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[Illustration: Patient waiting for the earth to bloom develops a little
child spiritually.]
MONTESSORI CHILDREN
BY
CAROLYN SHERWIN BAILEY
ILLUSTRATED FROM SPECIALLY POSED PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1913, 1914,
BY
THE BUTTERICK CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published February, 1915
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
As a student of child psychology and always most deeply interested in the
welfare problems that confront us in connection with the upbringing of
little children, I went to Rome in 1913 to study, first-hand, the results
of the Montessori system of education. A great deal had been written
and said in connection with the technic of the system. Little had been
given the world in regard to individual children who were developing
their personalities through the auto-education of Montessori. I wished to
observe Montessori children.
Through the gracious courtesy of Dr. Montessori, I was given the
privilege of observing in the new Trionfale School where the method could
be watched from its inception, and in the Fua Famagosta and Franciscan
Convent Schools. I was also given the privilege of hearing Dr. Montessori
lecture, elucidating certain problems in her theory of education not
previously given publicity.
I found little ones of three, four, and five years, surrounded by the
many observers of the first international Montessori training class, yet
so marvelously poised and self-controlled that they went through the days
as if alone. I saw such proofs of the integrity of the system as the
instances of Otello, Bruno, and others.
The pages which follow constitute a series of pictures of real child
types showing Montessori results. As a record of results, I hope
they may contribute to the world’s greater faith in the discovery of
Montessori—the spirit of the child.
CAROLYN SHERWIN BAILEY.
NEW YORK, 1915.
CONTENTS
PAGE
DR. MONTESSORI, THE WOMAN 3
WITH MARGHERITA IN THE CHILDREN’S HOUSE 13
_Showing the Unconscious Influence of the True Montessori
Environment._
VALIA 26
_The Physical Education of the System._
THE FREEING OF OTELLO, THE TERRIBLE 39
_Montessori Awakening of Conscience Through Directed Will._
THE CHRIST IN BRUNO 54
_About the New Spiritual Sense._
MARIO’S FINGER EYES 67
_Montessori Sense-Training._
RAFFAELO’S HUNGER 81
_Color Teaching. Its Value._
THE GOING AWAY OF ANTONIO 94
_Directing the Child Will._
ANDREA’S LILY 108
_The Nature-Training of the Method._
THE MIRACLE OF OLGA 119
_Reading and Writing as Natural for Your Child as Speech._
CLARA—LITTLE MOTHER 135
_The Social Development of the Montessori Child._
PICCOLA—LITTLE HOME MAKER 148
_The Helpfulness of the Montessori Child._
MARIO’S PLAYS 163
_Montessori and the Child’s Imagination._
THE GREAT SILENCE 176
_Montessori Development of Repose._
ILLUSTRATIONS
Patient Waiting for the Earth to Bloom Develops a Little
Child Spiritually _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Back-yard Apparatus for the Physical Development of Children
Is Valuable 28
An Important Physical Exercise of Montessori 30
Hand and Eye Work in Connection in Exercises of Practical Life 32
Walking upon a Line Gives Poise and Muscular Control 34
The Kind of Toy Dr. Montessori Recommends for Physical Development 36
Replacing the Solid Insets by the Sense of Touch Alone 70
Building the Tower and the Broad Stair 70
A Fineness of Perception Is Developed by Discriminating Different
Textiles Blindfolded 74
Perfecting the Sense of Touch with the Geometric Insets 76
To Match the Colors Two by Two Is the First Exercise 84
Grading Each Standard Color and Its Related Colors in Chromatic
Order 88
All the Colors of Nature May be Found 88
Every Child Should Have a Pet 110
The Loving Care of a Dumb Animal Results in Child Sympathy 114
To Feel that Something Is Dependent upon Him for Care and Food
Helps a Child to Reverence Life 116
Building Words with the Movable Alphabet 122
Learning the Form of Letters by the Sense of Touch 126
Filling in Outlines with Color to Gain the Muscular Control
Necessary for Writing 126
MONTESSORI CHILDREN
DR. MONTESSORI, THE WOMAN
A holiday in Rome, the Eternally Old, the Eternally Young. A long,
sun-dried street that flanks the Tiber is gay with fruit venders who
push along their carts of gold oranges, strings of dates, and amber
lemons. Italians of the wealthy class mingle in friendly fashion with
the native-costumed peasants. Someone starts a snatch of song; a dozen
passersby take up the strain. Where the chariots of the Cæsars rattled by
in yesterday’s centuries, there rises a stately row of stucco apartment
mansions with terraced gardens where pink roses and purple heliotrope run
riot over the hedges and silver-toned fountains sing, all day long, their
tinkling tunes.
Leaving the gay, bright street, you ring the electric bell at number 5
Principessa Clotilde.
“Is the Dottoressa at home, or is she keeping holiday, too?” you ask of
the porter. He laughs, motioning you to an almost human elevator that
lifts itself and will stop at whichever floor you ask it.
