child’s mind, or his soul. In fact we need to do less teaching than
watching, less pruning than watering. After observing our little ones’
spontaneous manifestations of love and giving these a chance to increase,
and meeting them with encouragement after conscientiously pointing out
to them the good and the evil of life and insisting that they choose the
good and reject the evil—we discover a miracle. God comes to the little
ones.
Bruno, starved in his mind and starved in his heart, and never having
heard of things of the spirit except in terms of the vilest blasphemy,
found God as naturally as he would find the first gold blossom of the
broom braving winter’s frosts on the Appian Way.
Our own Helen Keller, deaf and dumb and blind, knew God before anything
that her teacher could tell her about Him had pierced the dark wall of
her sleeping senses.
Dr. Montessori asks us to prepare the way for this miracle in our homes.
She says that she would like to suggest to mothers a new beatitude,
“Blessed are those who _feel_;” and we add,
For they find God.
MARIO’S FINGER EYES
_Montessori Sense-Training_
Your little one, Mario, might have been, big eyes instantly glancing a
bit of color, something that moved, something that could be handled or
broken. All his four years he had been fighting his mother, his home,
the world—a one-sided fight, too, for everybody and everything always
triumphed over him in the end. He was so little and so ineffectual to do
battle.
And the times when he had been punished for breaking his mother’s
cherished plates with the pattern of raised roses—plump and red—for
clutching in loving, chubby, grimy hands the soft silk window curtains
or the bright velvet table-cover could not be counted. Yet Mario was
cheerful and uncowed and continued the struggle, the impulse for which
had been born with him, to use his fingers in learning about the world of
_things_.
To check this impulse was the object of everyone who had anything to
do with little Mario. There was his grandmother in a wonderful silk
headdress and a yellow wool shawl, fringed; she would not let Mario
clutch the cap and then feel of the shawl, as his fingers itched to.
There was the old fruit man at the corner near Mario’s house; he shook a
stick at children who handled his round and square measures, his fruits,
and vegetables of so many different shapes. There was always his _madre_,
who pursued Mario from waking to sleeping time, interfering with his
activities.
“Mario, don’t run your fingers along the window ledge; don’t handle the
door latch. You will soil them. You must not play with copper bowls and
pots; they are for cooking, not for little boys.”
As the warfare continued, Mario grew bolder. To be stopped when one is
playing with a fruit measure or a door latch or a bright, red copper
bowl with no malicious designs upon these but only to satisfy a sense of
hunger for knowledge of form, hurt his spirit.
“I _will_,” he announced one day, when his grandmother tried to rescue
her cap from his deft fingering, and he pulled off one of the long,
silken streamers.
“I will _not_,” he further asserted when his mother wished the copper pot
to cook her beans, and when she tried to take it from him forcibly, Mario
stamped and shrieked and struck his _madre_.
The habit of saying “I will” or “I won’t” in situations that demand the
will to decide, “I won’t” or “I will” is an easy habit for a little child
to form and a most dangerous one, morally. It is seldom a self-formed but
a parent-stimulated habit. When his mother put Mario, for reformation and
“to get rid of him,” in The House of the Children at the Trionfale School
in Rome, it was with the assurance:
“He’s a bad little boy. He never does what he ought to; he’s always in
mischief.”
“What should be a little child’s ‘oughts’ the first years of life?
Isn’t what we call getting into mischief, perhaps, the big business of
childhood?” we asked ourselves as we watched Mario in his Montessori
development. So, at least, Mario’s teacher decided.
“Go as you please, do as you wish, play with whatever you like—only be
careful not to hurt the work or the body of any other little one,” were
the words that turned Mario’s struggles to educate himself into a joy
instead of a fight.
Sitting in the light of the Roman sunshine and the smiles of the other
children of the Children’s House, Mario began to do the thing he was born
for in babyhood—he began to _see with his fingers_.
[Illustration: Replacing the solid insets by the sense of touch alone.]
[Illustration: Building the tower and the broad stair.]
