A Montessori Mother

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CORNELL ' UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 "BY

HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE

Preface

On my return recently from a somewhat prolonged stay in Rome, I observed that my family and circle of friends were in a very different state of mind from that usually found by the home-coming traveler. I was not depressed by the usual conscientious effort to appear interested in what I had seen ; not once did I encounter the wavering eye and flagging attention which are such invariable accompaniments to anecdotes of European travel, nor the usual elated rebound into topics of local interest after a tribute tO' the miles I had traveled, in some such generalizing phrase of finality as, "Well, I suppose you enjoyed Europe as much as ever."

If I had ever suffered from the enforced repression within my own soul of my various European experiences I was more than indemnified by the reception which awaited this last return to my native land. For I found myself set upon and required to give an account of what I had seen, not only by my family and friends, but by callers, by acquaintances in the streets, by friends of acquaintances, by letters from people I knew, and many from those whose names were unfamiliar.

The questions they all asked were of a striking similarity, and I grew weary in repeating the same vl PREFACE

answers, answers which, from the nature of the subject, could be neither categorical nor brief. How many evenings have I talked from the appearance of the coffee-cups till a very late bedtime, in answer to the demand, " Now, you've been to Rome ; you've seen the Montessori schools. You saw a great deal of Dr. Montessori herself and were in close personal relations with her. Tell us all about it. Is it really so wonderful. J' Or is it just a fad.^* Is it true that the children are allowed to do exactly as they please? I should think it would spoil them beyond endurance. Do they really learn to read and write so young? And isn't it very bad for them to stimulate them so unnaturally? And ..." this was a never- failing cry, " what is there in it for our children, situated as we are? "

Staggered by the amount of explanation necessary to give the shortest answers that would be intelligible to these searching, but, on the whole, quite misdirected questions, I tried to put off my interrogators with the excellent magazine articles which have appeared on the subject, and with the translation of Dr. Montessori's book. There were various objections to being relegated to these sources of information. Some of my inquisitors had been too doubtful of the value of the perhaps over-heralded new ideas to take the trouble to read the book with the close and serious attention necessary to make anything out of its careful and scientific presentation of its theories. Others, quite honestly, in the breathless whirl of

PREFACE vii

American business, professional and social life, were too busy to read such a long work. Some had read it and emerged from it rather dazed by the technical terms employed, with the dim idea that something remarkable was going on in Italy of which our public education ought to take advantage, but without the smallest definite idea of a possible change in their treatment of their own youngsters. All had many practical questions to put, based on the difference between American and Italian life, questions which, by chance, had not been answered in the magazine articles.

I heard, moreover, in varying degree, from all the different temperaments, the common note of skepticism about the results obtained. Everyone hung on my first-hand testimony as an impartial eye-witness. "You are a parent like us. Will it really work.''" they inquired with such persistent unanimity that the existence of a still unsatisfied craving for information seemed unquestionable. If so many people in my small personal circle, difi'ering in no way from any ordinary group of educated Americans, were so actively, almost aggressively interested in hearing my personal account of the actual working of the new system, it seemed highly probable that other people's personal circles would be interested. The inevitable result of this reasoning has been the composition of this small volume, which can claim for partial expiation of its existence that it has no great pretensions to anything but timeliness.

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I have put into it, not only an expo sition, as practical as I can make it, n f t.hp t^chmc. of th e method as far as it lies within the_ pqwers of any one of us fathers and mothers to apply it, but in addition I have

Lset down all the new ideas, hopes, and visions which have sprung up in my mind as a result of my close ] contact with the new system and with the genius who Vis its founder. For ideas, hopes, and visions are as important elements in a comprehension of this new philosophy as an accurate knowledge of the use of the " geometric insets," and my talks with Dr. Montessori lead me to think that she feels them to be much more essential. Contact with the new ideas is not doing for us what it ought, if it does not act as a powerful stimulant to the whole body of our thought about life. It should make us think, and think hard, not only about how to teach our children the alphabet more easily, but about such fundamental matters as what we actually mean by moral life ; whether we really honestly wish the spiritually best for our children, or only the materially best; why we are really in the world at all. In many ways, this " Montessori System " is a new religion which we are called upon to help bring into the world, and we cannot aid in so great an undertaking without considerable spiritual as well as intellectual travail.

