care of their bodies. They wash their faces and hands, brush their hair,
clean their finger nails, black their shoes, put on and take off their
aprons. The dressing frames that are included in the Montessori didactic
materials include all the different fastenings of a child’s clothing;
buttoning on red flannel, buttoning on leather, buttoning on drill with
tapes, lacing on cloth and on leather, fastening hooks and eyes and
snaps, and tying bow knots.
It is quite amazing to see the eagerness with which the Montessori
children attack these very universal activities of everyday life. The
skill they obtain in them proves the truth of Dr. Montessori’s words:
“We habitually _serve_ children. This is not only an act of servility
toward them, but it is dangerous because it tends to suffocate their
useful, spontaneous activity. We are inclined to believe that children
are like puppets, and we wash them and feed them as if they were dolls.
We do not stop to think that the child who does not do, does not know
how to do.
“Our duty toward children is, in every case, that of helping them to
make a conquest of such _useful_ acts as nature intended man to perform
for himself. The mother who feeds her child without making the slightest
effort to teach him to hold and use a spoon for himself is not a good
mother. She offends the fundamental, human dignity of her son,—she treats
him as if he were a doll. Instead, he is a _man_, confided for a time by
nature to her care.”
There are certain phases of the Montessori method which a mother
cannot apply in her home because she has not the preliminary training
and the necessary teaching skill. There is not a single activity of
the Montessori training for personal and community usefulness of the
individual as carried out in the Montessori school that may not be
practiced in any home. The Montessori schoolroom is a working duplicate
of the best conditions which should exist in every home where there is a
baby. It is significant that nations have been aroused by the education
miracles wrought in the Roman Children’s Houses. What, pray, is the
matter with the American children’s houses?
The home is a big workshop for turning out child cosmopolites, small
world citizens who will grow up into useful men and women. In the home
the child may learn how to care for his body, how to care for pets,
plants, and all the _things_ that combine to fill the tool box of
everyday living. Here the child may learn that consideration for others
which will help him to be kind, quiet, unselfish, and polite. Here, also,
he may take a small part in the care of the big human family in preparing
food, laying the table, learning household cleanliness and household
order. The child instinct to fetch and carry, which shows itself very
early in the life of the baby, may be turned into channels of usefulness
if the child is taught to happily wait on himself and others.
Much emphasis has been laid upon the didactic apparatus of Montessori
which has for its aim the development of the several intellectual
processes. Considering these appliances for direct stimulation and
perfection of mental activity only, the casual student of Montessori
says that the system is barren, that it takes into account none of the
emotional activities of the child, that it eliminates educational play
from the life of the little one.
As a matter of fact, the play instincts of the child are so carefully met
by Dr. Montessori that they blossom into usefulness. Dr. Montessori knows
more about the spontaneous play of the child from two and a half years
to six than we do. She sees that his play instincts are all, at first, a
struggling to be like his elders, to do the same utilitarian things that
he sees them do, to imitate on a child plane the work of his mother in
the home or his father in the industrial world. With this understanding
of the possibilities of child play for developing into future usefulness,
Dr. Montessori supplies children with those tools of play which turn
child play into exercises of helpfulness.
In the Trionfale School at Rome the free play of the children has been
especially safeguarded. The toddlers utilize their instinct to fetch and
carry objects by loading, trundling, and unloading the specially built,
stout little wheelbarrows provided for them. Very soon this play blossoms
into the desire to fetch and carry with some more useful object in view.
The children begin to show great skill in removing and replacing their
materials from the school cupboards and putting them back in an orderly
fashion. They attain perfect muscular control in laying the tables for
luncheon and serving the food daintily. In one corner of a sunlit room at
Trionfale there is a fascinating little _salon_. Soft rugs of small size,
diminutive green wicker easy-chairs, sofa, and round tea table, books
of colored pictures and large dolls’ dishes make it possible for the
children to “play house” under ideal conditions. They learn through their
play a sweet kind of hospitality, and the little school “drawing-room” of
Montessori stands for a necessary development of the social instinct in
children which is important.
Dr. Montessori suggests to us those playthings and play activities which
will lead our children into the art of being helpful and, which is much
more vital, will start in them habits of wanting to be helpful. Her
scheme of play is possible of adapting to almost any home, and it has for
its basis the instinctive longing of every child to be useful through his
play.
A playroom should be a place, as Dr. Montessori expresses it, where the
children may amuse themselves with games, stories, possibly music, and
the furnishing should be done with as much taste as in the sitting-room
of the adult members of the family. Small tables, a sofa, and armchairs
of child size, one or two casts, copies of masterpieces of art, and vases
or bowls in which the children may arrange flowers should be included.