“Yes, La Dottoressa Montessori is in—in fact, she is nearly always in
because of the many people, mainly Americans, who come to see her. And
the children come daily to see her as well.” The porter shrugs his
shoulders, uncomprehendingly, as you enter the elevator and stop at the
fourth floor. The popularity of this tenant of his is a matter of wonder
to the porter.
As a low-voiced maid opens a great carved door and you find yourself in
Dr. Montessori’s apartment, you hold your breath at the modernism of it.
Plain white woodwork, fine old rugs covering the stone floors, the soft
tan walls covered with a few beautiful tapestries; French furniture and
electric lights. The reception room in which you wait might be that of
an American home, but a glance out of the open window unfolds to you the
heart of the tenant. While her home is in one of the most beautiful and
cultured centers of Rome, Dr. Montessori sees daily a tiny, narrow Roman
alleyway where the “people” live like bees in a hive and the doorsills
throng with little children and their voices rise to her every hour of
the day.
But you hear a step. You turn. You are face to face with Maria
Montessori.
At first you have no words. You have seen her picture in America, but
it gave you no conception of the fine, chiseled beauty of the woman who
stands before you dressed in severe black that accentuates the marble
of the classic features, the depth of the far-seeing, dark eyes. Poise,
grace, self-control, sympathy, love of humanity are written on the face.
It is as if all the Madonnas of the imagination of the old Italian
painters had come to life in La Dottoressa. Overpowering the first glance
of courteous welcome, though, that accompanied her outstretched hand is a
look of stern query.
Why have you come? Are you another of the curious visitors who have
besieged her from almost every nation the past year to try and grasp in
a day her method of teaching that she gained only through twenty years
of patient, tireless scientific study of the child mind, she seems to
ask. But your words come like a torrent now. You assure her that you
have made this pilgrimage to Rome, not as an individual, but as the
voice of thousands of mothers who have children to be educated. They ask
Dr. Montessori, through you, for her message to the American people.
As you linger over the words, _madre_, mother, and _bambino_, baby,
Dr. Montessori smiles. You have set her doubts at rest. She talks fast,
eloquently, in her musical Italian, and you listen, thrilled, fascinated.
Often you are interrupted, but always by children. Lovely, dark-eyed,
courteous little Roman boys and girls they are. They come from you know
not where, are admitted to Dr. Montessori’s apartment quite as if they
were adult visitors, and after they have greeted her in their graceful,
polite fashion, they quietly run about the room or sit in groups talking
together as if the apartment were the popular meeting place for all the
children of the neighborhood. You find their interruption and their
presence a help instead of a hindrance to your interview. They illustrate
by their loving friendship for La Dottoressa and each other, and by their
complete self-control, the message that Dr. Montessori gives you to carry
back to the American people.
_She would liberate the children._
_The American people are free, but American children are not._
We have lost sight of the Republic of Childhood, she says. Through
forcing our adult standards of conduct and teaching upon children, we
have closed the gateways of their souls. We must believe that every
child, well-born into the world, is going to be good and happy and
intelligent if we as parents and teachers give him a fair chance. We must
stop _commanding_ our children. Instead, we will _lead_ them.
Dr. Montessori tells us that we are undergoing a slow but certain change
in the social structure of society. Woman is being emancipated from her
domestic slavery of yesterday. We are creating a new and more healthful
environment for the laboring man. But the American child is still a slave
to the capricious commands of his parents, which claim his soul and
prevent his free, natural development to his best manhood. In school,
too, children are still bound.
The vertebral column, Dr. Montessori tells us, which is biologically the
most fundamental part of the human skeleton; which survived the desperate
struggles of primitive man against the beasts of the desert, helped him
to quarry out a shelter for himself from the solid rock and bend iron to
his uses, cannot resist the bondages of the present-day _school desk_.
Curvature of the spine is alarmingly prevalent among children and is
increasing. Instead of resorting to surgical methods, corsets, braces,
and orthopædic means for straightening child bodies, we should try to
bring about some more rational method of teaching that children shall no
longer be obliged to remain for the greater part of the day in such a
pathologically dangerous position.
Not only do we hurt child bodies by the confinement of the school desk,
but we wound their souls by ever offering rewards and punishments, by
insisting upon such long periods of absolute silence as are demanded in
our schools, and by imposing upon children a program of instruction that
is built, often by law, to be followed by large groups of children. The
normal child is he who finds it impossible to follow a program of school
work or to obey, unquestioningly, the arbitrary commands of his parents.
He must follow his own bent, providing he does not interfere with the
freedom of others, if he is to dig out his own life path. The abnormal
child is the one who _never resists_; he is the child who, without
dissent, obeys all adult commands.
So Dr. Montessori, who has discovered a method of free teaching by means
of which children from two and a half to five develop naturally and
happily along lines that culminate in a spontaneous “explosion” into
self-taught reading and writing at four and five years, speaks to the
American parent.
