MORAL TRAINING
A perusal of the methods of the Montessori schools and of the
philosophy underlying them may lead the reader to question if under
this new system the child is regarded as a creature with muscular and
intellectual activities only, and without a soul. While the sternest
sort of moral training is given to the parent or teacher who attempts
to use the Montessori system, apparently very little is addressed
directly to the child.
Nothing could more horrify the founder of the system than such an idea.
No modern thinker could possibly be more penetrated with reverence for
the higher life of the spirit than she, or could bear its needs more
constantly in mind.
Critics of the method who claim that it makes no direct appeal to the
child’s moral nature, and tends to make of him a little egotist bent
on self-development only, have misapprehended the spirit of the whole
system.
One answer to such a criticism is that conscious moral existence, the
voluntary following of spiritual law, being by far the rarest, highest,
and most difficult achievement in human life, is the one which
develops latest, requires the longest and most careful preparation and
the most mature powers of the individual. It is not only unreasonable
to expect in a little child much of this conscious struggle toward the
good, but it is utterly futile to attempt to force it prematurely into
existence. It cannot be done, any more than a six-months baby can be
forced to an intellectual undertaking of even the smallest dimension.
As a matter of fact, a normal child under six is mostly a little
egotist bent on self-development, and to develop himself is the best
thing he can do, both for himself and others, just as the natural
business of a healthy child under a year of age is to extract all the
physical profit possible out of the food, rest, care, and exercise
given him. And yet even here, the line between the varieties of
growth--physical, intellectual, and moral--is by no means hard and
fast. The six-months baby, although living an almost exclusively
physical life, in struggling to co-ordinate the muscles of his two arms
so that he can seize a rattle with both hands, is battling for the
mastery of his brain-centers, just as the three-year-old, who leads a
life composed almost entirely of physical and intellectual interests,
still, in the instinct which leads him to pity and water a thirsty
plant, is struggling away from that exclusive imprisonment in his own
interests and needs which is the Old Enemy of us all. The fact that
this altruistic interest is not an overmastering passion which moves
him to continuous responsible care for the plant, and the other fact
that, even while he is giving it a drink, he has very likely forgotten
his original purpose in the fascinations of the antics of water poured
out of a sprinkling-pot, should not in the least modify our recognition
of the sincerely moral character of his first impulse.
Now, sincerity in moral impulse is a prerequisite to healthy moral
life, the importance of which cannot be overstated by the most swelling
devices of rhetoric. It is an essential in moral life as air is in
physical life; in other words moral life of any kind is entirely
impossible without it. Hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, is a far
worse enemy than ignorance, since it poisons the very springs of
spiritual life, and yet few things are harder to avoid than unconscious
hypocrisy. A realization of this truth is perhaps the explanation of a
recent tendency in America for fairly intelligent, fairly conscientious
parents utterly to despair of seeing any light on this problem, and
to attempt to solve it by running away from it, to throw up the whole
business in dismay at its difficulty, to attempt no moral training at
all because so much that is given is bad, and to “let the children go,
until they are old enough to choose for themselves.”
It is possible that this method, chosen in desperation, bad though it
obviously is, is better than the older one of attempting to explain to
little children the mysteries of the ordering of the universe before
which our own mature spirits pause in bewildered uncertainty. The
children of six who conceive of God as a policeman with a long white
beard, oddly enough placed in the sky, lying on the clouds, and looking
down through a peephole to spy upon the actions of little girls and
boys, have undoubtedly been cruelly wronged by the creation of this
grotesque and ignoble figure in their little brains, a figure which,
so permanent are the impressions of childhood, will undoubtedly, in
years to come, unconsciously render much more difficult a reverent
and spiritual attitude towards the Ultimate Cause. But because this
attempt at spiritual instruction is as bad as it can be, it does
not follow that the moral nature of the little child does not need
training fitted to its capacities, limited though these undoubtedly
are in early childhood. There is no more reason for leaving a child to
grow up morally unaided by a life definitely designed to develop his
moral nature, than for leaving him to grow up physically unaided by
good food, to expect that he will select this instinctively by his own
unaided browsings in the pantry among the different dishes prepared for
the varying needs of his elders.
