AS I look at the title of this chapter before setting to work on it, the sight of the word “Theory” makes me apprehensively aware that I am stepping down into very deep water without any great confidence in my powers as a swimmer. But I recall again the reflection which has buoyed me up more than once in the composition of these unscientific impressions, namely that I am addressing an audience no more scientific than I am, an audience of ordinary, fairly well educated American parents. Furthermore I am convinced that my book can do no more valuable service than if by the tentative incompleteness of its account it drives every reader to the study of the system in Dr. Montessori’s own carefully written treatise. It is always, I believe, essential to an understanding of any educational system to comprehend first of all the underlying principle before going on to its adaptation to actual conditions. This adaptation naturally varies as the actual conditions vary, and should change in many details if it is to embody faithfully, under differing conditions, the fundamental principle. But the master idea in every system is unvarying,[49] eternal, and it should be stated, studied, and grasped, before any effort is made to learn the details of its practical application. A statement of this fundamental principle will be found in different phrasings, several times in the course of this book, because it is essential not only to learn it once, but to bear it constantly in mind. Any attempt to use the Montessori apparatus or system by anyone who does not fully grasp or is not wholly in sympathy with its bed-rock idea, results inevitably in a grotesque, tragic caricature of the method, such a farcical spectacle as we now see the attempt to Christianize people by forcible baptism to have been.
The central idea of the Montessori system, on which every smallest bit of apparatus, every detail of technic rests solidly, is a full recognition of the fact that no human being can be educated by anyone else. He must do it himself or it is never done. And this is as true at the age of three as at the age of thirty; even truer, for the man of thirty is at least as physically strong as any self-proposed mentor is apt to be, and can fight for his own right to chew and digest his own intellectual food.
It can be readily seen how this dominating idea changes completely the old-established conditions in the schoolroom, turning the high light from the teacher to the pupil. Since the child can really be taught nothing by the teacher, since he himself must do every scrap of his own learning, it is upon the child that our attention centers. The teacher should[50] be the all-wise observer of his natural activity, giving him such occasional quick, light-handed guidance as he may for a moment need, providing for him in the shape of the ingenious Montessori apparatus stimuli for his intellectual life and materials which enable him to correct his own mistakes; but, by no means, as has been our old-time notion, taking his hand in hers and leading him constantly along a fixed path, which she or her pedagogical superiors have laid out beforehand, and into which every childish foot must be either coaxed or coerced.
We have admitted the entire validity of this theory in physical life. We no longer send our children for their outdoor exercise bidding them walk along the street, holding to Nurse’s hand like little ladies and gentlemen. If we can possibly manage it we turn them loose with a sandpile, a jumping-rope, hoops, balls, bats, and other such stimuli to their natural instinct for vigorous body-developing exercise. And we have a “supervisor” in our public playgrounds only to see that children are rightly started in their use of the different games, not at all to play every game with them. We do this nowadays because we have learned that little children are so devoted to those exercises which tend to increase their bodily strength that they need no urging to engage in them. The Montessori child, analogously, is allowed and encouraged to let go the hand of his mental nurse, to walk and run about on his own feet, and an almost endless variety of stimuli to his natural instinct for[51] vigorous mind-developing, intellectual exercise is placed within his reach.
The teacher, under this system, is the scientific, observing supervisor of this mental “playground” where the children acquire intellectual vigor, independence, and initiative as spontaneously, joyfully, and tirelessly as they acquire physical independence and vigor as a by-product of physical play. We have long realized that children do not need to be driven by force, or even persuaded, to take the amount of exercise necessary to develop their growing bodies. Indeed the difficulty has been to keep them from doing it so continuously as to interfere with our sedentary adult occupations and tastes. We have learned that all we need to do is to provide the jumping-rope and then leave the child alone with other children. The most passionately inspired pedagogue can never learn to skip rope for a child, any more than in after years he can ever learn the conjugation of a single irregular verb for a pupil. The learner must do his own learning, and, this granted, it follows naturally that the less he is interfered with by arbitrary restraint and vexatious, unnecessary rules, the more quickly and easily he will learn. An observation of the typical, joyfully busy child in a Casa dei Bambini furnishes more than sufficient proof that he enjoys acquiring mental as well as physical agility and strength, and asks nothing better than a fair and unhindered chance at this undertaking.
But even when this deep-laid foundation principle[52] of self-education has been grasped, all is not plain sailing for the adventurer on the Montessori ocean. A set of theories relating to such complicated organisms as human beings, cannot in the nature of things be of primer-like simplicity. For my own convenience I very soon made two main divisions of the different branches on which the Montessori system is developed out of its central main idea. One division, the practical, is made up of theories based on acute, scientific knowledge of the child’s body, his muscles, brain, and nerves, such as only a doctor and a physiological psychologist combined can have. The second division is made up of theories based on the spiritual nature of man, as disclosed by the study of history, by unbiased direct observation of present-day society, and by that divining fervor of enthusiastic reverence for the element of perfectibility in human nature which has always characterized founders of new religions.
This chapter is to be devoted to the narration of what a person, neither a doctor nor a physiological psychologist, was able to understand of the first division.