She begs us to give our children the freedom that is the American
nation’s boast. Not the freedom that would lead to disordered acts, but
that liberty which means the untrammeled exercise of all the moral and
intellectual powers that are born with the individual.
About twenty years ago Maria Montessori, a beautiful young society girl
of Rome, startled Italy by receiving with honors her degree as Doctor of
Medicine. The Italian girl of the cultured classes is essentially a home
girl. She studies at home, she embroiders, she plays with flowers, she
is introduced to society—then she marries. That Maria Montessori should
desert the quiet, rose-strewn paths of Roman débutantes and, after taking
her degree, act as assistant doctor in the Psychiatric Clinic of the
University of Rome, startled all Italy.
Her work at the clinic led her to visit the general insane asylums, and
she became deeply interested in the deficient children who were housed
there, with no attempts being made to educate them. As she studied these
helpless little ones, the idea came to her that it might be possible, by
putting them into better surroundings, and giving them opportunity for
free gymnastic activities and free use of the senses, to educate them.
She gave up medicine for teaching and again startled Italy—and the world.
Her deficient children learned to read and write, easily and naturally,
and took their places beside normal children in the municipal schools.
Then Dr. Montessori carried her method of physical and sense education
a lap farther. If this method stimulated to action the sleeping mind of
a deficient child, might it not save time and energy in the teaching
of normal children, she asked herself. At that time, the Good Building
Association of Rome was tearing down the squalid, disease-filled houses
of the poor of the San Lorenzo Quarter and putting up in their places
hygienic model tenements. Dr. Montessori arranged to have the children
of each tenement gathered in one room of the basement, where large,
free spaces, didactic apparatus, hot meals, and gardens would make it a
Children’s House. She applied her method in numerous of these Children’s
Houses and in the beautiful convent of the Franciscan nuns on the Via
Giusti.
Again the miracle happened. Children of four began to read and write,
having taught themselves. There were other wonders, too. These
Montessori-trained children were self-controlled, free, happy, good.
To-day there are Montessori mothers all over the world.
To furnish the right environment for the expanding of the child soul,
Dr. Montessori urges that every home be transformed into a House of
Childhood. It will not consist alone of walls, she tells us, although
these walls will be the bulwarks of the sacred intimacy of the family.
The home will be more than this. It will have a soul, and will embrace
its inmates with the consoling arms of love. The new mother will be
liberated, like the butterfly bursting its winter cocoon of imprisonment
and darkness, from those drudgeries that the home has demanded of her in
the past, leaving her better able to bear strong children, study those
children, teach them, and be a social force in the world.
The new father will cultivate his health, guard his virtue, that he
may better the species and make his children better, more perfect, and
stronger than any which have been created before.
The ideal home of to-morrow will be the home of those men and women who
wish to improve the human species and send the race on its triumphant way
into eternity.
So Dr. Montessori, physician, psychologist, teacher, lover of children,
and womanly woman, speaks to us.
As one says _addio_ and leaves her and goes down into the blue,
star-filled evening of the Eternal City, the night seems to be charged
with a new mystery. Rome, who holds in her beautiful hands such good
gifts for us—art, sculpture, history, painting—now offers to us another.
Stretching farther than the moss-grown stones that line the Appian Way,
she shows us a new road—the way that leads to the soul of a little child.
WITH MARGHERITA IN THE CHILDREN’S HOUSE
_Showing the Unconscious Influence of the True Montessori Environment_
It is so early in the sweet, perfume-laden Italian morning that the dew
is still hanging in diamond drops on the iris and roses in the garden of
the Casa dei Bambini of the Via Giusti, Rome. The great white room, with
its flooding sunlight and host of tiny, waiting chairs and tables, is
empty, quiet, calm.
Margherita stands a happy second in the wide-arched doorway that
makes room and garden melt into one fragrant, peaceful whole. A wee
four-year-old girlie is Margherita, big-eyed, radiant with smiles, and
tugging a huge wicker basket of lunch that is almost as large as she. She
is the first baby to arrive at the Children’s House. Ah, but that does
not ruffle her composure. She is already alone in her newly-found freedom
of spirit. She needs no teacher.
She places the lunch basket on a waiting bench, crosses to a wall space
where rows of diminutive pink and blue aprons hang at comfortable
reaching distances for little arms. She finds her own apron, wriggles
into it, _buttons_ it at the back. She is ready for the day.
What shall come first in Margherita’s day? So much is in store for her,
waiting for her eager finger tips, her electric-charged soul. As her
great brown eyes slowly trail the room and the colorful garden outside,
it is as if she were making a soul search for that “good thing” which
will be her first silent teacher. Her glance lingers on the terraced
rows of flowers, the tinkling fountain in the center. She has found
the object of her search. She runs—no, she _floats_, for such complete
physical control of her limbs has this four-year-old baby—to the garden,
and kneels there, looking up at a redolent, yellow rose that has opened
in the night. She does not touch it; she only looks and breathes and
wonders. She has watched for this unfolding daily, waiting with sweet
patience for the branch to burst into bud and the bud to unfold into
bloom. She has tugged a vase of water each morning to offer drink to the
roots. Now her patience and her service are rewarded. As she kneels
there looking up into the petals of the gold flower, her small hands
clasped over her breast with devotional ecstasy, _Nature opens her heart
to the heart of a little child_.