The usual method by which bountiful Nature, striving to make up for
our deficiencies, provides for this, is by the action of children upon
each other. This factor is, of course, notably present in the Casa dei
Bambini in the all-day life in common of twenty children. In families
it is especially to be seen in the care and self-sacrifice which older
children are obliged to show towards younger ones. But in our usual
small prosperous American families, this element of enforced moral
effort is often wanting. Either there are but one or two children, or
if more, the younger ones are cared for by a nurse, or by the mother
sufficiently free from pressing material care to give considerable
time to the baby of the family. And on the whole it must be admitted
that Nature’s expedient is at best a rough-and-ready one. Though the
older children may miss an opportunity for spiritual discipline, it is
manifestly better for the baby to be tended by an adult.
But there are other organisms besides babies which are weaker than
children, and the care for plants and animals seems to be the natural
door through which the little child may first go forth to his lifelong
battle with his own egotism. It is always to be borne in mind that
the Case dei Bambini now actually existing are by no means ideal
embodiments of Dr. Montessori’s ideas (see page 227). She has not had
a perfectly free hand with any one of them and herself says constantly
that many phases of her central principle have never been developed
in practice. Hence the absence of any special morally educative
element in the present Casa dei Bambini does not in the least indicate
that Dr. Montessori has deliberately omitted it, any more than the
perhaps too dryly practical character of life in the original Casa
dei Bambini means anything but that the principle was being applied
to very poor children who were in need, first of all, of practical
help. For instance, music and art were left out of the life there,
simply because, at that time, there seemed no way of introducing them.
It is hard for us to realize that the whole movement is so extremely
recent that there has not been time to overcome many merely material
obstacles. In the same way, although circumstances have prevented Dr.
Montessori from developing practically the Casa dei Bambini as far in
the direction of the care of plants and animals as she would like, she
is very strongly in favor of making this an integral and important part
of the daily life of little children.
In this she is again, as in so many of the features of her system, only
using the weight of her scientific reputation to force upon our serious
and respectful attention means of education for little children which
have all along lain close at hand, which have been mentioned by other
educators (Froebel has, of course, his elder boys undertake gardening),
but of which, as far as very young children go, our recognition has
been fitful and imperfect. She is the modern doctor who proclaims with
all the awe-compelling paraphernalia of the pathological laboratory
back of him, that it is not medicine, but fresh air which is the cure
for tuberculosis. Most parents already make some effort to provide pets
(if they are not too much trouble for the rest of the family) with a
vague, instinctive idea that they are somehow “good for children,”
but with no conscious notion of how this “good” is transferred or how
to facilitate the process; and child-gardens are not only a feature
of some very advanced and modern schools and kindergartens, but are
provided once in a while by a family, although nearly always, as in
Froebel’s system, for older children. But as those institutions are
now conducted in the average family economy, the little child gets
about as casual and irregular an opportunity to benefit by them as the
consumptive of twenty years ago by the occasional whiffs of fresh air
which the protecting care of his nurses could not prevent from reaching
him. The four-year-old, as he and his pets are usually treated, _does
not feel real responsibility_ for his kitten or his potted plant and,
missing that, he misses most of the good he might extract from his
relations with his little sisters of the vegetable and animal world.
Our part, therefore, in this connection, is to catch up the hint which
the great Italian teacher has let fall and use our own Yankee ingenuity
in developing it, always bearing religiously in mind the fundamental
principle of self-education which must underlie any attempt of ours to
adapt her ideas to our conditions. For, of course, there is nothing
new in the idea of associating children with animals and plants--an
idea common to nearly all educators since the first child played with
a puppy. What is new is our more conscious, sharpened, more definite
idea, awakened by Dr. Montessori’s penetrating analysis, of just
how these natural elements of child-life can be used to stimulate a
righteous sense of responsibility. Our tolerant indifference towards
the children’s dogs and cats and guinea-pigs, our fatigued complaint
that it is more bother than it is worth to prepare and oversee the
handling of garden-plots for the four- and five-year-olds, would be
transformed into the most genuine and ardent interest in these matters,
if we were penetrated with the realization that their purposeful use
is the key to open painlessly and naturally to our children the great
kingdom of self-abnegation. There is not, as is apt to be the case
with dolls, a more or less acknowledged element of artificiality, even
though it be the sweet “pretend” mother-love for a baby doll. The
children who really care for plants and animals are in a sane world
of reality, as much as we are in caring for children. Their services
are of real value to another real life. The four-year-old youngster
who rushes as soon as he is awake to water a plant he had forgotten
the day before, is acting on as genuine and purifying an impulse of
remorse and desire to make amends as any we feel for a duty neglected
in adult life. The motives which underlie that most valuable moral
asset, responsibility, have been awakened, exercised, strengthened far
more vitally than by any number of those Sunday morning “serious talks”
in which we may try fumblingly and futilely from the outside to touch
the child’s barely nascent moral consciousness. The puppy who sprawls
destructively about the house, and the cat who is always under our feet
when we are in a hurry, should command respectful treatment from us,
since they are rehearsing quaintly with the child a first rough sketch
of the drama of his moral life. The more gentleness, thoughtfulness,
care, and forbearance the little child learns to show to this creature,
weaker than himself, dependent on him, the less difficult he will find
the exercise of those virtues in other circumstances. He is forming
spontaneously, urged thereto by a natural good impulse of his heart,
a moral habit as valuable to him and to those who are to live with
him, as the intellectual habits of precision formed by the use of the
geometric insets.