I watched him for days, such a blessedly good, chubby, curly-headed
little man that my arms ached to hold him, instead of leaving him free
to trot from one occupation to another, busy, concentrated, educating
himself. Mario’s mother, his wise old grandmother, the canny fruit
seller,—none of them had known how blurred the world looks to the eyes
of a little child. Many mothers are not able to see with the eyes of
a child. We grown-ups who comprehend a beautiful landscape, a lovely
fresco, a piece of miracle machinery, a fragile porcelain vase, a statue,
an immortal pile of architecture instantaneously, analyzing the form
that makes the beauty, never stop to think how we grasp it, mentally.
It is the color and curve of the landscape, the combination of lines
in the fresco, the “feel” and contour of the statue, the “fit” of the
machinery, the design of the vase, the combination of geometric figures
in the building, that make the beauty. The artist, the inventor, the
sculptor, the architect, saturated their finger tips, then their eyes,
and last their brains with a knowledge of line and form before they saw
Fame reaching out her hands to touch theirs. Every little child is born
with a longing to _feel_ line and form, not perhaps for Fame’s, but for
Knowledge’s sake, and we crush the longing when we say “don’t touch.”
Intent, engrossed Mario worked for days until he grew expert in piling,
one upon the other, the graded, rose-colored blocks of the Montessori
Tower. Soon he could erect the tower, blindfolded. Just a fascinating
play it looked, as interesting as is the play of our babies with their
nested picture blocks, but it was play with a purpose. It taught Mario to
_feel_ and then to discriminate, mentally, between objects that differ in
dimension, one from another.
Then came the fun of laying in order the graded blocks of the Montessori
Broad Stair. Building steps, it was, as all home children instinctively
struggle to build steps with their blocks, with dominoes, with pebbles
and rocks of different sizes.
Why do children like to build steps; is it not because they live in a
world of _high_ and _low_, and _higher_ and _lower_ things? We grown-ups
say, “It is a beautiful sky-line, the tall and low buildings rubbing
shoulders,” or “The clouds are banked in a red and gold mass.” How did
we learn the beauty of gradation of form in a city, in nature? Once when
we were as little as Mario we tried to build stairs, we jumped, happily,
from one step to another; we climbed, we learned height and depth by
_feeling_ them. So, Mario learned to see minute variations in the height
of objects through the broad stair.
He spent hours fitting the little wooden cylinders in their places in
their frames. How he had longed to play with the vases and jugs at home,
some tall and some short, some thick and some thin. And how many times
his mother had prevented his digging rows of little holes in the garden
in which to fit, first, a fat thumb, then a slim forefinger; last, a tiny
finger! With the Montessori geometric insets, he could enjoy this hole
play, and, at the same time, learn, through _feeling_, to recognize very
fine differences in height and breadth. One day Mario found a little set
of drawers in the big white material cupboard at the Montessori School.
It made him remember his grandmother’s great shelf of drawers with the
polished brass knobs. In these were hidden fascinating, musty-smelling
wool shawls, silk scarfs, soft embroideries, and stiff, bright ribbons.
Mario’s secret happiness had been to climb upon a stool, clutch a brass
knob, pull, and then delve pink fingers into the sense-feeding horde of
stuffs. He would close his eyes and enjoy the _feel_ of them, but there
was always the rude awakening.
“Naughty Mario—don’t touch.” But now he had these other drawers full of
stuffs to open, to empty, to sort the contents, to crumple the stuffs
in his hands, and then match velvet to velvet, silk to silk, wool to
wool, blindfolded. It hadn’t been shawls and scarfs and embroideries
and ribbons that the little man wanted, but a chance to use his fingers
in learning to recognize the qualities of objects; rough, soft, smooth,
stiff.
Otello brought a great, crimson poppy to the Children’s House one day.
Poppies to the Roman baby are as dandelions to our children, so lavish a
gift of the nature mother as to be of little value after the first bloom
colors the grass. Otello’s impulse was to pull off the already dropping
petals of the flower, but Mario rescued it from the ruthless baby
fingers. Holding the fragile stem between forefinger and chubby thumb,
he ran the other forefinger lightly over the surface of the velvet-soft
petals of the poppy. Then he ran to baby Valia and touched her leaf-soft
cheek with the finger that taught him how like a flower petal in softness
is the flesh of a child.
