to Otello, a morning when the free breezes from the Roman hills brought
heavy odors of grape and orange blooms and the birds sang their freedom
outside the windows of the Trionfale Children’s House. Otello sat in
a little white chair in front of a little white table, suddenly quiet
and thinking. He saw, all about him, other little white chairs and low
white tables. If he wished he might choose another chair; no one would
insist that he stay in one seat. The brown linen curtains at the windows
rustled pleasantly with the perfume-laden wind. If Otello wished he
might go out in the playground for a breath of that wind. No one would
prevent him. In front of him he saw another large room with a piano and
low white cabinets filled with fascinating Montessori materials, and
colored rugs for spreading on the stone floor, and many babies, of his
own kind, sitting there busily at work. A child might dash over and spoil
the work of a dozen children at one attack. Or a child might do a little
experimenting himself with these materials that so engrossed the others.
Otello chose the latter course, and going to one of the cabinets, he
selected one of the solid insets, a long polished wood frame, into which
fit ten fascinatingly smooth cylinders of varying diameters. Holding
the cylinders by their shining brass knobs, he put them in their proper
places in the frame, took them out, put them in again a dozen, a score of
times. Unconsciously he was training his sense of touch, but more than
this, he was exercising his conscience in a new way. A small cylinder
refused to fit in a large hole in the frame; a large cylinder could
not be forced, no matter how strenuously he hammered it with his little
clenched fist, into a small hole. Before Otello put each cylinder in its
proper place, he tested it with a larger or smaller hole.
“Wrong!” he whispered to himself in the first instance; and,
“Right!” he ejaculated when the good, smooth little piece of wood dropped
out of sight in its own hole.
After almost three-quarters of an hour of this will training, for the
little child who persists in a piece of work and completes it is taking
the first steps toward properly directed _will_, Otello looked up from
his work. Mario, his neighbor, bent over the color spools again. From the
pocket of Mario’s apron protruded one of the crown jewels of childhood—a
big glass marble. Otello had no marble. With all the longing of his
heart he had wanted one. Mario bent lower over his color matching and
the shining glass sphere, as if it were alive, slipped from his pocket,
dropped to the floor, and rolled across to Otello.
With quick stealthiness Otello grasped it in his eager little fingers. It
was _his_ marble now; no one had seen him take it; in his little brown
palm it held and scintillated a hundred colors. How happy it made him to
own it; he would slip it into the hole in his shoe to keep it safe until
he reached home! But, even as he made a hurried movement to hide his
booty, his prisoned soul burst its cocoon. With one of the rare smiles
in his eyes that one sees in the undying children of Raphael, Otello ran
over to Mario and dropped the marble in his lap.
Otello had taught himself the right and he had made the right his happy
choice.
The old way of helping Otello, of helping _your_ child to right action
and self-education, was to command. Yesterday, we said:
“You must do this because I tell you to; this is right because I say that
it is.”
Dr. Montessori gives us a new, a better way of educating little children.
Before we present her didactic materials to a child, before—even—he
leaves his cradle and his mother’s arms, we will give the child his
birthright of freedom; physical freedom, mental freedom, moral freedom.
The place of the mother in education, Dr. Montessori tells us, is that
of the “watcher on the mountain top.” She observes every action of the
child, helps him to see the difference between right and wrong, but she
leaves him _free_, that he may train his own will, make his own choice,
educate himself.
How can we help our children to the goodness that little Otello has
found? What had he missed at home that was supplied to him in the
Children’s House?
The root that is denied space by its earth mother to stretch and pull and
reach does not grow into a tall, straight tree. The bud, shut off from
its birthright of sunshine and moisture, does not unfold into perfect
flowering. The child who is choked at home by an artificial environment
and chained by the commands of his parents will develop into a crooked,
blasted man. Dr. Montessori told me that her first word to American
mothers is this:—
“Free your children.”
Every child is born with an unlimited capacity for good. His impulse is
to do the good thing, but we so hedge him about with objects which he
must not touch and places which he must not explore and inaccuracies of
speech which confuse his understanding, that he rebels. With the force
of a giant, the baby uses his will to break _our_ will. This is right;
he was born as free as air, and we act as his jailers. Presently, his
thwarted will finds other outlets, and we are confronted with a little
Otello.
We have thought that to “break” a child’s will was the first step toward
giving him self-control. We say to a child:
“Don’t be capricious!”