The only way for us to improve our children's lives by the application of these new ideas is by meditating on them until we have absorbed their veryessence and then by making what varying applica-

PREFACE is

tions of them are necessary in the differing condition of our lives. I have set down, without apology, my

ItaJiajL-texty-simply because I chance to be one of the first American mothers to come into close cont act with her and her work, and as such may be of value to my fellows. I have, however, honestly labeled and pigeon-holed these meditations on the general philosophy of the system, and set them in separate chapters so that it should not be difficult for the most casual reader to select what he wishes to read, without being forced into social, philosophical, or ethical considerations. I confess that I shall be greatly disappointed if he takes too exclusive advantage of this opportunity, for I quite agree with the Italian founder of the system that its philosophical and ethical elements are those which have in them most promise for a new future for us all.

Finally, in spite of all my excuses for the undertaking, I seem to myself, now that I am fairly embarked upon it, very presumptuous in speaking at all upon such high and grave matters, fit only for the sure and enlightened handhng of the specialist. But this is a subject differing from biology, physiological psychology, and philosophy (although the foundations of the system are laid deep in those sciences), inasmuch as its usefulness to the race depends upon its comprehension by the greatest possible number of ordinary human beings. I hearten myself by remembering that if it is not to remain an interesting

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and futile theory, it must be, in its broad outlines at least, understood and practised by just such people as I am. We must all collaborate. And here is the place to say that I consider this book a very tentative performance ; and that I will be very grateful for suggestions from any of my readers which will help to make a second edition more useful and complete.

This volume of impressions, therefore, lays no claim to eindition. It is not written by a biologist for other biologists, by a philosopher for an audience of college professors, or by a professional pedagogue to enlighten school-superintendents. An ordinary American parent, desiring above all else the best possible chance for her children, addresses this message to the innumerable legion of her companions in that desire.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Miss M. I. Batchelder and Miss Mary G. Gillmore, both of the Horace Mann School, for helpful suggestions ; to Miss Anne E. George, who also read the manuscript; and to the House of Childhood, Inc., 200 Fifth Avenue, New York, for the use of illustrations. Dr. Montessori's patent rights in the didactic apparatus are controlled, for the United States and Canada, by the House of Childhood, Inc., Carl R. Byoir, President.

Contents

CHAPTER PAQB

y Pbepace V

^I. Some iNTHODircToaT Remarks About Parents . 1

Chapter I Some Introductory Remarks About Parents

AN observation often made by philosophic obiV servers of our social organization is that the tremendous importance of primary teachers is ridiculously underestimated. The success or failure of the teachers of little children may not perhaps determine the amount of information acquired later in its educative career by each generation, but no one can deny that it determines to a considerable extent the character of the next generation, and character determines practically everything worth considering in the world of men. Yet the mind of the average community admits this but haltingly. The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened majority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the character of the teacher.

But is there a thoughtful parent living who has not quailed at the haphazard way in which Fate has pitchforked him into a profession greatly more important and enormously more difficult? For it is not quite fair to us to say that we chose the profession of parent with our eyes open when we repeated the words of the marriage service. It cannot be denied that every pair of fiances know that probably they will have children, but this knowledge has about the same degree of first-hand vividness in their minds that the knowledge of ultimate certain death has in the mind of the average healthy young person: there is as little conscious preparation for the coming event in the one case as in the other. No, we have some right on our side, under the prevailing conditions of education about the facts of life, in claiming that we are tossed headlong by a force stronger than ourselves into a profession and a terrifying responsibility which many of us would never have had the presumption to undertake in cold blood. We might conceivably have undertaken to build railway bridges, even though the lives of multitudes depended on them ; we might have become lawyers and settled people's material affairs for them or even, as doctors, settled the matter of their physical life or death ; but to be responsible to God, to society, and to the soul in question for the health, happiness, moral growth, and usefulness of a human soul, what reflective parent among the whole army of us has not had moments of heartsick terror at the realization of what he has been set to do.'' I say " moments " advisedly, for it must be admitted that most of us manage to forget pretty continually the alarming possibiHties of our situation.