Of course, he will in the first place form this habit of unvarying
gentleness towards plants and animals, only as he forms so many other
habits, in simian imitation of the actions of those about him. He must
absorb from example, as well as precept, the idea that plants and
animals, being dependent on us, have a moral right to our unfailing
care--a conception which is otherwise not suggested to him until he is
several years older and has back of him the habit of several years of
indifference toward this duty of the strong.
And so here is our hard-working Montessori parent embarked upon the
career of animal-rearing, as well as child-training, with the added
difficulty that he must care for the animals _through_ the children,
and resist stoutly the almost invincible temptation to take over
this, like all other activities which belong by right to the child,
for the short-cut reason that it is less trouble. If this impulse of
the parent be followed, the mere furry presence will be of no avail
to the child, except casually. The kitten must be the little girl’s
kitten if she is really to begin the long preparation which will lead
her to the steady and resolute self-abnegations of maternity, the
preparation which we hope will make her generation better mothers than
we undisciplined and groping creatures are.
As for plant-life, the Antæus-like character of humanity is too well
known to need comment. We are all healthier and saner and happier
if we have not entirely severed our connection with the earth, and
it is surprising that, recognizing this element as consciously as
we do, we have made so comparatively little systematic and regular
use of it in the family to benefit our little children. It is not
because it is very hard to manage. What has been lacking has been some
definite, understandable motive to make us act in this way, beyond
the sentimental notion that it is pretty to have flowers and children
together. No one before has told us quite so plainly and forcibly that
this observation of plants and imaginative sympathy with their needs
is the easiest and most natural way for little minds to get a first
general notion of the world’s economy, the struggle between helpful and
hurtful forces, and of the duty of not remaining a passive onlooker at
this strife, but of entering it instinctively, heartily throwing all
one’s powers on the side of the good and useful.
I know a child not yet quite three, who, by the maddeningly persistent
interrogations characteristic of his age, has succeeded in extracting
from a pair of gardening elders an explanation of the difference
between weeds and flowers, and who has been so struck by this
information that he has, entirely of his own volition, enlisted himself
in the army of natural-born reformers. With the personal note of very
little children, who find it so impossible to think in terms at all
abstract, he has constructed in his baby mind an exciting drama in the
garden, unfolding itself before his eyes; a drama in which he acts, by
virtue of his comparatively huge size and giant strength, the generous
rôle of _deus ex machina_, constantly rescuing beauty beset by her
foes. He throws himself upon a weed, uproots it, and casts it away with
the righteously indignant exclamation, “Horrid old weed! Stop eating
the flowers’ dinner!”
I do not think that it can be truthfully said that there are no moral
elements in his life. He is a baby Sir Galahad, with roses for his
maidens in distress. He has felt and exercised and strengthened the
same impulse that drove Judge Lindsey to his battle for the children
of Denver against the powers of graft. He has recognized spontaneously
his duty to aid the good and useful against their enemies, the
responsibility into which he was born when he opened his eyes upon the
world of mingled good and evil.