“Don’t tell lies!”
He is capricious because we have so often interfered with his normal
child activities, because they made him dirty, perhaps, or caused a
litter that we thought disorderly. He lies because we have not explained
his world to him, or because he fears us. Seldom is a child capricious or
untruthful unless we have made him so.
The Montessori directress at the Trionfale Children’s House, first of
all, patiently observed Otello. At the end of a week’s time she knew more
about him than his mother did, for she had recorded his height, weight,
chest, and cranial development and had discovered that he needed physical
exercise to help his mental development. We will watch _our_ children’s
bodily growth more carefully than we have in the past if we are to be
Montessori mothers.
She never commanded the little fellow whose ears were so deafened
with the many commands of his mother that he found it a psychological
impossibility to obey. Instead she had faith that his new environment,
her careful pointing out of right and wrong, and the ordered activities
brought about by the Montessori didactic materials would loose his
spirit, which had been like a butterfly stabbed by the pin of a scientist.
So we will be patient with our babies and watch them and wait expectantly
for the unfolding of their minds and souls which will surely come if we
supply the opportunity.
Dr. Montessori gives us a new word for the home and she blots out an old
one.
“Why?” is our new word. We will observe the minutest activity of the
home child from its first month to the time when it leaves the home for
school, asking ourselves the reason for each activity.
“Don’t!” is our blotted-out word. No activity of a child should be
inhibited unless it is morally _wrong_.
From babyhood to the age of six years almost every free movement, every
free thought of the child has a meaning in relation to its bodily and
mental growth. If we suffocate children’s activities, we suffocate their
lives. The good child is not the quiet, inactive child. The perfect child
is not the child who is nearest like man.
The only way to keep a child still is to teach him orderly movement. The
only way to keep him from handling our things is to give him educational
things of his own to handle.
It is a more fascinating home occupation than any which you ever
attempted, this Montessori way of observing your child. He is your own
life flower, a bud, now, but with the power of sure, beautiful unfolding
into bloom. Your part is to watch the process of this unfolding, and to
surround the child plant with light and nourishment and _freedom_ for
growth.
You thoughtlessly say, “Don’t sit on the floor and play; you will soil
your clothes.”
“Walk faster and keep up with my footsteps or I will not take you out
with me to-morrow.”
Dr. Montessori tells us that the limbs of the little child are very
short in comparison with his torso and tire quickly from holding up his
body weight. If his legs are to grow straight and strong he must follow
his own inclination and sit and lie on the floor when he plays; he must
not be required to keep up with our longer stride in walking. We were
thoughtless when we commanded _don’t_. Dr. Montessori shows us the _why_.
These actions of the child were wrong only from our standpoint. We have
to cleanse soiled clothes; we think that we have no time to walk slowly.
But in the Children’s Houses no child is ever required to stay in his
small white chair or to keep his work on his low table. He is free to
work on the floor in any position which makes him physically comfortable
and soft rugs are provided for this purpose. No Montessori child is
commanded to stay in line and “keep up” when the piano gives the signal
for a march or one of the gay Italian dance steps. Otello and Mario and
Piccola, the babies, drop out for a few seconds, seating themselves for
a space of rest, and when their fat legs are ready for more muscular
exertion, they again join the other children.
But this freedom will make my child fickle, lacking in concentration, you
say.
On the contrary, it leads to concentration. The Montessori-trained child
who has never been prevented from doing a thing unless it was wrong and
who has been allowed to carry on any activity which it chooses; free play
with outdoor toys, the Montessori physical exercises, sense-training,
drawing, suddenly arrives, at five or six years at a most unusual
amount of concentration. From a free choice of occupations that lead to
the exercise of the muscles and the senses, the minds of these little
children order themselves, and the children are able to concentrate on
one line of thought for long periods.
In the Children’s House of one of the Model Tenements in Rome, I saw a
little girl come quietly in at nine o’clock, button on her apron, and
seat herself with a book. She read, happily, for three-quarters of an
hour, hardly lifting her eyes from the pages, although twenty-five other
little ones were carrying on almost as many different occupations all
about her. At the end of this time, she closed her book, crossed to the
blackboard, looked out of the window a moment, and wrote in a clear hand
the following childish idyl to the day:
“The sun shines,” it began. “I smell the orange flowers and the sky is
blue and I hear birds singing. I am happy because it is a pleasant day.”