In this we are imitating the curious actual indifference to peril which, from time immemorial, has been observed among those who are exposed to any danger which is very long continued. The incapacity of human nature to feel any strong emotion for a considerable length of time, even one connected with the supposedly sacrosanct instinct for self-preservation, is to be observed in the well-worn examples of people living on the sides of volcanoes, and of workers among machinery, who will not take the most elementary precautions against accidents if the precautions consume much time or thought. Consequently it is not surprising that, as a whole, parents are not only not stricken to the earth by the responsibilities of their situation, but as a class are singularly blind to their duties, and oddly difBcult to move to any serious, continued consideration of the task before them. This attitude bears a close relation to the axiom which has only to be stated to win instant recognition from any self-analyzing human being, " We would rather lie down and die than think! " We cannot, as a rule, be forced to think really, seriously, connectedly, logically about the form of our government, about our social organization, about how we spend our lives, even about the sort of clothes we wear or the food we eat,- — questions affecting our comfort so cruelly that they would make us reflect if anything could. But we ourselves are the only ones to suiFer from our refusal to use our minds fully and freely on such subjects. It is intolerable that our callous indifference and incurable triviality should wreak themselves upon the helpless children committed to our care. The least we can do, if we will not do our own thinking, is to accept, with all gratitude, the thinking that someone else has done for us.

For there is one loop-hole of escape in our modem world from this self-imprisonment in shiftless ways of mental life, and that is the creation and wide diffusion of the scientific spirit. There is apparently in human nature, along with this invincible repugnance to use reason on matters closely connected with our daily life, a considerable pleasure in ratiocination if it is exercised on subjects sufficiently removed from our personal sphere. The man who will eat hot mincepie and rarebit at two in the morning and cry out upon the Fates as responsible for the inevitable sequence of suffering, may be, often is, in his chemical laboratory, or his surgical practice, or his biological research, an investigator of the strictest integrity of reasoning.

Reflection on this curious trait of human nature may bring some restoration of self-respect to' parents in the face of the apparently astounding fact that most of the great educators have been by no means parents of large families, and a large proportion of them have been childless. This but follows the usual eccentric route taken by discoveries leading to the amelioration of conditions surrounding man. It was not an inhabitant of a malarial district, driven to desperation by the state of things, who discovered the crime of the mosquito. That discovery was made by men working in laboratories not in the least incommoded by malaria. Hundreds of generations of devoted mothers, ready and willing to give the last drop of their blood for their children's welfare, never discovered that unscalded milk-bottles are like prussic acid to babies. Childless workers in white laboratory aprons, standing over test-tubes, have revolutionized the physical hygiene of infancy and brought down the death-rate of babies beyond anything ever dreamed of by our parents.

But let it be remembered as comfort, exhortation, and warning to us that the greatest army of laboratory workers ever financed by a twentieth-century millionaire, would have been of no avail if the parents of the babies of the world had not taken to scalding the milk-bottles. Let us insist upon the recognition of our merit, such as it is. We will not, apparently we cannot, do the hard, consecutive, logical, investigating thinking which is the only thing necessary in many cases to better the conditions of our daily life ; but we are not entirely impervious to reason, inasmuch as the world has seen us in this instance following, with the most praiseworthy docility, the teachings of those who have thought for us. The milk-bottles in by far the majority of American homes are really being scalded to-day ; and " cholera morbus," " second summers," " teething fevers," and the like are becoming as out-of-date as " fever 'n' ague," " galloping consumption," and the like.

The lessened death-rate among babies is not only the most heartening spectacle for lovers of babies, but for hopers and believers in the general advancement of the race. This miraculous revolution in the care of infants under a year of age has taken place in less than a human generation. The grandparents of our children are still with us to pooh-pooh our sterilizings, and to look on with bewilderment while we treat our babies as intelligently as stock-breeders treat their animals. Let us take heart of grace. If scientific methods of physical hygiene in the care of children can be thus quickly inculcated, it is certainly worth while to storm the age-old redoubts sheltering the no less hoary abuses of their intellectual and spiritual treatment.

A scientist of another race, talcing advantage of the works of all the other investigators along the same line (works which nothing could have induced us to study) , laboring in a laboratory of her own invention, has been doing our hard, consecutive, logical, investigating thinking for us. Let us have the grace to take advantage of her discoveries, many of which have been stumbled upon from time to time in a haphazard, unformulated way by the instinctive wisdom of experience, but the synthesis of which into a coherent, usable system, with a consistent philosophical foundation, has been left to a childless scientific investigator.

