more poignant because it came from a man
who had devoted himself with such passionate affection to his pupils,
“I have found that no man in God’s wide earth is able to help any other
man. Help must come from the bosom alone.” Froebel, in all his general
remarks on education, states this principle clearly. Finally, it has
been crystallized in the homely adage of old wives, “Every child’s got
to do its own growing.”
We all admit the truth of this theory. What is so startling about Dr.
Montessori’s attitude towards it, is that she really acts upon it!
More than that, she expects us to act on it, all the time, in all the
multiform crises of our lives as parents, in this intricate problem of
discipline and the training of the will-power as well as in the simpler
form of physically refraining from interfering with the child’s efforts
to feed and dress himself.
And yet it is natural enough that we should find at first sight such
general philosophic statements rather vague and remote, and not at
all sufficiently reassuring as we stand face to face with the problem
of securing obedience from a lively child of three. We may have seen
how we overlooked the obvious reason why a child who _cannot_ obey a
command will not; and we may be quite convinced that the first step in
securing both self-control and obedience from a child is to put the
necessary means in his power; and yet we may be still frankly at a loss
and deeply apprehensive about what seems the hopeless undertaking of
directly securing obedience even after the child has learned how to
obey. All that Dr. Montessori has done for us so far is to call our
attention to the fact, which we did not in the least perceive before,
that a child is no more born into the world with a full-fledged
capacity to obey orders, than to do a sum in arithmetic. But though we
agree that we must first teach him his numbers before expecting him to
add and subtract, how, we ask ourselves anxiously, can we be in the
least sure that he will be willing to use his numbers to do sums with,
that he will be willing to utilize his careful preparatory training
when it comes to the point of really obeying orders.
At this juncture I can recommend from successful personal experience
a courageous abandonment of our traditional attitude of deep distrust
towards life, of our medieval conviction that desirable traits can
only be hewed painfully out across the grain of human nature. The
old monstrous idea which underlay all schooling was that the act of
educating himself was fundamentally abhorrent to a child and that he
could be forced to do it only by external violence. This was an idea,
held by more generations of school-teachers and parents than is at
all pleasant to consider, when one reflects that it would have been
swept out upon the dump-heap of discarded superstitions by one single,
unprejudiced survey of one normal child under normal conditions.
Dr. Montessori, carrying to its full extent a theory which has been
slowly gaining ground in the minds of all modern enlightened teachers,
has been the first to have the courage to act without reservation on
the strength of her observation that the child prefers learning to
any other occupation, since the child is the true representative of
our race which does advance, even with such painful slowness, away
from ignorance towards knowledge. Now, in addition she tells us just
as forcibly, that they prefer right, orderly, disciplined behavior to
the unregulated disobedience which we slanderously insist is their
natural taste. As a result of her scientific and unbiased observation
of child-life she informs us that our usual lack of success in handling
the problems of obedience comes because, while we do not expect a
child at two or three or even four to have mastered completely even
the elements of any other of his activities, we do expect him to have
mastered all the complex muscular, nervous, mental, and moral elements
involved in the act of obedience to a command from outside his own
individuality.
She points out that obedience is evidently a deep-rooted instinct
in human nature, since society is founded on obedience. Indeed, on
the whole, history seems to show that the average human being has
altogether too much native instinct to obey anyone who will shout out
a command; and that the advance from one bad form of government to
another only slightly better, is so slow because the mass of grown men
are too much given to obeying almost any positive order issued to them.
Going back to our surprised recognition of the child as an inheritor of
human nature in its entirety, we must admit that obedience is almost
certainly an instinct latent in children.
The obvious theoretic deduction from this reasoning is, that we need
neither persuade nor force a child to obey, but only clear-sightedly
remove the various moral and physical obstructions which lie in the
way of his obedience, with the confident expectation that his latent
instinct will develop spontaneously in the new and favorable conditions.
When we plant a bean in the ground we do not feel that we need to try
to force it to grow; indeed, we know very well that we can do nothing
whatever about that since it is governed entirely by the presence
or absence in the seed of the mysterious element of life; nor do we
feel any apprehension about the capacity of that smooth, small seed,
ultimately to develop into a vine which will climb up the pole we
have set for it, will blossom, and bear fruit. We know that, barring
accidents (which it is our business as gardeners to prevent), it cannot
do anything else, because that is the nature of beans, and we know all
about the nature of beans from a long acquaintance with them.
We would laugh at an ignorant, city-bred person gardening for the
first time, who, the instant the two broad cotyledons showed above the
ground, began tying strings to them to induce them to climb his pole.
Our advice to him would be the obvious counsel, “Leave them alone until
they grow their tendrils. You not only can’t do any good by trying to
induce those first primitive leaves to climb, but you may hurt your
plant so that it will never develop normally.”