Do we find such concentration in our children whom we teach according
to rule and in masses? We have thought that to educate was to formulate
a great many rules and make our little ones follow them, but our new
Montessori ideal is a very different matter—that of leaving Life free to
develop and to unfold.
The American child has the strongest will, his gift from a vital
heredity, of any child in the world. His father and his mother have,
also, this splendidly forceful inherited will. Parent and child tilt
and bout in a daily fight, and if the parent comes out triumphant and
succeeds in breaking the child’s will there is a deadly wrong done. That
is why our reform schools and prisons are so full of strong wills, beyond
bending.
We must let our little ones blaze their own trails, provided, of course,
that they are trails which lead in the right direction. We must, also,
let them make their own decisions, and if occasionally they prove to
have been wrong, the experience will have helped them to decide wisely
the next time. We will, also, put into their hands the self-corrective
didactic apparatus of Montessori, which has a distinct ethical value in
the training of the human will.
Education to be vivid and permanent in the child’s life should be worked
out along lines of experience. To say to a child, “Don’t do that; it
isn’t right,” is to make a very inadequate appeal to one, only, of his
senses, that of hearing. To put into the child’s hands the blocks of the
Montessori tower so carefully graded in dimension that it takes exquisite
differentiation to pile them is to give him a chance to learn through
experience the difference between right and wrong by means of three
senses. He hears a possible direction as to their use, he touches them,
he sees the perfectly completed tower. In like manner the broad and long
stair, the solid and geometric insets, all contribute their quota to the
sum of the child’s perfectly directed will control.
The average home is full of mediums for helping a little child to
develop along lines of willed control. To concentrate upon a bit of
constructive play until it is finished, to learn orderliness in putting
away playthings, or to do some simple home duty that will be carried over
from day to day, all are important willed activities. To do whatever is
in hand, building or drawing or picking up toys, or bathing or caring for
a doll or a pet, or helping mother as well as possible, is, also, very
vital will-training.
Dr. Montessori helps us to a hopeful outlook on the subject of child
will. Our Otellos are not, after all, terrible. The child who is most
difficult to manage is, with Montessori training, the child who turns out
to be best able to manage himself.
THE CHRIST IN BRUNO
_About the New Spiritual Sense_
When Bruno was a little fellow, his mother and father were killed in the
Messina earthquake.
Because he was one of so many left-behind babies, he was quite neglected,
and he grew up to four years as a weed grows. Sometimes one _madre_ of
the tenement mothered him, sometimes not. At times he was fed, at other
times he starved. Because of the great fear that came to him with the
blinding smoke and the twisting red river of molten lava and the death
cry of his girl mother that day of the earthquake, Bruno’s mind seemed
a bit dulled. He was often confused by the commands of people who tried
to take care of him and so could not obey. Then they would strike him.
And he heard very vile language spoken and he saw very evil things done
during his babyhood in the tenement.
When Bruno wandered across the threshold of the Via Giusti Children’s
House in Rome, he seemed like a little alien among the other happy
little ones who were so carefully watched over, so gently led. For days
he sat in silence, his great, frightened blue eyes watching to help him
dodge the blow that he expected but never felt; his lips ready to imitate
the vile speech that he had known before, but which he never heard here.
His timid fingers fumbled with the big pink and blue letters that the
other children used in making long sentences on the floor; they tried to
button, to lace, to match colors, but not very effectually. It was as if
the great fear of his babyhood had shadowed his whole mental life and
left him powerless.
One morning Bruno’s dulled blue eyes glimpsed an unusual stir among the
children. A new little one had come and, full of disorderly impulses, had
snatched at the varicolored carpet of carefully arranged color spools
Piccola had placed on her table, scattering them to the floor. Red,
green, orange, yellow, Piccola’s painstaking work of an hour lay in a
great, colored, mixed-up heap. Piccola’s eyes, still pools that reflected
all the hazel tints of fall woods, grew blurred with tears. She dropped
her curly head in her arms and sobbed, big, gulping sobs that wouldn’t
stop, that strangled her. Bruno, watching her, found his muscles. He ran
to her, putting one kind little arm around her waist, and with the other
drew her head down to the shoulder of his little ragged blue blouse and
smoothed her hair, talking sweet, liquid nonsense all the time that made
Piccola’s sobs grow less and less, and comforted her. When she smiled and
drew away to watch the group of children who had hurried to pick up her
colors for her, Bruno slipped back to his corner and the old, dull look
settled back in his face.