Chapter II A Day In A Casa Dei Bambini

I HAD not seen a Montessori school when I first read through Dr. Montessori's book. I laid it down with the mental comments, " All very well to write about! But, of course, it can't work anything like that in actual practice. Everyone knows that a child's party of only five or six children of that age (from two and a half to six) is seldom carried through without some sort of quarrel, even though an equal number of mothers are present, devoting themselves to giving the tots exactly whatever they want. It stands to reason that twenty or thirty children of that tender age, shut up together all day long and day after day, must, if they are normal children, have a great many healthy normal battles with each other ! "

After putting myself in a dispassionate and judicial frame of mind by laying down these fixed preconceptions, I went to visit the Casa dei Bambini in the Franciscan Nunnery on the Via Giusti.

I half turn away in anticipatory discouragement from the task of attempting, for the benefit of American readers, any description of what I saw there. They will not believe it. I know they will not, because I myself, before I saw it with my own eyes, would have discounted largely the most moderate statements on the subject. But even though stay-athome people in other centuries may have salted liberally the tall stories of old-time travelers, they certainly had a taste for hearing them ; and so possibly my plain account of what I saw that day may be read, even though it be to the accompaniment of incredulous exclamations.

My first glimpse was of a gathering of about twenty-five children, so young that several of them looked like real babies to me. I found afterwards that the youngest was just under three, and the oldest just over six. They were scattered about over a large, high-ceilinged, airy room, furnished with tiny, lightly-framed tables and chairs which, however, by no means filled the floor. There were big tracts of open space, where some of the children knelt or sat on light rugs. One was lying down on his back, kicking his feet in the air. A low, cheerful hum of conversation filled the air.

As my companion and I came into the room I noticed first that there was not that stiffening into self-consciousness which is the inevitable concomitant of " visitors " in our own schoolrooms. Most of the children, absorbed in various queer-looking tasks, did not even glance up as we entered. Others, apparently resting in the intervals between games, looked over across the room at us, smiled welcomingly as I would at a visitor entering my house, and a little group near us ran up with outstretched hands, saying with a pleasant accent of good-breeding, " Good-morning ! Good-morning ! " They then instantly went off about their own affairs, which were evidently of absorbing interest, for after that, except for an occasional friendly look or smile, or a momentary halt by my side to show me something, none of the little scholars paid the least attention to me.

Now I myself, like all the American matrons of my circle of acquaintances, am laboring conscientiously to teach my children " good manners," but I decided, on the instant, nothing would induce me to collect twenty children of our town and have a Montessori teacher enter the room to be greeted by them. The contrast would be too painful. These were mostly children of very poor, ignorant, and utterly untrained parents, and ours are children of people who flatter themselves that they are the opposite of all that; but I shuddered to think of the long silent, discourteous stare which is the only recognition of the presence of a visitor in our schools. And yet I felt at once that I was attaching too much importance to a detail, the merest trifle, the slightest, most superficial indication of the life beneath. We Anglo-Saxons notice too acutely, I thought, these surface differences of manner.

But, on the other hand, I was forced to consider that I knew from bitter experience that children of that age are still near enough babyhood to be absolutely primeval in their sincerity, and that it is practically impossible to make them, with any certainty of the result, go through a form of courtesy which they do not feel genuinely. Also I observed that no one had pushed the children towards us, as I push mine, toward a chance visitor, with the command accompanied by an inward prayer for obedience, " Go and shake hands with Mrs. Blank."

In fact, I noticed it for the first time, there seemed no one there to push the children or to refrain from doing it. That collection of little tots, most of them too busy over their mysterious occupations even to talk, seemed, as far as a casual glance over the room went, entirely without supervision. Finally, from a comer, where she had been sitting (on the floor apparently) beside a child, there rose up a plainlydressed woman, the expression of whose quiet face made almost as great an impression on me as the children's greetings had. I had always joined with heartfelt sympathy in the old cry of " Heaven help the poor teachers ! " and in our town, where we all know and like the teachers personally, their exhausted condition of almost utter nervous collapse by the end of the teaching year is a painful element in our community life. But I felt no impulse to sympathize with this woman with untroubled eyes who, perceiving us for the first time, came over to shake hands with us. Instead, I felt a curious pang of envy, such as once or twice in my sentimental and stormy girlhood I felt at the sight of the peaceful face of a nun. I am now quite past the possibility of envying the life of a nun, but I must admit that it suddenly occurred to me, as I looked at that quiet, smiling Italian woman, that somehow my own life, for all its full happiness, must lack some element of orderliness, of discipline, of spiritual economy which alone could have put that look of calm certainty on her face. It was not the passive, changeless peace that one sees in the eyes of some nuns, but a sort of rich, fullblooded confidence in life.