Many rapturous minutes the baby kneels. Then she flies back to the room
again and glances at it with the critical eye of a housekeeper. Here
she flicks away a speck of dust, there she picks up a scrap of paper
from the stone floor. She peeps into the wall cabinets that hold the
Montessori didactic materials to see if the gay buttoning, lacing, and
bow-tying frames, the fascinating pink blocks of the tower, the frames
of form insets are all in their places. In the meantime the Signorina
directress comes. Bruno, of five, arrives, bringing with him his
two-and-a-half-year-old brother. More toddlers trail in, two and a half,
three, four, four and a half years old, and button themselves into their
pink and blue aprons. Independent, polite, joyous little children of the
Cæsars they are, each with his or her own special happy task in mind in
coming to the Children’s House this blue day.
The wee-est toddlers drag out soft-colored rugs, orange, dull green,
deep crimson, and spread them on the wide white spaces of the sun-flecked
stone floor. Here they build and rebuild the enchanting intricacies of
the tower of blocks, the broad stair of blocks, and the red and white
rods of the long stair, chanting to themselves as they unconsciously
measure distances and make mental comparisons: “big, little; thick, thin;
long, short.”
Children of three and a half and four take from the cabinets boxes of
many-colored, silk-wound spools, which they sort and lay upon the little
tables in chromatic order until a rainbow-tinted mass lies before their
pigment-loving eyes. From the bright scarlet of poppies to the faint
blush of pale pink coral, from the royal purple of the tall, spiked Roman
iris to the amethyst tint of a wild orchid, they make no mistake in the
intermediate color gradations. Other children of four and over finger
with intelligent, trained skill the geometric forms; circles, triangles,
squares that they are learning to recognize through the “eyes in their
fingers,” and which will help them to see with the mind’s eye the form
that makes the beauty of our world. Small Joanina, in her corner, runs
her forefinger with the greatest delicacy of touch a dozen times around
a circle. Then she fits it in its place in the form board, takes it out
and fits it in again. Then she looks up, a new light in her eyes, darts
out into the garden and walks slowly about the fountain, running her
finger around its deep basin.
“Signorina, Signorina!” she calls. “The fountain is a circle. I can see a
pebble that is a circle, too. I see _many_ circles!”
So the children learn through the _exercise of the senses_.
But Margherita?
All this time she has flitted from one task to another. She found an
outlined picture of clover leaves and colored it with dainty pencil
strokes, making the leaves deep green and the background paler, and
handling her pencil with careful skill. Then she took a box of white
cards on which are mounted great black letters, cut from fine sandpaper.
Holding each card in her left hand, she traced the form of the letter
with her right forefinger, closed her eyes, traced its form again,
repeated the letter’s name to herself in a whisper, sat silently a second.
As the Signorina directress moves from child to child, smiling
encouragement, showing Bruno’s baby brother’s clumsy fingers how to slip
a button through a buttonhole, helping Joanina to find a new form, the
square, she watches Margherita.
“This may be a white day in the child’s mind growth,” she thinks, but she
does not suggest, or hurry the miracle. She only waits, hopes, watches.
_Silence_ is written on the blackboard. Three hours have passed in which
over thirty children, barely out of babyhood, have worked incessantly
at many different occupations, have moved gracefully and with complete
freedom about the room, have changed occupations as often as they wished,
have not once quarreled. But now, out of the ordered disorder, comes a
marvelous hush. No word is spoken, but one baby after another, glancing
the written sign, drops back with closed eyes into a hushed silence in
which the whir of bird wings in the garden, the fluttering of casement
hangings, the far-away sound of a bell are audible. Even Bruno’s baby
brother struggles not to make a clattering noise with his little chair.
No one has said to this two-year-old, “Be still.” Rather, has he been
inspired to _feel_ stillness.
Out of the restful calm of the room comes the whispered call of the
Signorina: “Bruno, Piccola, Maria, Joanina, Margherita!” Lightly,
noiselessly, joyously the children come and huddle in a hushed group
about the directress. She has called to the soul of each child, she has
commended them for their self-taught lesson in control.
As the work with the didactic materials is taken up again, Margherita
sits in a little chair for a space, quiet, reflective. Her lips move,
her fingers trace signs in the air and on the table before her. The Game
of Silence has helped this four-year-old with her spirit unfolding. Now,
with a sudden impulse, she darts to the blackboard, seizes a piece of
chalk, _writes_.
“Ma-ma! Ma-ma!”
Margherita writes it a dozen times in clear, flowing script with
breathless, eager strokes.
