IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MONTESSORI SYSTEM AND THE
KINDERGARTEN?
No one realizes more acutely than I that the composition of this
chapter presupposes an amount of courage on my part which it is perhaps
hardly exaggeration to call foolhardiness. That I am really venturing
upon a battleground is evident to me from the note of rather fierce
anticipatory disapproval which I hear in the voice of everyone who
asks me the question which heads this chapter. It always accented,
“_Is_ there any real difference between the Montessori system and the
kindergarten?” with the evident design of forcing a negative answer.
Oddly enough, the same reluctance to grant the possibility of anything
new in the Italian method characterizes the attitude of those who
intensely dislike the kindergartens, as well as that of its devoted
adherents. People who consider the kindergarten “all sentimental,
enervating twaddle” ask the question with a truculent tone which makes
their query mean, “This new system is just the same sort of nonsense,
isn’t it now?”; while those who feel that the kindergarten is one of
the vital, purifying, and uplifting forces in modern society evidently
use the question as a means of stating, “It can’t be anything
different from the best kindergarten ideas, for they are the best
possible.”
I have seen too much beautiful kindergarten work and have too sincere
an affection for the sweet and pure character of Froebel to have
much community of feeling with the rather brutal negations of the
first class of inquirers. If they can see nothing in kindergartens
but the sentimentality which is undoubtedly there, but which cannot
possibly, even in the most exaggerated manifestations of it, vitiate
all the finely uplifting elements in those institutions, it is of no
use to expect from them an understanding of a system which, like the
Froebelian, rests ultimately upon a religious faith in the strength of
the instinct for perfection in the human race.
It is therefore largely for the sake of people like myself, with a
natural sympathy for the kindergarten, that I am setting out upon the
difficult undertaking of stating what in my mind are the differences
between a Froebelian and a Montessori school for infants.
I must begin by saying that there are a great many resemblances, as
is inevitable in the case of two methods which work upon the same
material--children from three to six. And of course it is hardly
necessary formally to admit that the ultimate aim of the two educators
is alike, because the aim which is common to them--an ardent desire to
do the best thing possible for the children without regard for the
convenience of the adults who teach them--is the sign manual throughout
all the ages, from Plato and Quintilian down, which distinguishes the
educator from the mere school-teacher.
There are a good many differences in the didactic apparatus and use of
it, some of which are too technical to be treated fully here, such as
the fact that Froebel, moved by his own extreme interest in crystals
and their forms, provides a number of exercises for teaching children
the analysis of geometrical forms, whereas Dr. Montessori thinks best
not to undertake this with children so young. Kindergarten children
are not taught reading and writing, and Montessori children are.
Kindergarten children learn more about the relations of wholes to parts
in their “number work,” while in the Casa dei Bambini there is more
attention paid to numbers in their series.
There are of course many other differences in technic and apparatus,
such as might be expected in two systems founded by educators separated
from each other by the passage of sixty years and by a difference in
race as well as by training and environment. This is especially true in
regard to the greater emphasis laid by Dr. Montessori on the careful,
minute observation of the children before and during any attempt to
instruct them. Trained as she has been in the severely unrelenting
rule for exactitude of the positive sciences, in which intelligent
observation is elevated to the position of the cardinal virtue
necessary to intellectual salvation, her instinct, strengthened since
then by much experience, was to give herself plenty of time always
to examine the subject of her experimentation. Just as a scientific
horticulturist observes minutely the habits of a plant before he tries
a new fertilizer on it, and after he has made the experiment goes on
observing the plant with even more passionately absorbed attention,
so Dr. Montessori trains her teachers to take time, all they need, to
observe the children before, during, and after any given exercise. This
is, of course, the natural instinct of Froebel, of every born teacher,
but the routine of the average school or kindergarten gives the teacher
only too few minutes for it, not to speak of the long hours necessary.
On the other hand, even in the details of the technic, there is much
similarity between the two systems. Some of the kindergarten blocks are
used in Montessori “sensory exercises.” In both institutions the ideal,
seldom attained as yet, is for the systematic introduction of gardening
and the care of animals. In both the children play games and dance
to music; some regular kindergarten games are used in the Casa dei
Bambini; in both schools the first aim is to make the children happy;
in neither are they reproved or punished. Both systems bear in every
detail the imprint of extreme love and reverence for childhood. And yet
the moral atmosphere of a kindergarten is as different from that of a
Casa dei Bambini as possible, and the real truth of the matter is that
one is actually and fundamentally opposed to the other.