There should be many picture books, blocks, dolls, and, if possible, a
musical instrument of some kind in the nursery. Dr. Montessori suggests a
piano or harp of small dimensions. An important playroom accessory is a
low cupboard, with drawers in which the children may keep their completed
drawings, paper dolls, scrap pictures, and any precious collection of
outside material such as seeds, leaves, twigs, or pebbles which they
long to keep and use in their play. Half of this cupboard should consist
of shelves for bowls, plates, napkins, doilies, spoons, knives, forks,
a tray and tumblers for the children to use in preparing and serving
their luncheon or in entertaining their friends. Stout pottery of quaint
shapes and exquisite gay coloring may be obtained now. It is much more
attractive to the child of three and four years than inadequate, tiny
sets of dolls’ dishes. At least the necessary bowl, plate, pitcher, and
mug for serving the nursery supper should be supplied and the toddler
taught to serve and feed himself at a very early age.
The child should have a little broom and dustpan and scrubbing brush. He
should have a low, painted washstand with a basin, soap, and nail-brush.
He should be taught how to turn on and off a water tap, filling a small
pitcher, pail, or basin, and carrying it, full, without spilling. He
should have low hooks for hanging his clothing for outdoor wear. Both
small boys and girls should have bright little aprons, not so much for
purposes of cleanliness, although this is important, as to inspire them
to the feeling that work is dignified and needs to be set apart by a
uniform of service.
Dr. Montessori urges that those toys which we buy be selected having in
mind helping the child to be an actor in a little drama of home life. A
plaything, she feels, should be a work thing, capable of bringing a life
activity down to the primitive plane of the child’s thinking.
Our toy shops offer us now a very wide variety of such educational toys
from which to choose. We may find large dolls, modeled from life, and
wearing clothes similar to children and requiring the same muscular
co-ordination in fastening and unfastening. There is large furniture for
these dolls, built on good lines and teaching a little girl to make a bed
neatly and keep the doll’s bureau drawers in order. There are good-sized
washing sets, including tubs, basket, lines, clothespins, ironing board,
and sad irons; we find very complete dolls’ houses, sewing materials
with dolls’ patterns and small sewing machines, kitchens where the child
can pretend to cook, complete sets of cooking utensils, and lifelike toy
animals.
These toys Dr. Montessori urges us to use, realizing that the child’s
deepest play impulse is to dramatize in the theater of the home playroom
the everyday utilitarian occupations of the race.
MARIO’S PLAYS
_Montessori and the Child’s Imagination_
Mario played a great deal, and I noticed, as I watched him critically,
that his play was of a very strongly imaginative kind.
He was one of the youngest of the little ones at the Trionfale Children’s
House, and it had taken him a rather longer time than it had the other
children to gain control of his impulsive hands, his little truant feet,
his vagrant-tending mind. During this first period of his Montessori
schooling, when his attention was scattering and he found difficulty in
making muscular co-ordination and differentiating form and color clearly,
he seemed also to have difficulty in amusing himself. His play impulses
at this time seemed to be very primitive; he took pleasure in idling in
some sunny spot, kitten-like, or he arranged and rearranged the pieces of
wicker furniture which filled the _salon_ corner of the schoolroom, or
he found entertainment in interfering with the work of the other little
ones. There seemed to be no element of creativeness or originality in his
play.
Presently, however, Mario began to show a steady intellectual development
in his work. Through the physical exercises of Montessori, through
the rhythmic exercises carried on with music and through exercises of
usefulness in keeping himself and the room neat and waiting upon others,
he learned an important lesson of muscular co-ordination.
He learned to make his body respond to the command of his brain.
Through the sense exercises in recognizing fine differentiations of
color and form and weight and sound and texture, Mario found a clear
mental vision. A month before, the hill back of the school had been a
blur to his mental vision. Now it was, for him, a clear percept made up
of various component parts. He saw it tall, broad, steep, colored in
varying tints of green and brown; its outlines were broken for him by the
sunshine, the gardens, the red and yellow tiled houses; he could almost
smell the sweet perfume from its orchards and vineyards.
The sense-training of the Montessori system had quickened and clarified
the little boy’s perceptive faculties.
Following side by side with Mario’s new mental development came as marked
a development in his play. His play impulses were no longer scattering
but had objectivity. He was, in fancy, a steam engine puffing along or
the little father of a group of other children.
As he swung himself over the parallel bars in the school yard he felt
that he was a famous acrobat entertaining an applauding audience. In a
second he slipped into another path of fancy; as he piled stones into
a pyramid, he was a great builder. More than this, Mario’s newly-found
play impulses carried him into a unique plane of idealism. Crouched in a
sunny corner of the playground, he was a sleeping seed; slowly and with
spontaneous grace the little body rose, arms upstretched, as Mario felt
in dreams the growth of root and branch and flower. No one had taught
four-year-old Mario the skill of making real these fantasies. How had he
taken his way alone into the fertile fields of the imagination?