She lingered beside us some moments, chatting with my companion, who was an old friend of hers, and who introduced her as Signorina Bailer ini. I noticed that she happened to stand all the time with her back to the children, feeling apparently none of, that lion-tamer's instinct to keep an hypnotic eye on the little animals which is so marked in our instructors. I can remember distinctly that there was for us school-children actually a different feel to the air and a strange look on the familiar school-furniture during those infrequent intervals when the teacher was called for an instant from the room and left us, as in a suddenly rarefied atmosphere, giddy with the removal of the pressure of her eye; but when this teacher turned about casually to face the room again, these children did not seem to notice either that she had stopped looking at them or that she was now doing it again.

We used to know, as by a sixth sense, exactly where, at any moment, the teacher was, and a sudden movement on her part would have made us all start as violently and as instinctively as little chicks at the sudden shadow of a hawk . . . and this, although we were often very fond indeed of our teachers. Remembering this, I noticed with surprise that often, when one of these little ones lifted his face from his work to ask the teacher a question, he had been so unconscious of her presence during his concentration on his enterprise that he did not know in the least where to look, and sent his eager eyes roving over the big room in a search for her, which ended in such a sudden flash of joy at discovering her that I felt again a pang of envy for this woman who had so many more loving children than I have.

What could be these " games " which so absorbed these children, far too young for any possibility of pretense on their part. J" Moving with the unhampered, unobserved ease which is the rule in a Montessori schoolroom, I began walking about, looking more closely at what the children were holding, and I could have laughed at the simplicity of many of the means which accomplished the apparent miracle of self-imposed order and discipline before me ... if I had not been ready to cry at my own stupidity for not thinking of them myself. One little boy about three and a half years old had been intent on some operation ever since we had entered the room, and even now as I drew near his little table and chair, he only glanced up for an instant's smile without stopping the action of his fingers. I leaned over him, hoping that the device which so held his attention was not too complicated for my inexperienced, unpedagogical mind to take in. He was holding a light wooden frame about eighteen inches square, on which were stretched two pieces of cotton cloth, meeting down the middle like the joining of a garment. On one of these edges was a row of buttonholes and on the other a row of large bone buttons. The child was absorbed in buttoning and unbuttoning those two pieces of cloth.

He was new at the game, that was to be seen by the clumsy, misdirected motions of his baby fingers, but the process of his improvement was so apparent as, his eyes shining with interest, he buttoned and unbuttoned steadily, slowly, without an instant's interruption, that I watched him, almost as fascinated as he. A child near us, apparently playing with blocks, upset them with a loud noise, but my buttoning boy, wrapped in his magic cloak of concentration, did not so much as raise his eyes. I myself could not look away, and as I gazed I thought of the many times a little child of mine had tried to learn the secret of the innumerable fastenings which hold her clothes together and how I, with the kindest impulse in the world, had stopped her fumbling little fingers saying, " No, dear. Mother can do that so much better. Let i/ Mother do it." It occurred to me now that the situation was very much as if, in the midst of a fascinating game of billiards, a professional player had snatched the cue from my husband's hands, saying, " You just stand and watch me do this. I can do it much better than you."

The child before me stopped his work a moment and looked down at his little cotton waist. There was a row of buttons there, smaller but of the same family as those on the frame. As he gazed down, absorbed, at them, I could see a great idea dawn in his face. I leaned forward. He attacked the middle button, using with startling exactitude of imitation the same motion he had learned on his frame. But this button was not so large or so well placed. He had to bend his head over, his fingers were cramped, he rtiade several movements backward. But then suddenly the first half of his undertaking was accomplished. The button was on one side, the buttonhole on the other. I held my breath. He set to work again. The cloth slipped from his boneless little fingers, the button twisted itself awry, I fairly ached with the idiotic habit of years of interference to snatch it and do it for him. And then I saw that he was slowly forcing it into place. When the bone disk finally shone out, round and whole, on the far side of the buttonhole, the child drew a long breath and looked up at me with so ecstatic a face of triumph that I could have shouted, " Hurrah ! " Then, without paying any more attention to me, he rose, sauntered over to a corner of the room where a thick piece of felt covered the floor, and lay down on his back, his hands clasped under his head, gazing with tranquil, reposeful vacuity at the ceiling. He was resting himself after accomplishing a great step forward. I did not fail to notice that, except for my entirely fortuitous observation of his performance, nobody had seen his absorption any more than they now saw his apparent idleness.