To explain this, a few words of comment on Froebel, his life, and
the subsequent fortunes of his ideas may be useful. These facts are
so well known, owing to the universal respect and affection for this
great benefactor of childhood, that the merest mention of them will
suffice. The dates of his birth and death are significant, 1782-1852,
as is a brief bringing to mind of the intensely German Protestant
piety of his surroundings. He died sixty years ago, and a great deal
of educational water has flowed under school bridges since then. He
died before anyone dreamed of modern scientific laboratories, such
as those in which the Italian educator received her sound, practical
training, a training which not only put at her disposition an amount of
accurate information about the subject of her investigation which would
have dazzled Froebel, but formed her in the fixed habit of inductive
reasoning which has made possible the brilliant achievements of modern
positive sciences, and which was as little common in Froebel’s time as
the data on which it works. That he felt instinctively the needs for
this solid foundation is shown by his craving for instruction in the
natural sciences, his absorption of all the scanty information within
his reach, his subsequent deep meditation upon this information, and
his attempts to generalize from it.
Another factor in Froebel’s life which scarcely exists nowadays was
the tradition of physical violence and oppression towards children.
That this has gradually disappeared from the ordinary civilized family,
is partly due to the general trend away from physical oppression of all
sorts, and partly to Froebel’s own softening influence, for which we
can none of us feel too fervent a gratitude. He was forced to devote
considerable of his energy to combating this tendency, which was not a
factor at all in the problems which confronted Dr. Montessori.
Some time after his death his ideas began to spread abroad not only
in Europe (the kindergartens of which I know nothing about, except
that they are very successful and numerous), but also in the United
States, about whose numerous and successful kindergartens we all know a
great deal. The new system was taken up by teachers who were intensely
American, and hence strongly characterized by the American quality of
force of individuality. It is a universally accepted description of
American women (sometimes intended as a compliment, sometimes as quite
the reverse) that, whatever else they are, they are less negative, more
forceful, more direct, endowed with more positive personalities than
the women of other countries. These women, full of energy, quivering
with the resolution to put into full practice all the ideas of the
German educator whose system they espoused, “organized a campaign for
kindergartens” which, with characteristic thoroughness, determination,
and devotion, they have carried through to high success.
They, and the educators among men who became interested in the
Froebelian ideas, have been by no means willing to consider all
advance impossible because the founder of the system is no longer
with them. They have been progressively and intelligently unwilling
to let 1852 mark the culmination of kindergarten improvement, and
they have changed, and patched, and added to, and taken away from the
original method as their best judgment and the increasing scientific
data about children enabled them. This process, it goes without
saying, has not taken place without a certain amount of friction.
Naturally everyone’s “best judgment” scarcely coincided with that of
everyone else. There have been honest differences of opinion about the
interpretation of scientific data. True to its nature as an essentially
religious institution, the kindergarten has undergone schisms, been
rent with heresies, has been divided into orthodox and heterodox,
into liberals and conservatives, although the whole body of the work
has gone constantly forward, keeping pace with the increasing modern
preoccupation with childhood.
Indeed it seems to me that one may say without being considered
unsympathetic that it has now certain other aspects of a popular,
prosperous religious sect, among which is a feeling of instinctive
jealousy of similar regenerating influences which have their origin
outside the walls of the original orthodox church.
Undoubtedly they have some excuse in the absurdly exaggerated current
reports and rumors of the miracles accomplished by the Montessori
apparatus; but it seems to outsiders that what we have a right to
expect from the heads of the organized, established kindergarten
movement is an open-minded, unbiased, and extremely minute and thorough
investigation into the new ideas, rather than an inspection of popular
reports and a resultant condemnation. It is because I am as much
concerned as I am astonished at this attitude on their part that I am
venturing upon the following slight and unprofessional discussion of
the differences between the typical kindergarten and the typical Casa
dei Bambini.
To begin with, kindergarteners are quite right when they cry out that
there is nothing new in the idea of self-education, and that Froebel
stated as plainly as Montessori does that the aim of all education is
to waken voluntary action in the child. For that matter, what educator
worthy of the name has not felt this? The point seems to be, not that
Froebel states this vital principle any less clearly, but so much less
forcibly than the Italian educator. Not foreseeing the masterful women,
with highly developed personalities, who were to be the apostles of his
ideas in America, and not being surrounded by the insistence on the
value of each individuality which marks our modern moral atmosphere,
it did not occur to him, apparently, that there was any special
danger in this direction. For, of course, our modern high estimate of
the value of individuality results not only in a vague though growing
realization of the importance of safeguarding the nascent personalities
of children, but in a plenitude of strongly marked individualities
among the adults who teach children, and in a fixed habit of using the
strength of this personality as a tool to attain desired ends.