It has been suggested that the Montessori system does not take into
account the stimulating of the child’s imagination. Daily instances of
very original, undirected imaginative play on the part of Montessori
children show a subtle force at work in the method which results in a
spontaneous unfolding of the imagination. The games and plays which we
teach our children in kindergarten and primary school are carried on by
the Montessori-trained children without adult supervision. Leaving their
work, they run to the garden or playground, imitating with great freedom
and beauty of imagination the activities of the gardener, the baker,
the artisan, the street vender, and the traveling musician. They even
impersonate in a more idealistic way, playing, as did little Mario, that
they are birds and flowers.
This natural expression of imagination in very young children is an
important development of the method, and a suggestive one.
We are all familiar with the timid, shrinking little child in the
center of a game circle who doesn’t want to be a chickadee, but who is
urged by the teacher in charge of the circle. The child persists in her
disinclination; she is overawed by so large a ring of spectators; it
is possible that she has never seen a chickadee. The teacher, also,
persists. She goes to the child and tries to teach her the motions of
bird flight, but the child sees only an adult running about and waving
her arms in an unusual way. She does not connect the spectacle in any
way with the free flight of a bird, and when she does take courage and
tries to follow the directions of her teacher, the little one is not
giving expression to her own mental image, but is endeavoring to imitate
a rather ungainly adult.
Is this play of the imaginative type?
It would seem as if we have lost sight of the real character of this
elusive, subtle, unexplainable fruition of the mental faculties, the
imagination. It is the unforeseen mind power which makes poets and
painters and sculptors and conquerors. It is a mind vision which sees
success beyond defeat, worth hidden in rags, and good blossoming out
of evil. It makes us hear the piping of Pan as the wind blows the
reeds beside the river; it promises us a pot of gold if we can build
ourselves a rainbow bridge across every cloud of despair; it shows us the
lineaments of God in the guise of sorrow and poverty.
Imagination in the child finds varied expressions. There are a great
many instances where a child who is lonely and longs for companionship
sees and holds daily intercourse with an invisible playmate whom he can
describe with great accuracy of detail. In the majority of cases this
invisible playmate in disposition, appearance, and tastes is unlike any
member of the family or any friend of the child’s. Where did the child
find this fancy?
A child has the power of a seer to develop the unknown potentialities in
apparently dead things. This dry brown leaf, frost-killed of the sap of
life, is, in the child’s fancy, a gnome, jumping along in the path in
front of him to warn the birds of the coming of winter. An acorn is a
golden goblet brimming with fairy nectar; a hollow tree is a magic place
in which to set up a domicile. No one schooled the child in these tricks
of thought. How did he find them?
Dr. Montessori explains the growth of child imagination.
The child is born with a certain defined mental equipment. He has
instincts, inherited memories they might be called, and he struggles
to feed these instincts. He has capacities for acquiring good or bad
habits very early. He has a race-old longing to gain knowledge by means
of his senses. Our part in the education of the child is to study his
instinctive activities, giving them opportunities for free expression
where they are important for the child’s best mental development. A child
likes to play in the dirt because his ancestors lived in caves and tilled
the soil; it is necessary for the child’s best development that he play
in sand and model in clay and plant little gardens. A child instinctively
fights because his ancestors survived only by warfare; this child
instinct we must inhibit.
We must establish good habits in a child early. We must help him, through
various sense exercises, to gain clear percepts of his environment. We
must try not to force our adult view-point upon the child, but endeavor
to establish in him a habit of independent self-active thought.
Then, after we have strengthened the general intellectual processes
of the child mind, Dr. Montessori points to us a miracle. Dovetailing
instinct and habit and perception, the child intellect begins to build.
Clear percepts become concepts; mental images become ideals, imagination
appears, building from the clay of everyday-mind stuff a golden castle of
dreams.
Imagination cannot be taught. It can scarcely be defined. It can never
be prescribed and trained. It is that flowering of the mind processes by
means of which a bit of brown sod appears tinted with light and color to
the artist, full of potentialities of growth to the gardener, smells of
home to the wanderer. If the three types of minds, as children, had been
told that a similar piece of sod was a blanket for the sleeping seeds,
one questions if it would have been gilded for them in adult life with
this glow of individual fancy. On the contrary, the painter has been
trained to see color, the gardener has experienced the cultivation of
life in the earth, the home lover’s hungry senses grasped the memory of
former sense stimuli.
Dr. Montessori tells us that the imagination develops variously in
different individuals. There may be a child who will never be able to
pierce the veil of reality and find his way into the court of fantasy.
There will be also the child who develops a seerlike quality of idealism.