“Signorina, Signorina, I write—I write about my mother. I _write_!” she
joyously interpolates.
The other children look up with sympathetic interest, some leaving their
work to crowd about the victorious Margherita. All of them voice their
sympathy.
“Margherita writes,” they say. With the older ones who have already
reached this wonder lap in their education there is a note of
_nonchalance_.
“We also write,” they seem to say. With the tiny ones there is a note of
hopeful promise.
“Some day we, too, will find that we can write,” they seem to say.
Margherita covers the blackboard with clear, big script. She erases it
all for the sheer joy of assuring herself that she is able to write it
all over again. When the luncheon hour comes, she looks back longingly
at the blackboard as she lays plates on the little tables with dainty
precision, places knife, fork, and spoon deftly, carries five tumblers at
a time on a tray without dropping one, and passes a tureen of hot soup
that is so large as to almost hide her small self. Even the happiness
of being one of such a happy “party,” of eating one’s lunch of peas and
sweet wheat bread and soup in the Children’s House, does not wholly
satisfy Margherita to-day. Her big brown eyes are raised continually to
her first written word.
Luncheon over, the children, with balls, hoops, and toys, romp out for an
hour’s play in the garden.
“Margherita,” Bruno calls. “Come, we will have The Little One for a
donkey, and I will harness him with you, who may be the horse!”
But the little girl, usually the first to start a game, does not hear.
She is seated under the rosebush as if she were telling _her_ rose the
wonder that has come to her to-day. She and the rose have unfolded
together. So it is with all Montessori children. They open their souls as
flowers do, naturally, freely, surely.
Margherita is your child as well as the precious _bambino_ of her Roman
mother. Children the world over, from sun to sun, from pole to pole,
are the same in these plastic first years of mind growth. They have the
same insatiable desire to _do_, to _touch_, to be _free in activity_.
Not always understanding the little child’s hereditary way of grasping
knowledge, we wound his spirit by crushing these natural instincts. We
say, “_don’t touch_,” “_be still_,” because the activities of our small
Margheritas and Brunos interfere with our adult standards of living.
Dr. Montessori has discovered that to say, “_don’t touch_,” “_be still_,”
to a child is a crime. Such commands are the keen-edged daggers that
kill the child soul.
It is possible that some time will elapse before Dr. Montessori’s
system of setting the clockwork of the little child’s mind running
automatically, of opening the floodgates of the child soul can be adopted
in their entirety in our American school. We are so used to thinking
of a school as a crowded place of many desks, where children must
remain, bound physically and mentally by the will of the teacher and
the relentless course of study, that a Montessori schoolroom where, as
Dr. Montessori herself expresses it, children may move about usefully,
intelligently, and freely, without committing a rough or rude act, seems
to us impossible. We even prescribe and teach imaginative _plays_ to
our children—as if it were possible for any outside force to mold that
wonderful mind force by means of which the mind creates the _new_ out of
its triumphant conquest of the world through the senses.
Ideal Montessori schools may be our hope of to-morrow, but to make of a
home a Children’s House is the fact of to-day.
To bring about Montessori development in the home is not alone a
matter of buying the didactic materials and then offering them to your
Margherita and looking for their future miracle working. This would mean
stimulating lawlessness instead of freedom. Many of our children already
play with squares and circles without seeing how squares and circles
make beauty in the architecture of our cities. Many of our children
grow up side by side with opening roses without unfolding with them. We
would most of us rather button on our babies’ aprons, tie their bibs,
feed them, than lead them into the physical independence that comes from
doing these things themselves. We wish children to be obedient, but
instead of establishing principles of good in their minds which they will
follow freely, if we only give them a chance, we _command_, and expect
unreasoning obedience to our injustice.
A Children’s House in every home will be a place where the mother is
imbued with the spirit of the investigator. She watches her children,
asking herself why they act along certain lines. She leads instead of
ruling. She will teach her children physical independence as soon as
they can toddle. To know how to dress and undress, to bathe, to look
quickly over a room to see if it is in order, to open and close doors
and move little chairs, tables, and toys quietly, to care for plants and
pets—these are simple physical exercises which help to keep children
free and good. She will provide her Children’s House with materials for
sense-training. She will lead her children by simple, logical steps into
preparation for early mastery of reading and writing.
The first step, however, in giving the American child a chance to develop
along the self-active, natural lines of Margherita is to fill our homes
with the spirit of Montessori. We will have unlimited patience with the
mistakes and idiosyncrasies of childhood, remembering that we do not
aim to develop little men and women but only as nearly perfect children
as we can. We will endeavor to surround ourselves with those influences
of love and charity and beauty and simplicity which it will be good for
our children to feel as well. We will offer the children the best food,
the greatest amount of air, the brightest sunshine, the least breakable
belongings, the most encouragement, the minimum of coercion.