The difference in this regard between the two educators may perhaps be
stated fancifully in the following way: Froebel gives his teachers,
among many other maxims to hang up where they may be constantly in
view, a statement running somewhat in this fashion: “All growth must
come from a voluntary action of the child himself.” Dr. Montessori not
only puts this maxim first and foremost, and exhorts her teachers to
bear it incessantly in mind during the consideration of any and all
other maxims, but she may be supposed to wish it printed thus: “All
growth must come from a VOLUNTARY action of the child HIMSELF.”
The first thing she requires of a directress in her school is a
complete avoidance of the center of the stage, a self-annihilation,
the very desirability (not to mention the possibility) of which has
never occurred to the kindergarten teacher whose normal position is
in the middle of a ring of children with every eye on her, with every
sensitive, budding personality receiving the strongest possible
impressions from her own adult individuality. Without the least
hesitation or doubt, she has always considered that her part is to make
that individuality as perfect and lovable as possible, so that the
impression the children get from it may be desirable. The idea that
she is to keep herself strictly in the background for fear of unduly
influencing some childish soul which has not yet found itself, is an
idea totally unheard of.
I find in a catalogue of kindergarten material this sentence in
praise of some new device. “It obviates the need of supervision on
the part of the teacher _as far as is consistent with conscientious
child-training_.” Now the Montessori ideal is a device which shall
be so entirely self-corrective that absolutely no interference by
the teacher is necessary as long as the child is occupied with it.
I find in that sentence the keynote of the difference between the
two systems. In the kindergarten the emphasis is laid, consciously,
or unconsciously, but very practically always, on the fact that the
teacher teaches. In the Casa dei Bambini the emphasis is all on the
fact that the child learns.
In the beginning of her study the kindergarten teacher is instructed,
it is true, as a philosophic consideration, that Pestalozzi held and
Froebel accepted the dictum that, just as the cultivator creates
nothing in his trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the
children under his care. This is duly set down in her note-book, but
the apparatus given her to work with, the technic taught her, what she
sees of the work of other teachers, the whole tendency of her training
goes to accentuate what is already racially strong in her temperament,
a fixed conviction of her own personal and individual responsibility
for what happens about her. She feels keenly (in the case of nervous
constitutions, crushingly) the weight of this responsibility, really
awful when it is felt about children. She has the quick, energetic,
American instinct to _do_ something herself, at once to bring about a
desired condition. She is the swimmer who does not trust heartily and
wholly to the water to keep him up, but who stiffens his muscles and
exhausts himself in the attempt by his own efforts to float. Indeed,
that she should be required above all things to do nothing, not to
interfere, is almost intellectually inconceivable to her.
This, of course, is a generalization as inaccurate as all
generalizations are. There are some kindergarten teachers with great
natural gifts of spiritual divination, strengthened by the experiences
of their beautiful lives, who feel the inner trust in life which
is so consoling and uplifting to the Montessori teacher. But the
average American kindergarten teacher, like all the rest of us average
Americans, needs the calming and quieting lesson taught by the great
Italian educator’s reverent awe for the spontaneous, ever-upward,
irresistible thrust of the miraculous principle of growth.
In spite of the horticultural name of her school the ordinary
kindergarten teacher has never learned the whole-hearted, patient faith
in the long, slow processes of nature which characterizes the true
gardener. She is not penetrated by the realization of the vastness
of the forces of the human soul, she is not subdued and consoled by
a calm certainty of the rightness of natural development. She is far
gayer with her children than the Montessori teacher, but she is really
less happy with them because, in her heart of hearts, she trusts them
less. She feels a restless sense of responsibility for each action of
each child. It is doubtless this difference in mental attitude which
accounts for the physical difference of aspect between our pretty,
smiling, ever-active, always beckoning, nervously conscientious
kindergarten teacher, always on exhibition, and the calm, unhurried
tranquillity of the Montessori directress, always unobtrusively in the
background.