“The little man has the conscience sense. He shall have a chance to use
it,” thought the Montessori directress who had been watching the scene.
And because she wanted his soul to grow strong, even if his timid fingers
couldn’t, she often stopped by Bruno’s chair to hold his hand, kindly,
for a minute in hers, or just bent over him, smiling straight down into
his face.
“No one will hurt this little man of ours. He loves us and we love him,”
she assured Bruno over and over, until one day her patience reaped the
prize of Bruno’s answering smile and she felt his two hungry little arms
clasping her.
She strengthened his beginning friendship with Piccola, the
color-loving, reckless, daring little maid, whom all the children loved
to love and loved to fight. When Piccola brought an unusual treat in her
luncheon basket, a leaf-wrapped packet of dried grapes or two luscious
figs instead of one, the directress suggested that she share with Bruno,
who had no one to tuck a surprise in his basket. As the two child faces
drew close above the feast and the little hands fluttered together over
this friendly breaking of bread, Bruno’s eyes sparkled. He was reading
his first lines in the primer of love; he was finding his sight. And in
return Bruno helped Piccola to rake leaves in the garden, he unrolled
and carefully spread upon the floor the rug upon which Piccola wished to
curl herself and sort letters; he hastened to add his strength to hers
when the drawer that held the letters stuck; he fought Piccola’s street
battles for her.
Soon Bruno’s loving busy-ness so increased that he found things to do
almost every second of his happy days in the Children’s House. No longer
the little cowering, cringing, inactive child of a few weeks past, he was
an alert little man whom I instantly watched, because his activity was so
unusual. When the line of children, two by two and clasping hands, in
their pretty custom of welcoming visitors to the Via Giusti Children’s
House, tumbled in each morning, Bruno always headed the line. He held
by the hand the smallest, newest, or the most timid child, dragging it
in his eagerness to teach it to shake hands and say good-day. He would
“hold up” the line because he had so much to say in his welcome to the
strangers who had come to spend the morning with the little ones.
“See our Signorina; is she not _kind_?
“This is our room; do you like it?
“There is Margherita; she _writes_!
“This is Piccola, who reads!”
In breathless sentences, Bruno’s heart interest worded itself. Then,
as the others settled themselves for the day’s work, Bruno began his
day of service. He was the Loving One, the Helping One, the Comforting
One of the Via Giusti Children’s House. Was any child left without a
glass of water at the luncheon hour, Bruno fetched it. Did the little
girl waitress for the day forget to fill a soup plate from her tureen,
Bruno reminded her. If the three-year-old started home with his cloak
unbuttoned, Bruno, feeling in his tender little heart the chill wind of
the Roman hills, buttoned the cloak for the baby. If a toddler tumbled
down, Bruno picked it up and examined it for bumps, and started it safely
on its way again. He fetched and carried, watched for chances to help, to
champion the weak, to wipe away anybody’s tears with the hem of his apron.
The seat he most often chose was under a cast of the Madonna. Sometimes
he sat quiet for long spaces, looking at it. “Bruno calls the Madonna his
_madre_,” whispered Piccola one day.
“Who is that big, homely child?” asked a visitor, pointing to Bruno
putting fresh water in a bowl of roses that stood under the cast. “Isn’t
he older than the other children?”
“Older—yes, in spirit,” answered the far-seeing directress. “He is our
little Christ-child.”
So he is _our_ little Christ-child. Wherever there is a child in a
home, Dr. Montessori tells us, there Christ is. She discovers for us a
new sense, the “conscience sense,” only waiting for an opportunity to
exercise itself and, in the exercising, unfold and bloom and ripen into
the fruits of the spirit. If being an orphan and hungry and beaten
and knowing vile things couldn’t hurt the soul of Bruno, think of the
possibility of Christ in _your_ baby.
Children grow, mentally, through the right exercise of the senses. To
see and to be able to distinguish between beautiful colors and beautiful
forms; to discriminate between sounds that are discordant and sounds that
are harmonious; to know rough things and smooth things, round things and
square things, velvet things and linen things, by touching them with the
finger tips, this we know is a starting point on the road of the three
R’s of everyday education. Dr. Montessori guides us a lap farther in
the new education. She sees, born with every child, eyes of the spirit
and slender, groping fingers of the soul that look and reach for the
good. To help a child to use his spirit eyes and his soul fingers means
to give him a chance to exercise his conscience. It is a new sort of
sense-training that means his finding the three R’s of the life of the
spirit: faith, hope, and charity.