Our attitude toward the child will be that of the physician to whom the
slightest variation of a symptom is a signal for a change of treatment,
to whom a fraction of progress measures a span. A careful home record
of the child’s mental, moral, and physical gain should be kept, and it
will be radiantly discovered that the removal of the burden of force and
coercion from the shoulders of the little child will give him an impetus,
not only to mind growth, but to the attaining of greater bodily strength.
Much misunderstanding of the system of Montessori has come about through
our too lavish interpretation of the word _freedom_ as lawlessness. It
should be interpreted, rather, as _self-direction_. The home in which the
children are provided with good living conditions, in which it is made
possible for them to grow naturally, where their longing to see and touch
and weigh and smell and taste is satisfied as far as can be arranged, and
where they are led to be as independent of adult help as possible, is
laying the foundation for the education of Montessori.
VALIA
_The Physical Education of the System_
Valia was her mother’s little stranger. Although the mother had borne and
fondled and bathed and clothed and undressed the pink flesh that held the
baby soul, she did not know that flesh. And Valia grew to be three years
old, fat and good, but with little bent limbs and a tired-out spine and
clumsy, fumbling fingers.
“Sit in your chair, Valia. That is what chairs are made for,” Valia’s
mother admonished at home when the baby joyfully pranced across the floor
on “all fours” or lay prone at play with her toys.
“Walk in the garden path like a little lady,” she urged, when Valia,
taken out for a walk, climbed to the lowest railing of an adjacent
fence and walked along it, sideways, or hung from the top, her fat legs
swinging in the air.
“Do not jump; to jump is noisy and unbecoming in little girls,” the
mother commanded, as Valia, brought to the Trionfale Children’s House in
Rome, hopped gayly up and down the wide stone steps.
But the directress of the school had no word of reproof for baby Valia.
She looked at the bent legs that could hardly hold the weight of the
plump body, she glanced at the powerless baby hands that could not clutch
with any force the handles of a toy wheelbarrow which another child
offered Valia for her play.
“You have not noticed the baby’s limbs,” the directress suggested.
The mother’s eyes trailed the school yard where Valia struggled to keep
up with the other sturdy little men and women who trundled their toy
wheelbarrows up and down in long happy lines. She shrugged her shoulders.
“Perhaps they are crooked, but what can one do to the body of a _bambino_
but feed and cover it?” she asked in discouraged query.
“Ah, La Dottoressa tells us,” the directress replied simply.
“We can _know the body_ of the little child.”
The education of Valia’s muscles was begun that very day, that instant.
[Illustration: Back-yard apparatus for the physical development of
children is valuable.]
In the school garden the little maid found her way with the other
children to an immediately fascinating bit of gymnastic apparatus; a
section of a low fence it looked, its posts sunk deeply into the ground
so as to make it strong and durable. It was the right height for small
arms to reach the top rail, which was round, smooth, and easily grasped
by small hands. Here Valia hung, her limbs suspended and at rest, for
long periods. Sometimes she pulled her body up so that her waist was
level with the upper railing. It was a new game, one could climb a fence
without being chided for it. Valia did not know, but Dr. Montessori did,
that little children climb fences, pull back when we lead them, and try
to draw themselves up by clinging to furniture because they need this
form of physical exercise to bring about harmonious muscular development.
Valia’s body was developing at an enormously greater rate than her
limbs. The height of your baby’s torso at one year is about sixty-five
per cent. of its total stature, at two years is sixty-three per cent.,
at three years is sixty-two per cent. But the limbs of the baby, ah,
these develop much more slowly. To hang from the top railing of a fence
straightens the spine, rests the short limbs by removing the weight of
the torso, and helps the hands to prehensive grasping. So Dr. Montessori
invented and uses this bar apparatus with the children at Rome and
recommends its use in American nurseries and playrooms.
The next Montessori exercise for Valia was a simple, rhythmic one—walking
on a line to secure bodily poise and limb control.
It was just another game for a child, full of happy surprise, too, for
she never knew when the sweet notes of the piano in the big rooms of the
Children’s House would tinkle out their call to the march. But when the
pianist played a tune that was simple and repeated its melody over and
over again and was marked in its rhythm, Valia and Otello and Mario and
all the other babies put away their work and fluttered like wind-blown
butterflies over to the place where a big circle was outlined in white
paint on the floor. To march upon this line, now fast, now slowly,
sometimes with the lightness of a fairy and then with the joyously loud
tramp of a work horse, oh, how delightful! Sometimes the music changed
to the rhythm of running or a folk-dance step, and this gave further
delight to the little ones.
At first, Valia could not find the white circle of delight. Her fat feet
refused to obey the impulse of her eagerly musical soul. But with the
days she found poise and grace and erectness and the crooked limbs began
to straighten themselves.
She sat, for hours at a time, in a patch of sunlight on the floor, using
her incompetent little fingers in some of the practical exercises of
everyday living. The directress gave her a stout wooden frame, to which
were fastened two soft pieces of gay woolen stuff, one of which was
pierced with buttonholes and the other having large bone buttons. Valia
worked all one morning before she was able to fit each button in its
corresponding buttonhole, but when she did accomplish this, the triumph
was a bit of wonder-working in Valia’s control of herself. It started her
on the road to physical freedom.