The latter is but moving about from one little river of life to
another, lifting a sluice gate here for a sluggish nature, constructing
a dam there to help a too impetuous nature to concentrate its forces,
and much of the time occupied in quietly observing, quite at her
leisure, the direction of the channels being constructed by the
different streams. The kindergarten teacher tries to do this, but she
seems obsessed with the idea, unconscious for the most part, that it
is, after all, her duty to manage somehow to increase the flow of the
little rivers by pouring into them some of her own superabundant
vital force. In her commendable desire to give herself and her whole
life to her chosen work, she conceives that she is lazy if she ever
allows herself a moment of absolute leisure, and unoccupied, impersonal
observation of the growth of the various organisms in her garden. She
must be always helping them grow! Why else is she there? she demands
with a wrinkled brow of nervous determination to do her duty, and with
the most honest, hurt surprise at any criticism of her work.
It is possible that this tendency in American kindergartens is not only
a result of the American temperament, but is inherent in Froebel’s
original conception of the kindergarten as the place where the child
gets his real social training, as opposed to the home where he gets
his individual training. Standing midway between Fichte with his hard
dictum that the child belongs wholly to the State and to society, and
Pestalozzi’s conviction that he belongs wholly to the family, Froebel
thought to make a working compromise by dividing up the bone of
contention, by leaving the child in the family most of the time, but
giving him definite social training at definite hours every day.
Now there is bound to be, in such an effort, some of the same danger
involved in a conception of religious life which ordains that it
shall be lived chiefly between half-past ten and noon on every Sunday
morning. It may very well happen that a child does not feel social
some morning between nine and eleven, but would prefer to pursue
some laudable individual enterprise. It may be said that the slight
moral coercion involved in insisting that he join in one of the group
games or songs of the kindergarten is only good discipline, but the
fact remains that coercion has been employed, even though coated with
sweet and coaxing persuasion, and the picture of itself conceived by
the kindergarten as a place of the spontaneous flowering of the social
instinct among children has in it some slight pretense. In the Casa dei
Bambini, on the other hand, the children learn the rules and conditions
of social life as we must all learn them, and in the only way we all
learn them, and that is by _living socially_.
The kindergarten teacher, set the task of seeing that a given number
of children engage in social enterprises practically all the time
during a given number of hours every day, can hardly be blamed if she
is convinced that she must act upon the children nearly every moment,
since she is required to round them up incessantly into the social
corral. The long hours of the Montessori school and the freedom of
the children, living their own everyday lives as though they were (as
indeed they are) in their own home, make a vital difference here. The
children, in conducting their individual lives in company with others,
are reproducing the actual conditions which govern social life in the
adult world. They learn to defer to each other, to obey rules, even to
rise to the moral height of making rules, to sink temporarily their
own interests in the common weal, not because it is “nice” to do this,
not because an adored, infallible, lovely teacher supports the doctrine
by her unquestioned authority, not because they are praised and petted
when they do, but (and is not this the real grim foundation of laws for
social organization?) because they find they cannot live together at
all without rules which all respect and obey.
In other words, when there is some real occasion for formulating or
obeying a law which facilitates social life, they formulate it and obey
it from an inward conviction, based on genuine circumstances of their
own lives, that they must do so, or life would not be tolerable for any
of them; and when there is no genuine occasion for their making this
really great sacrifice for the common weal, they are left, as we all
desire to be left, to the pursuit of their own lives. No artificial
occasion for this sacrifice is manufactured by the routine of the
school--an artificial occasion which is apt to be resented by the
stronger spirits among children even as young as those of kindergarten
age. They feel, as we all do, that there is nothing intrinsically
sacred or valuable about the compromises necessary to attain peaceable
social life, and that they should not be demanded of us except when
necessary. Crudely stated, Froebel’s purpose seems to have been that
the child should, in two or three hours at a given time every day, do
his social living and have it over with. And although this statement
is both unsympathetic and incomplete, there is in it the germ of a
well-founded criticism of the method which many of us have vaguely
felt, although we have not been able to formulate it before studying
the principles of a system which seems to avoid this fault.
A conversation I had in Rome with an Italian friend, not in sympathy
with the Montessori ideas, illustrates another phase of the difference
between the average kindergarten and the Casa dei Bambini. My friend is
a quick, energetic, positive woman who “manages” her two children with
a competent ease which seems the most conclusive proof to her that her
methods need no improvement. “Oh, no, the Case dei Bambini are quite
failures,” she told me. “The children themselves don’t like them.” I
recalled the room full of blissful babies which I had come to know so
well, and looked, I daresay, some of the amused incredulity I felt, for
she went on hastily, “Well, _some_ children may. Mine never did. I had
to put both the boy and the girl back into a kindergarten. My little
Ida summed up the whole matter. She said, ‘Isn’t it queer how they
treat you at a Casa dei Bambini! They ask me, “Now which would you like
to do, Ida, this, or this?” It makes me feel so queer. I want somebody
to _tell_ me what to do!’”