It was so daily an application of newly-gained knowledge as to be
unnoticed save by a wondering onlooker. It was the mind enrichment
through sense-training denied Mario by his home and offered him by
Montessori.
[Illustration: A fineness of perception is developed by discriminating
different textiles blindfolded.]
The frames for geometric insets enthralled Mario next. To take out of its
place, fit in again, and refit a dozen, twenty times the different sizes
of flat wooden circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, and other forms
kept the little fingers busy and the opening mind concentrated for long
spaces. The wooden insets are large, shining with polish, and easy to
handle because of the brass knob attached to each. As Mario lifted one
out of its place in the form board, he ran his fingers around the edge,
then around the empty place in the board. Soon he could do this with
closed eyes, fitting wooden figures of many different shapes and sizes
correctly in the form board. He matched these forms to corresponding
paper forms mounted on cards and then to outlined forms.
Here was a circle like the top of the red copper bowl, and a smaller
circle like the top of the yellow majolica mug that held his milk in
the morning. Here was a rectangle like the kitchen window at home and
a triangle like the glittering one the band man struck to make music.
Kitchen utensils and home furnishings and the street band are as vastly
interesting to all children as they were to little Mario, interesting
because they are things of color and texture and shape and sound.
One morning Mario showed his teacher one of the rectangular geometric
insets. “The window in the church,” he explained. Then he picked up a
rectangular inset. “This is like the flower-bed in the Gardens,” he
announced.
Your child struggles to educate himself through his senses as did Mario.
You, too, perhaps, not seeing the inspiration in the active little
fingers, say, “He gets into mischief all the time.” It is our privilege
to turn child mischief into education. Instead of taking away from
children the objects which they select for handling, we must study those
objects and substitute for them didactic materials for education of the
tactile sense, the sense of weight, the sense of form and contour.
A little girl whose spirit is so sensitively attuned that a breath,
almost, will snap the too-taut strings was allowed to be present at a
dinner her mother was giving. Through a wearisome round of courses, the
little one sat in her uncomfortable chair, quiet, good, and tracing with
one finger the design of her cut-glass tumbler. Sometimes the blue eyes
closed as she tried to retrace the design in the air or on the table
linen. At last her mother saw what she was doing.
“Leave the table immediately!” she commanded. “You are a very impolite
child.”
She thought that she was a good mother, but the tear-brimming eyes of the
little one, disgraced, hurt, should have mirrored her cruelty. We can’t
allow children to finger cut glass, but we ought to furnish them with a
substitute for sense-training that will remove the necessity.
[Illustration: Perfecting the sense of touch with the geometric insets.]
Our children are born into a world of which they know nothing. They are
discoverers, travelers touching an unknown shore, and the first business
of their new-found life is to adjust themselves to their environment.
Like valiant explorers they plunge into the wilderness in which they
find themselves. We furnish them with food and clothing for the journey,
but we have quite neglected to offer them at the beginning any chart or
compass.
Because of this, the way of a child of two and a half to four years
is a stumbling way in our homes. He is hedged in by a wilderness of
furnishings and bric-à-brac and household appliances and mechanical
devices and different kinds of materials and strange forms and varied
colors. It is the business of being a child to notice and handle and
smell and test and use these different objects, but we continually thwart
him in his attempts to make these social adjustments. In so doing we turn
the child into a militant instead of a discoverer. He must conquer his
wilderness. Prevented from learning through the medium of his senses, he
fights to learn, and we say that he is destructive and wilful and lacking
in thoughtfulness.
Dr. Montessori offers our children in the didactic material for
sense-training a valuable guide for adjusting himself to his environment.