[Illustration: An important physical exercise of Montessori.]
Happy in her new accomplishment, she mastered all the other dressing
frames; the soft linen with pearl buttons that was like her underlinen,
the leather through which one thrust shoe buttons with one’s own button
hook, or laced from one eyelet to another, the lacing on cloth like her
mother’s Sunday bodice of green velvet, the frames of linen with large
and small hooks and eyes, the frame upon which were broad strands of
bright-colored ribbon to be tied in a row of smart little bows.
Daily, simple physical exercises such as these; hand and eye
co-ordination, exercises in poise, stretching, rest for the limbs and
freedom for the spine and torso slowly transformed Valia from a lump of
disorganized, putty-like flesh to an erect, graceful, self-controlled
little woman.
“What have you done to my Valia?” asked the mother as she waited at the
school door for her little one a few months later. “She dresses the young
_bambino_ at home and buttons her own shoes. She no longer stumbles all
day long but stands well on her feet. She helps me to lay the evening
meal and carries a dish of soup, full, to the place of her father. I do
not understand it. Did you punish her for climbing and being clumsy?”
“No.” The directress of the Children’s House lays a kind hand on Valia’s
curly head as she explains. “We did not punish Valia. We gave her a
fence upon which to climb and we let her tumble about on the floor when
she was tired, and we helped her to find her feet and her fingers.”
Dr. Montessori tells us that there is a little Valia in every home.
The child from one to three and four years of age is in need of
definite physical exercises that will tend to the normal development
of physiological movements. We ordinarily give the little child’s body
slight thought. Then, in the schools, we gather older children into
large classes, and by a series of collective gymnastics in which the
commands of the teacher check all spontaneity, we try to secure poise and
self-control and grace for the child body.
[Illustration: Hand and eye work in connection in exercises of practical
life.]
Gymnastics for the home will accomplish this result, Dr. Montessori tells
us, and these include simple exercises such as one sees in the Children’s
Houses. They are planned taking into account the biology of the body
of the child from birth to six years of age—the child who has a torso
greatly developed in comparison with his lower limbs. They have for their
basis these goals:
Helping the child to limb development and control.
Helping the child to proper breathing and articulate speech.
Helping the child to achieving the practical acts of life;
dressing, carrying objects without dropping, and the resulting
co-ordination of hand and eye.
To bring about this physical development, Dr. Montessori has planned
and put into the Children’s Houses in Rome certain very simple physical
exercises, so simple as to seem to us almost obvious, but the results in
child poise, control, and grace have drawn the attention of the entire
world. These exercises include:
Swinging and “chinning” on a play fence, modeled after a real
fence or gate.
Climbing and jumping from broad steps, a flight of wooden steps
being built for the purpose. Ascending and descending a short
flight of circular steps, these steps built for the exercise
at slight expense. Climbing up and down a very short ladder.
Stepping through the rungs of the ladder as it is laid upon the
ground or the floor.
Rhythmic exercises carried out upon a line; walking slowly
or fast, softly and heavily, on tiptoe, running, skipping,
and dancing in time to music. These exercises may be done by
utilizing the long, straight cracks in a hardwood floor, the
seams in a carpet, by strewing grain or making a snow line out
of doors.
Exercises in practical life, the most important of these being
brought about by the use of the dressing frames included in
the Montessori didactic materials, and including: buttoning
on scarlet flannel, linen, and leather, lacing on cloth and
leather, fastening hooks and eyes and patent snaps, and tying
bow-knots. Other materials used in these exercises are: brooms
and fascinating little scrubbing brushes and white enamel
basins with which the children help to make the schoolroom
tidy in the morning. And the children are taught to open and
close doors and gates softly and gracefully and to greet their
friends politely and with courtesy.
Physical training brought about through play with a few
toys that stimulate healthful muscular exercises and deep
breathing. These toys include rather heavy toy wheelbarrows,
balls, hoops, bean bags, and kites.
Breathing exercises. For these, Dr. Montessori recommends the
march, in which the little ones sing in time to the rhythmic
movement of their feet, an exercise in which deep breathing
brings about lung strength. She recommends also the singing
circle games of Froebel. She leads the children to practice
such simple respiratory exercises as, hands on hips, tongue
lying flat in the mouth and the mouth open, to draw the breath
in deeply with a quick lowering of the shoulders, after which
it is slowly expelled, the shoulders returning slowly to their
normal position.
Exercises for practice in enunciation, including careful phonic
pronunciation of the sounds of the vowels and consonants
and the first syllables of words. This practice in the
co-ordination of lips, tongue, and teeth not only helps the
child to clear speech but leads to a quicker grasp of reading.
[Illustration: Walking upon a line gives poise and muscular control.]