My friend went on to generalize, quite sure of her ground, “That’s the
sweet and natural child instinct--to depend on adults for guidance.
That’s how children _are_, and all the Dr. Montessoris in the world
can’t change them.”
The difference between that point of view and Dr. Montessori’s is the
fundamental difference between the belief in aristocracy, and the value
of authority for its own sake, which still lingers among conservatives
even in our day, and the whole-hearted belief in democracy which is
growing more and more pronounced among most of our thinkers.
Ida is being trained under her mother’s masterful eye to carry on
docilely what an English writer has called “the dogmatic method with
its demand for mechanical obedience and its pursuit of external
results.” She is acquiring rapidly the habit of standing still until
somebody tells her what to do, and she has already acquired an
unquestioning acquiescence in the illimitable authority of somebody
else, anyone who will speak positively enough to regulate her life in
all its details. In other words, a finely consistent little slave is
being manufactured out of Ida, and if in later years she should develop
more of her mother’s forcefulness, it will waste a great deal of its
energy in a wild, unregulated revolt against the chains of habit with
which she finds herself loaded, and in the end will probably wreak
itself on crushing the individuality out of her children in their turn.
Sweet little four-year-old Ida, freed for a moment from the twilight
cell of her passive obedience, and blinking pitifully in the free
daylight of the Casa dei Bambini, is a figure which has lingered long
in my memory and has been one of the factors inducing me to undertake
the perhaps too ambitious enterprise of writing this book.
In still another way the Montessori insistence on spontaneity of the
children’s action safeguards them, it seems to me, against one of the
greatest dangers of kindergarten life, and obviates one of the justest
criticisms of the American development of Froebel’s method, namely
overstimulation and mental fatigue. When I first thoroughly grasped
this fundamental difference, I was reminded of the saying of a wise old
doctor who, when I was an intense, violently active girl of seventeen,
had given me some sound advice about how to lift the little children
with whom I happened to be playing: “Don’t take hold of their hands to
swing them around!” he cried to me. “You can’t tell when the strain
may be too great for their little bones and tendons. You may do them
a serious hurt. Have them take hold of your hands! And when they’re
tired, they’ll let go.”
[Illustration: INSETS AROUND WHICH THE CHILD DRAWS, AND THEN FILLS IN
THE OUTLINE WITH COLORED CRAYONS.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
It now seems to me that in the kindergarten the teachers are the ones
who take hold of the children’s hands, and in the Casa dei Bambini
it is the other way about. What Dr. Montessori is always crying to
her teachers is just the exhortation of my old doctor. What she is
endeavoring to contrive is a system which allows the children to
“let go” when they themselves, each at a different time, feel the
strain of effort. The kindergarten teacher is making all possible
conscientious efforts to train herself to an impossible achievement,
namely to know (what of course she never can know with certainty) when
each child loses his spontaneous interest in his exercises or game. She
is as genuinely convinced as the Montessori directress that she must
“let go” at that moment, but she is not trained so to take hold of the
child that he himself makes that all-important decision.
It is true that the best kindergarteners learn from years of experience
(which involves making mistakes on a good many children) about when,
in general, to let go; but not the most inspired teacher can tell, as
the child himself does, when the strain is first felt in the immature,
undeveloped brain. And it is this margin of possibility of mistake
on the part of the best kindergarten teachers which results only too
frequently, with our nervous, too responsive American children, in the
flushed faces and unnaturally bright eyes of the little ones who return
to us after their happy, happy morning in the kindergarten, unable to
eat their luncheons, unable to take their afternoon naps, quivering
between laughter and tears, and finding very dull the quiet peace of
the home life.
This observation finds any amount of confirmatory evidence in the
astonishingly great diversity in mental application among children
when really left to their own devices. There is no telling how long or
how short a time any given play or game will hold their attention,
and both kindergarteners and Montessori teachers agree that it is of
value only so long as it really does genuinely hold their attention.
Some children are interested only so long as they must struggle against
obstacles, and once the enterprise runs smoothly, have no further use
for it. With others, the pleasure seems to increase a hundredfold when
they are once sure of their own ability.