All this is not a fanciful literary flight of the imagination. It is
not sentimentality. It is calling things by their real names. Because
the little child’s capacity for a genuine moral impulse is small and
has, like all his other capacities, little continuity, is no reason
why we should not think clearly about it and recognize it for what it
is--the key to the future. Because he “makes a play” of his good action
and is not priggishly aware of his virtue is all the more reason for us
to be thankful, for that is a proof of its unforced existence in his
spirit. Just as the child “makes a play” out of his geometric insets,
and is not pedantically aware that he is acquiring knowledge, so, to
take an instance from the Casa dei Bambini, the little girls who set
the tables and bring in the soup are only vastly interested in the
fun of “playing waitress.” It is their elders who perceive that they
are unconsciously and painlessly acquiring the habit of willing and
instinctive service to others, which will aid them in many a future
conscious and painful struggle against their own natural selfishness
and inertia.
This use of the sincerely common life in the Children’s Home to promote
sincerely social feeling among the children has been mentioned in the
preceding chapter. It is one of the most vitally important of the
elements in the Montessori schools. The genuine, unforced acceptance
by the children of the need for sacrifices by the individual for the
good of all, is something which can only be brought about by genuinely
social life with their equals, such as they have in the Children’s Home
and not elsewhere. We must do the best we can in the family-life by
seeing that the child shares as much as possible and as sincerely as
possible in the life of the household. But at home he is inevitably
living with his inferiors, plants, animals, and babies; or his
superiors, older children and adults; whereas in the Children’s Home
he is living as he will during the rest of his life, mostly with his
equals. And it is in the spontaneous adjustments and compromises of
this continuous life with his equals that he learns most naturally,
most soundly, and most thoroughly, the rules governing social life.
As for moral life, it seems to me that we need neither make a vain
attempt to subscribe to a too-rosy belief in the unmixed goodness
of human nature, and blind ourselves to the saddening fact that the
battle against one’s egotism is bound to be painful, nor, on the other
hand, go back to the grim creed of our forefathers, that the sooner
children are thrust into the thick of this unending war the better,
since they must enter it sooner or later. The truth seems to lie in
its usual position, between two extremes, and to be that children
should be strengthened by proper moral food, care, and exercises suited
to their strength, and allowed to grow slowly into adult endurance
before they are forced to face adult moral problems; and that we may
protect them from too great demands on their small fund of capacity for
self-sacrifice by allowing them and even encouraging them to wreathe
their imaginative “plays” about the self-sacrificing action, provided,
of course, that we keep our heads clear to make sure that the “plays”
do not interfere with the action.
It is well to make a plain statement to the child of five, that he is
requested to wipe the silver-ware because it will be of service to
his mother (if he is lucky enough to have a mother who ever does so
obviously necessary and useful a thing as to wash the dishes herself),
but it is not necessary to insist that this conception of service shall
uncompromisingly occupy his mind during the whole process. It does no
harm if, after this statement, it is suggested that the knives and
forks and spoons are shipwrecked people in dire need of rescue, and
that it would be fun to snatch them from their watery predicament and
restore them safely to their expectant families in the silver-drawer.
By so doing we are not really confusing the issue, or “fooling” the
child into a good action, if clear thinking on the part of adults
accompany the process. We are but suiting the burden to the childish
shoulders, but inducing the child-feet to take a single step, which is
all that any of us can take at one time, in the path leading to the
service of others.
* * * * *
Most of this chapter has been drawn from Montessori ideas by inference
only, by the development of hints, and it is probable that other
mothers, meditating on the same problems, may see other ways of
applying the principle of self-education and spontaneous activity
to this field of moral life. It is apparent that the first element
necessary, after a firm grasp on the fundamental idea that our children
must do their own moral as well as physical growing, and after a
vivid realization that the smallest amount of real moral life is
better than much simulated and unreal feeling, is clear thinking on
our part, a definite notion of what we really mean by moral life, a
definition which will not be bounded and limited by the repetition of
committed-to-memory prayers. This does not mean that simple nightly
aspirations to be a good child the next day may not have a most
beneficial effect on even a very young child and may satisfy the first
stirrings to life of the religious instinct, as much as the constant
daily kindnesses to plants and animals satisfy the ethical instinct.
This latter, however, at his age, is apt to be vastly more developed
and more important than the religious instinct.
Indeed the religious instinct, which apparently never develops in some
natures, although so strong in others, is in all cases slow to show
itself and, like other slowly germinating seeds, should not be pushed
and prodded to hasten it, but should be left untouched until it shows
signs of life. Our part is to prepare, cultivate, and enrich the nature
in which it is to grow.