Each of these physical exercises has its basis in child interest. _Your_
toddler instinctively pulls and climbs, stretches, and scrambles about
on the floor, longs to dress his own fascinating, wee body, and play into
the activities of the home. He loves marked, rhythmic music and longs
to hear those jingles and nonsense ditties of childhood’s literature in
which syllabic sounds are emphasized and repeat themselves.
“Not commands, but freedom; not teaching, but observation,” Dr.
Montessori begs of mothers. So she has taken these instinctive activities
of the little child and, using them as a basis, she has built upon them
her system of physical training for the baby, a system that needs no
bidding, “Do this,” because all children love to climb fences and play
with buttons and stretch little limbs on the floor, and keep time to
rhythmic music.
[Illustration: The kind of toy Dr. Montessori recommends for physical
development.]
Every Thursday morning a crowd of thirty or forty eager tourists from
all over the world wait with impatience to be admitted to the Montessori
school on the Via Giusti, Rome. Silently, led by a white-robed sister,
they enter the schoolroom and seat themselves in quiet expectant rows to
watch the miracle of Montessori physical freedom. A hush, a tinkle of
child laughter, and the babies flock in from the garden. Noiselessly,
gracefully, with no rude jostling or crowding—and alone—they greet
each visitor with outstretched hands. Then, like a bevy of little men
and women, eager to work, eager to achieve, they hasten to the cabinets
that hold the didactic materials, to choose their material for the day.
Nothing drops, nothing is broken, no child hurts his neighbor in his
haste, and they find their places, some stretched out on the floor, some
seated at the white tables. When the hour for the midday meal comes,
the materials are as carefully put back in their places in the cabinet
and the little ones lay the tables for luncheon. To see a child balance
a tray that holds five filled tumblers, to see another child bring in
a huge bowl of warm soup and serve it with no mishaps, these interest
curious sightseers as much as the Roman Colosseum or the Roman baths.
But isn’t, after all, the child who has come, by natural steps, to this
control of his mind and body the normal child? Are not our children, whom
we feed and dress and lead and fasten into high chairs, the abnormal
ones? It is vastly easier to lace a child’s shoes, to hold his hand when
he goes up and down steps, to fetch and carry for him, than to teach
him this muscular co-ordination, but it is just this careful teaching of
the simple things of life that makes the Montessori child a sight for
tourists.
“What makes these children so good?” I heard a visitor ask her neighbor
one morning as she watched the Via Giusti little ones.
A number of factors contribute to the goodness of the Montessori child,
but one of the most important of these is that he “knows himself.” He
knows his body, what it can do and what it must not do. This physical
freedom leads naturally and surely to freedom of the spirit.
THE FREEING OF OTELLO, THE TERRIBLE
_Montessori Awakening of Conscience Through Directed Will_
He was so wee a _bambino_ to have absorbed so much brutality in his
heart. Not quite three summers and winters old was Otello when his
mother pushed him across the threshold of the big, cool, white room of
the Trionfale Public School at Rome that houses a Montessori Children’s
House. There she left him after a volley of guttural speech that told
the little dark-eyed girl directress how uncontrolled and passionate was
this baby of Rome, a quaint little “man” in stuff dress and bare legs and
torn shoes who looked with stolid wonder into the happy eyes of the other
babies.
At first it seemed as if the mother were right. In an awed whisper to
Dr. Montessori the girl directress spoke of Otello as “the terrible.”
He met love with apparent hate, kindness with malevolence, sociability
with taciturn aloofness. Did little Mario with painstaking effort lay a
carpet of beautifully tinted color spools in careful order on his table;
then Otello swooped down from his watchful corner and with one sweep of
his fat hand wrought confusion in the beauty. Did a stone lie, harmless,
in the school garden; Otello found it and used it with dire results. Did
Valia, the toddler, with much toil fill her small wheelbarrow with a
precious load of sticks ready to trundle it across the playground; Otello
intervened, overturned the barrow, and gloated over Valia’s tears.
From his first day he showed an amazing inventiveness along lines of
disorder. To tear a finished picture that his little girl neighbor had
zealously colored, to swoop down upon the heights of the pink tower whose
perfect building some other baby had just achieved in a patch of sunlight
on the floor and overturn it—these seemed to be Otello’s most joyful
triumphs. And always, as he planned some act of disorder, he looked up,
expectantly, for the blow, the harsh command with which the misdirected
force of childhood is so often met by the brute force of the adult.
But these never came. Instead, he saw a group of sympathetic little
ones run softly across the wide spaces of the room to help Mario in
rearranging his color spools. There was no thought of him, Otello the
law breaker, but only the love of Mario in their hearts. In place of the
reproof that he almost longed for, that he might meet it with rebellion,
he felt the touch of warm lips on his forehead, and he heard the soft
voice of the directress:
“Ah, Otello, that was _wrong_.”
There was no other word of blame, no command, _you must not_, for him to
meet with his marvelous strength of will and, _I shall_. He might choose
the thing that was wrong—or——