How shall we help a child to exercise and train his _conscience sense_?
Dr. Montessori tells us that if we but watch a little child’s free,
spontaneous use of his soul fingers, his daily loves and hopes and
faith, these will shine for us as a Bethlehem star-path leading us to
the manger-throne of a King-in-the-making. As we are turning a child’s
tendency to _handle_ into mind-training, we will turn his manifestations
of inner sensibility into morality.
It is quite ineffectual to say to a child:
“You must love your neighbor.”
Of course he will try to do the thing that we ask of him because he is a
very kind little person, ready to put up with the inconsistencies of his
elders and willing to try to obey; but it will be a makeshift sort of
love, not free and a flowering of the child’s own heart, but built upon
what we tell him about love. This makes of children little puppets.
Dr. Montessori says: “Watch _how_ children love and _what_ they love.”
You know _how_ your child loves—with the thoughtless abandon of pure
passion. That he interferes with your important occupation, crumples your
immaculateness, has a soiled face and sticky fingers when he kisses you,
do not enter into his thoughts. That anything should interfere with his
caresses would wound his heart. If you were disfigured or maimed, he
would still vision you as the beautiful mother whom baby eyes see only
with the eyes of adoration.
Is this a love that we can teach?
You know _what_ your child loves. There was the ugly yellow puppy with
muddy feet that stained your new rug; don’t you remember how the Little
Chap sobbed so long, and then woke up in the night crying, the day you
sent away the yellow puppy? He loved, too, the dirty rag doll that you
burned and the broken toy that you threw away, and that little street
gamin of a newsboy who stands at the corner in all kinds of weather. He
doesn’t love ceremony and money and the opinions of other people as we
do. The Little Chap goes out into the highways and byways for his stuff
of love. And he doesn’t care if the thing he loves is ugly, or old, or
halt, or lame, because he sees, with his soul eyes, behind the veil of
appearances to the _real of it_.
Your child is born with faith and hope, too. If you tell him that the
moon is made of green cheese and that a stork dropped him down the
chimney, he believes you, and when he grows up and catches you in the
lies, he has one less peg in his moral inner room to pin his faith in the
divine to. If you tell him that you will take him to the circus, and then
let your bridge party interfere with that promise, the Little Chap is
going to be less hopeful that God will keep His promises, for you stand
for the divine in the Little Chap’s beginnings of spirituality.
Dr. Montessori says that we often crush the child’s conscience sense
by not giving him an opportunity to exercise it as he is led to,
instinctively. We must let our children, in their baby days, love _as_
they wish and _what_ they wish. We must be quite careful to give them
true conceptions of the strange world in which they find themselves, and
we must make only good promises to children and use much vigilance in
keeping those promises.
Dr. Montessori sets another guidepost for us in the star-path by which
our children will travel across the desert of unbelief to the manger
where God, incarnate, lies. She tells us that, as the Ten Commandments
were a very simple set of laws for the Israelites, and John, in his
preaching of simplicity, paved the way for Christ, so the first
religious teaching of the little child should have this same quality of
directness.
_The child’s first religious training will consist in a discrimination
between good and evil._
“It was good of you to share your sweets with sister. When you ate your
chocolate, alone, yesterday, I was sorry, because it was selfish.”
“It was thoughtful of you to fetch grandfather’s cane for him. Some
little boys would not have been so kind.”
“You must not scream and kick when you are angry. It is wrong!”
We might say in contrast; we do, ordinarily, say:
“You must share because I wish you to.”
“You must be kind because the world likes gentlemen.”
“You mustn’t scream and kick, because you give me a headache and mar my
furniture.”
Such commands are quite ineffectual, because they call the child’s
attention to us and not to his own acts. But patiently and effectually
to see that the Little Chap knows the difference between good and evil
and practices good instead of evil—this gives him a chance to train and
strengthen his conscience sense and forms the beginnings of his moral
life.
“But how shall I give my child an idea of God?” thousands of thinking
parents object.
It isn’t necessary to give the idea of God to your child. Dr. Montessori
tells us that _every child has it_.