He moves in a world of blissful unrealities; he sees angels’ wings in the
clouds and angels’ eyes in the stars. Our part in the education of little
children is to build the tower for a possible poising of the child’s
wings of fancy. Then we will wait hopefully for the wonder flight.
The various parts of the didactic apparatus of Montessori presented to
a child in their proper relation to his stage of mental growth have a
definite place in strengthening the mental processes which lie at the
basis of imagination.
We are so unaccustomed to offering any sort of mind food to the child
of two and a half or three that we have allowed the little child to go
mind hungry. At this early stage of a child’s development the right
kind of mental training will lay a foundation for the constructive and
intellectual processes of imagination and reasoning.
The child of two and three years of age is at the sensory-motor stage of
mind development. He longs for experiences which he can turn into action;
his mind craves ideas which will express themselves in useful muscular
co-ordination and the ability to adjust himself to his environment. To
put into a child’s hands the materials for this sensory-motor education
early is not to overtax his mind; instead, it satisfies his very
important mind hunger.
The didactic materials of Montessori that supply this sensory-motor
need of the very young child and should be presented early include the
various dressing frames, the solid insets, the sound boxes, the blocks
of the tower, the broad stair and the long stair, the latter without
the use of the sandpaper numerals. As soon as the little one has made
his own the muscular co-ordination and ideas of form in relation to
size involved in this material and has begun to find the will power to
correct his own mistakes, other home activities involving these mental
faculties should be added to the use of the Montessori apparatus. The
child may dress, undress, bathe himself, dress and undress a doll, build
with large blocks, sort various objects of different shapes and sizes,
as seeds, nuts, spools, button molds; handle and learn the uses of the
furnishings and equipment of the home: toilet utensils, brush, broom,
duster, dustpan, kitchen appliances, and the like; he should receive
simple ear-training in discriminating different bell tones, high and low,
loud and soft notes played on the piano, and hear good models of speech,
both in diction and modulation.
At the age of three to four years, the sensory element in the child’s
mental life is even more prominent, but it is separated a little from
motor activities. If the child has had adequate training, he has obtained
a large degree of muscular control; he can handle objects without
breaking them, he can run without falling down, he can minister to his
own bodily needs. Now his mind is hungry for sense images. He wishes to
study his environment with the aim of securing a series of definite mind
pictures. Ideas are to be stored in the workshop of the child mind for
future use in building the power of constructive imagination.
The Montessori didactic apparatus suited to this ideo-sensory stage of
the child’s development includes the color spools, the geometric insets,
the baric sense tablets, the sandpaper boards, and the textiles. The
sense-training involved in the child’s use of these should be applied
in various ways: finding and matching home and outdoor colors, noting
the size, shape, and form of various everyday objects, block building
with an idea of form, cutting form to line with blunt-pointed scissors,
clay-modeling, and constructive sand-play.
The child from four years to five shows a dawning of the constructive
imagination. The spool with which he played like a kitten in baby days
has new potentialities in his eyes. Having learned that it is wooden,
round, and will roll, and having made a mental comparison of it with
the wheel of his toy cart, which is also wooden, round, and will roll,
he calls the spool a wheel. This is a very important break in the
child’s mental life. It demonstrates to us that the child now has ideas
in the abstract. Dr. Montessori meets this with those of her didactic
appliances, which will lead a child by natural, easy steps from objective
to abstract thinking. She strengthens the sensory life of the child and
guides him toward a grasp of the symbols of thought. Those parts of
the didactic apparatus which should be presented at this point to the
child are the long stair, with the sandpaper letters, and the various
arithmetic exercises to be had with the rods; the counting boxes and
frame, the sandpaper letters, the movable alphabet, and the drawing
tablets.
Now, the child shows individualistic thinking. The direct mental training
of Montessori has built a solid foundation for the growth and unfolding
of the imagination. Our place is to watch for the special trend of his
mind development and help this as far as lies in our power.
Does the child show special interest in the symbols and combinations of
number? We should help him to play store, provide him with numerical
games, give him a chance to spend and account for a weekly allowance, do
home errands, use a tool box, construct cardboard toys, and learn any
other possible application of number in its relation to life. Does he
make a quick mastery of the symbols of language? We should transfer him
as quickly as possible into simple reading books, offering him a great
variety of these, that he may feed his imagination with good stories.
It has been said that the average American child exhausts the
possibilities of the Montessori apparatus at the age of five years. Of
course he does. Dr. Montessori planned it as a means of lighting the
flame, touching the torch, opening the switch.
With a marvelous completeness it does this. Our part lies in keeping
the flame burning, guiding the express train of the child mind into the
higher places of reason, imagination, and personal achievement.
THE GREAT SILENCE
_Montessori Development of Repose_
It was an amazing fact, but a significant one, that four-year-old Joanina
had never been allowed to _feel herself_.