The solid insets, the tower, the broad and long stair teach him through
his own experiment and discovery the qualities which all the objects
in his world possess; height, breadth, length, thickness in all their
combinations and gradations. The color spools give him a chance to
recognize and learn practically all the various tints and shades that
surround him in his colorful world. The geometric insets bring to
him, through his senses of touch and vision, the many and wonderful
combinations of line with line and with curves which constitute the form
of the world. By means of the Montessori textiles and other appliances
for exercising the sense of touch, he learns to detect and discriminate
the most minute gradations of softness and roughness, smoothness and
coarseness. The Montessori sense-training apparatus guides the child on
his spiritual trip through his environment.
It is the guide, however, for the very young child whose senses are
hungry. We are so used to waiting on our one, two, and three-year-old
babies; we are so busy taking out of their hands our own precious
belongings and substituting for them a toy, that the Montessori
idea of guiding children, mentally, from the cradle, is strange to
us. The average five or six-year-old child completes the Montessori
sense-training quickly. What next? we ask.
To be able to, blindfolded, fit a polished wood rectangle in a
corresponding rectangular frame is, to the minds of some of us, the
climax of a Montessori exercise. To Montessori herself it is only the
beginning of education in form; we must help the child to see, feel,
recognize form in various combinations; to draw, to love as pure form
in the world about him as he has learned with this geometric inset.
The Montessori sense-training appliances should be used as the genetic
psychologist uses his various instruments and mental tests. They are
to arouse and awake into activity habits of quick perception, keen
appreciation, and constructive invention.
The greatest thing we can do for a child is to so educate it that it
_knows its environment_ and can _adjust itself to social conditions_.
We do this when we teach our children to see, to hear, to touch
intelligently. The lure of the senses is a spiritual spell in childhood.
If we catch it, then, and turn it into channels of knowledge, we may
develop a Marconi, conqueror of space; a Rodin, conqueror of form; a
Burbank, conqueror of life—a Carrel, conqueror of death. At least we
will have developed an observer who knows how to use his senses in the
practical living of life.
RAFFAELO’S HUNGER
_Color Teaching. Its Value_
Raffaelo’s grandfather had been a shepherd in the Roman hills, not so
much because he liked to tend the dull, white creatures, but on account
of the blue roof beneath which he sat all day and the carpet of green
splashed with poppy crimson and primrose gold and lupin blue that lay at
his feet, and the sunset that he waited for every night. It was never the
same, that sunset; like a beautiful Roman ribbon it spread itself before
his eyes, and he would rather see it than go home to eat.
Tucked under his long, wool cloak, he carried a pigment-daubed palette
and a patch of canvas. As the lambs and their mothers grazed, he watched,
hungrily, for picture stuff: a bright yellow cart taking its slow way
along the white dust of the Via Appia, the flower girl walking in to
Rome with her arms full of roses, the gold edges of a distant wheat
field—these fed his soul and satisfied his hunger.
Because the State was blind and thought that to fight is more vital than
to paint beautiful pictures, the grandfather of Raffaelo was forced into
the Italian army. The day that they substituted a gun for his crook and
threw away his palette, they killed his soul. The grandfather of Raffaelo
made a very poor soldier, indeed. The little boy that he left at home
on the Campagna grew up, and was a poor soldier, too; and when he had
finished military service he married and went to live in a tenement in
Rome, and in due time little Raffaelo was born.
It was all quite commonplace, and like the story of many other families.
But it had, too, its element of the unusual. With those long-ago,
shepherding days on the Roman Campagna, a gnawing hunger had begun. It
wasn’t a body hunger, but a hunger of the spirit. It killed the body
of the grandfather of Raffaelo—spirit hunger is more destructive than
a hunger for bread. Down through the years it took its gnawing way. It
killed the youth in the father of Raffaelo and it took possession of him
in the gray streets of the city and stifled his manhood.
Then the hunger pierced the spirit of little Raffaelo, and that was where
it stopped—a cruel, unsatiated thing. With the gathered strength of all
those years, it starved the baby.
He couldn’t have explained in words just what he was hungry for. In fact
he couldn’t explain anything very well, being not quite three years old.
Only, he was continually unsatisfied when he looked at the ugliness of
the dull walls of his home, and when his mother took him along the hard,
gray streets of the city he tugged and pulled at her hand whenever he
passed a corner flower stand, or a cart piled high with a mass of colored
vegetables.