The question seems to be, whether we will have the courage and good
sense to take similar sound advice from a more experienced and a wiser
child-gardener. Dr. Montessori not only expounds to us theoretically
this doctrine that the child, properly trained, will spontaneously obey
reasonable orders suited to his age with a prompt willingness which
grows with his growth, but she shows us in the garden of her schools,
bean-poles wreathed triumphantly with vines to the very top. Or, to
drop a perhaps too-elaborated metaphor, she shows us children of three
or four who willingly obey suggestions suited to their capacities,
developing rapidly and surely into children of six and seven whose
obedience in all things is a natural and delightful function of their
lives. She not only says to us, “This theory will work in actual
practice,” but, “It _has_ worked. Look at the result!”
Of course the crux of the matter lies in that phrase, “proper
training.” It means years of patient, intelligent, faithful effort
on the part of the guardian, to clear away from before the child the
different obstacles to the free natural growth of this, as of all other
desirable instincts of human nature. To give our children this “proper
training” it is not enough to have intellectually grasped the theory
of the Montessori method. With each individual child we have a fresh
problem of its application to him. Our mother-wits must be sharpened
and in constant use. Dr. Montessori has only compiled a book of
recipes, which will not feed our families, unless we exert ourselves,
and unless we provide the necessary ingredients of patience,
intelligence, good judgment, and devotion.
The prize which seems possible to attain by such efforts makes them,
however, worthy of all the time and thought we may possibly put upon
them. Apparently, judging by the results obtained in the Casa dei
Bambini among Italian children, and by Miss George in her school for
American children, there is no more need for the occasional storms of
temper or outbreaks of exasperated egotism which are so familiar to all
of us who care for children, than there is for the occasional “fits
of indigestion,” “feverishness,” or “teething-sickness” the almost
universal absence of which in the lives of our scientifically-reared
children so astonishes the older generation.
For the notable success of Miss George’s Tarrytown school disposes
once and for all of the theory that “it may work for Italians, but not
with our naturally self-indulgent, spoiled American children.” Fresh
from the Casa dei Bambini in Rome, I visited Miss George’s Children’s
Home and, except for the language, would have thought myself again
on the Via Giusti. The same happy, unforced interest in the work,
the same Montessori atmosphere of spontaneous life, the same utter
unconsciousness of visitors, the same astonishing industry.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: COUNTING BOXES.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
When theoretically by talk and discussion with experts on the subject
and practically by the sight of the astonishing results shown in the
enlightenment and self-mastery of the older children who had been
trained in the system, I was led towards the conviction that children
really have not that irresistible tendency towards naughtiness which my
Puritan blood led me unconsciously to assume, but that their natural
tendency is on the whole to prefer to do what is best for them, I
felt as though someone had tried to prove to me that the world before
my eyes was emancipating itself from the action of some supposedly
inexorable natural law.
Naturally, being an Anglo-Saxon, an inhabitant of a cold climate, and
the descendant of those troublesome Puritan forefathers, who have
interfered so much with the composition of this book, I could not,
all in a breath, in this dizzying manner lose that firm conviction
of Original Sin which, though no longer insisted upon openly in the
teachings of the church, which I no longer attend as assiduously as my
parents, still is, I discovered, a very vital element in my conception
of life.
No, the doctrine of Original Sin is in the very marrow of my New
England bones, but, as a lover of my kind, I rejoice to be convinced
of the smallness of its proportion in relation to other elements of
human nature, and I bear witness gladly that I never saw or heard of
a single case of wilful naughtiness among all the children in the
Casa dei Bambini in Rome. And though I still cling unreasonably to
my superstition that there is, at least in some American children,
an irreducible minimum of the quality which our country people
picturesquely call “The Old Harry,” I am convinced that there is far,
far less of it than I supposed, and I am overcome with retrospective
remorse for all the children I have misjudged in the course of my life.
To put it statistically, I would estimate that out of every thousand
cases of “naughtiness” among little children, nine hundred and
ninety-nine are due to something else than a “bad” impulse in the
child’s heart. Old-wife wisdom has already reduced by one-half the
percentage of infantile wickedness, in its fireside proverb, “Give a
young one that’s acting bad something to eat and put him to bed. Half
the time he’s tired or starved and don’t know what ails him.”
It now seems likely that the other half of the time he is either hungry
for intellectual food, weary with the artificial stimulation of too
much mingling with adult life, or exasperated by perfectly unnecessary
insistence on a code of rules which has really nothing to do with the
question of right or wrong conduct. When it comes to choosing between
really right and really wrong conduct, apparently the majority of the
child’s natural instincts are for the really right, as is shown by his
real preference for the orderly, educating activity of the Children’s
Home over disorderly “naughtiness.” Our business should be to see to it
that he is given the choice.