For it is by no means true that the kindergarten teacher is always apt
to continue a given game or exercise too long. It is only too long for
some of the children. There are apt to be others whom she deprives,
by her discontinuation of the game, of an invigorating exercise which
they crave with all their might, and which they would continue, if
left free to follow their own inclination, ten times longer than she
would dare to think of asking them to do. The pertinacity of children
in some exercise which happens exactly to suit their needs is one of
the inevitable surprises to people observing them carefully for the
first time. Since my attention has been called to it, I have observed
this crazy perseverance on unexpected occasions in all children acting
freely. Not long ago a child of mine conceived the idea of climbing up
on an easy-chair, tilting herself over the arm, sliding down into the
seat on her head, and so off in a sprawling heap on the floor. I began
to count the number of times she went through this extremely violent,
fatiguing, and (as far as I could see) uninteresting exercise, and
was fairly astounded by her obstinacy in sticking to it. She had done
it thirty-four times with unflagging zest, shouting and laughing
to herself, and was apparently going on indefinitely when, to my
involuntary relief, she was called away to supper.
In Rome I remember watching a little boy going through the exercises
with the wooden cylinders of different sizes which fit into
corresponding holes (page 70). He worked away with a busy, serene,
absorbed industry, running his forefinger around the cylinders and
then around the holes, until he had them all fitted in. Then with no
haste, but with no hesitation, he emptied them all out and began over
again. He did this so many times that I felt an impatient fatigue at
the sight of the laborious little creature, and turned my attention
elsewhere. I had counted up to the fourteenth repetition of his feat
before I stopped watching him, and when I glanced back again, a quarter
of an hour later, he was still at it. All this, of course, without
a particle of that “minimum amount of supervision consistent with
conscientious child-training.” He was his own supervisor, thanks to
the self-corrective nature of the apparatus he was using. If he put a
cylinder in the wrong hole he discovered it himself and was forced to
think out for himself what the trouble was.
Dr. Montessori says (and I can easily believe her from my own
experience) that nothing is harder for even the most earnest and
gifted teachers to learn than that their duty is not to solve all the
difficulties in the way of the children, or even to smooth these out
as much as possible, but on the contrary expressly to see to it that
each child is kept constantly supplied with difficulties and obstacles
suitable to his strength.
A kindergarten teacher tries faithfully to teach her children so that
they will not make errors in their undertakings. She holds herself
virtually responsible for this. With a Puritan conscientiousness she
blames herself if they do make mistakes, if they do not understand,
by grasping her explanation, all the inwardness of the process under
consideration, and she repeats her explanations with unending patience
until she thinks they do. The Montessori teacher, on the other hand,
confines herself to pointing out to the child what the enterprise
before him is. She does not, it is true, drop down before him the
material for the Long Stair and leave him to guess what is to be
done with it. She herself constructs the edifice which is the goal
desired. She makes sure that he has a clear concept of what the task
is, and then she mixes up the blocks and leaves him to work out his own
salvation by the aid of the self-corrective material.
Dr. Montessori has a great many amusing stories to tell of her
first struggles with her teachers to make them realize her point of
view. Some of them became offended, and resolved, since they were
not allowed to help the children, to do nothing at all for them, a
resolution which resulted naturally in a state of things worse than
the first. It was very hard for them to learn that it was their part
to set the machinery of an exercise in motion and then let the child
continue it himself. I quite appreciate the difficulty of learning the
distinction between directing the children’s activity and teaching them
each new step of every process. My own impulse made me realize the
truth of Dr. Montessori’s laughing picture of the teacher’s instinctive
rush to the aid of some child puzzling over the geometric insets, and
I knew, from having gone through many such profuse, voluble, vague,
confusing explanations myself, that what they always said was, “No, no,
dear; you’re trying to put the round one in the square hole. See, it
has no corners. Look for a hole that hasn’t any corners, etc., etc.”
It was not until I had sat by a child, restraining myself by a violent
effort of self-control from “correcting” his errors, and had seen
the calm, steady, untiring hopeful perseverance of his application,
untroubled and unconfused by adult “aid,” that I was fully convinced
that my impulse was to meddle, not to aid. And I admit that I have many
backslidings still.
Half playfully and half earnestly, I am continually quoting to myself
the curious quatrain of the Earl of Lytton, a verse which I think may
serve as a whimsical motto for all of us energetic American mothers and
kindergarteners who may be trying to learn more self-restraint in our
relations with little children:
“Since all that I can do for thee
Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be,
That thou mayst never guess nor ever see
The all-endured, this nothing-done costs me.”