Raffaelo was beauty hungry, as his father had been and his grandfather.
And no one knew it; and no one would have cared if they had known.
No one?
Little Raffaelo trudged across the court one morning to the Children’s
House in the Scuola Famagosta, near which he lived, and there found a
kind welcome and a happy, busy community of children like himself. Neat,
in his clean apron, and with big, questioning eyes, he sat apart from
the others in one corner of the room, watching. Certain of the children
were writing big, plain script on the blackboard; others sat quietly
reading to themselves from big picture books. Raffaelo’s glance shifted
from these to a child who stood near him, working at a low table. What
had he brought from the white shelves in that big wooden box? Raffaelo
wondered. Why was he turning the box over? But the table was suddenly
covered with a mass of color, such as only the Romans know how to dye.
From the box came reel upon reel of ravishingly colored silks, every
color that tints sky and field and garden—crimson, orange, lemon, the
deep green of the grass, and the gray green of the olive leaf; the blue
that makes wild iris and children’s eyes, the purple of grapes when the
sun shines on the vineyards. If Raffaelo could have counted, he would
have known that there were sixty-four of these flat, white wooden spools,
wound with eight colors and eight of each color, showing almost all the
grading of color that makes this old earth of ours so lovely.
[Illustration: To match the colors two by two is the first exercise.]
The colors trickled like a life-giving stream into Raffaelo’s starved
senses. He reached for the color spools, snatching a great fistful away
from the other child.
“_Mio; mio!_ Me; me!” he cried.
They _were_ his. Some of us steal bread when we are hungry. Some of us
steal love when we are famished for it. Children steal because we or the
world have starved them of something which they crave for their natural,
best development of body, mind, or soul. The habitual public school
teacher, the average mother of to-day, would have said:
“Give those colors back. It’s wicked to take something that is not yours!”
The directress of this Montessori school, in which teaching and mothering
are practiced in new ways, watched Raffaelo for a moment, asking herself:
“Why does this child steal? Is he blind to law because his need is so
great?”
Then she crossed to Raffaelo, bringing with her a handful of color
spools—two red, two blue, two yellow.
“These are yours,” she said. “Will you give your little neighbor’s colors
back to him, because it was not right to take them? When you have
carried to him every one of the spools, return to me and I will tell you
about _your_ colors.”
Happily, Raffaelo did as he was told, receiving his first lesson in
ethics before he had his first color lesson. Returning, he stood,
wide-eyed and fascinated, beside the directress as she held out to him
two of the color spools.
“This is _red_,” she explained, laying the red spool on the white table
in front of him, and waiting a moment or two, that he might make the
mental association between the name of the color and the color itself.
Then she showed him a blue wound spool.
“This is _blue_,” she said, laying his spool at the opposite side of
the table from the red one, and again waiting for Raffaelo to make the
association of name and color. Taking the next step in this Montessori
teaching, she pointed to the red wound spool, and asked:
“What is this, Raffaelo?”
“Red,” he laughed back.
“And this?” pointing to the other one.
“Blue!” Raffaelo almost shouted in his delight at acquiring knowledge.
Then came the last step in Raffaelo’s lesson. Holding out the remaining
tablets in the palm of her hand, the directress said:
“Show me red, Raffaelo. And show me blue.”
With no mistake, the little color lover selected the red, the blue, and
placed each on his table, matching them to the corresponding spools.
“These are yellow,” the directress explained to him, giving him the two
remaining spools. Then she left him, having given him the food for clear,
colorful thought for which two generations of thwarted painters had made
him long.
All the morning Raffaelo played with his six color spools, gathering them
together into a pile, handling them, holding them up to the light, that
he might watch the play of sunshine and shade upon their beauty, pairing
them upon his table, repeating to himself: “Red, blue, yellow!” Sometimes
he watched his small neighbor, who had grown very expert in color lore
and could name all the colors and lay the spools in chromatic order on
his table, eight rows headed, severally, by black, red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, violet, and brown, and each row containing eight gradations
of its color.