I think the first point which struck me especially was the insistence on the fact that very little children have no greater natural interest than in learning how to do something with their bodies. We all know how much more fascinating a place our kitchens seem to be for our little children than our drawing-rooms. I have heard this inevitable gravitation towards those back regions of the house accounted for on the theory[53] the “children seem to like servants better than other people. There seems to be some sort of natural affinity between a child and a cook.” One morning spent in the Casa dei Bambini showed me the true reason. Children like cooks and chamber-maids better than callers in the parlor, because servants are always doing something imitable; and they like kitchens and pantries better than drawing-rooms because the drawing-room is a museum full of objects, interesting it is true, but inclosed in the padlocked glass-case of the command, “Now, don’t touch!” while the kitchen is a veritable treasure-house of Montessori apparatus.
The three-year-old child who, eluding pursuit from the front of the house, sits down on the kitchen floor with a collection of cookie-cutters of different shapes in his lap, and amuses himself by running his fingers around their edges, is engaged in a true “stereognostic exercise” as it is alarmingly dubbed in scientific nomenclature. If there is a closet of pots and pans, and he has time before he is dragged off to clean clothes and the vacuity of adult-invented toys, to fit the right covers to the pots and see which pan goes inside which, he has gone through a “sensory exercise for developing his sense of dimension.” If he is struck by the fact that the package of oatmeal, although so large, weighs less than the smaller bag of salt, he has been initiated into a “baric exercise”; while if there are some needles of ice left on the floor by a careless iceman, with these and a permitted dabbling[54] in warm dishwater, he unconsciously invents for himself a “thermic exercise.” If the cook is indulgent or too busy to notice, there may be added to these interests the creative rapture to be evolved from a lump of dough, or a fumbling attempt to fathom the mysterious inwardness of a Dover egg-beater.
I have heard it said of the Montessori method that a system of education accomplished with such simple everyday means could scarcely claim that it is either anything new or the discovery of any one person. It seems to me that is about like denying any novelty to the discovery that pure air will cure consumption. The pure air has always been there, consumptives have had nothing to do but to breathe it to get well, but the doctors who first drove that fact into our impervious heads deserve some credit and can certainly claim that they were innovators with their descent upon the stuffy sickrooms and their command to open the windows.
Children from time immemorial have always done their best, struggling bravely against the tyranny of adult good intentions, to educate themselves by training their senses in all sorts of sense exercise. They have always been (generations of exasperated mothers can bear witness to it!) “possessed” to touch and handle all objects about them. What Dr. Montessori has done is to appear suddenly, like the window-breaking doctors, and to cry to us, “Let them do it!” Or rather, to suggest something better[55] for them to touch and handle since it is neither necessary nor desirable that one’s three-year-old should perfect his sense of form either on one’s cherished Sèvres vase or on a more or less greasy cooking utensil. Nor has he that perverse fondness for the grease of the kettle, or that wicked joy in the destruction of valuable bric-à-brac which our muddle-headed observation has led us to attribute to him. Those are merely fortuitous, and for him negligible, accompaniments to the process of learning how to distinguish accurately different forms. Dr. Montessori assures us, and proves her assertion, that his sole interest is in the varying shapes of the utensils he handles, and that if he is given cleaner, lighter articles with more interesting shapes, he requires no urging to turn to them from his greasy and heavy pots and pans.
Bearing in mind, therefore, the humble and familiar relatives of the Montessori apparatus to be found in our own kitchens and dining-rooms, let us look at it a little more in detail.
The buttoning-frames have been described (page 13). One’s invention can vary them nearly to infinity. In the Casa dei Bambini there are these frames arranged for buttons and buttonholes, for hooks and eyes, for lacings, patent snap-fasteners, ribbon-ends to tie, etc., etc. The aim of this exercise is so apparent that it is scarcely necessary to mention it, except for the constant temptation of a child-lover before the Montessori apparatus to see in it only the most enchanting diversion for a child, which[56] amuses him, though so simply, far more than the most elaborate of mechanical toys. But, and here is where our wool-gathering wits must learn a lesson from purposeful forethought: we should never forget that there is no smallest item in the Montessori training which is intended merely to amuse the child. He is given these buttoning-frames not because they fascinate him and keep him out of mischief, but because they help him to learn to handle, more rapidly than he otherwise would, the various devices by which his clothes and shoes are held together, on his little body. As for the profound and vitally important reason why he should be taught and allowed as soon as possible to dress himself, that will be treated in the discussion of the philosophical side of this baby-training (page 129 ff.).
 
Exercises in Practical Life.
 
Building “the Tower.”
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir
It is apparent, of course, that the blindfolded child who was identifying the pieces of different fabrics was training his sense of touch. The sight of this exercise reminds the average person with a start of surprise that he too was born with a sense of touch which might have been cultivated if anyone had thought of it; for most of us, by the enormity of our neglect of our five senses, reduce them, for all practical purposes to two, sight and hearing, and distrust any information which comes to us by other means. Our complacency under this self-imposed deprivation is astonishing. It is as if a man should wear a patch over one eye because he is able to see with one and thinks it not worth while to use two.[57] Now, it is apparent that our five senses are our only means of conveying information to our brains about the external world which surrounds us, and it is equally apparent that to act wisely and surely in the world, the brain has need of the fullest and most accurate information possible. Hence it is a foregone conclusion, once we think of it at all, that the education of all the senses of a child to rapidity, agility, and exactitude is of great importance, not at all for the sake of the information acquired at the time by the child, but for the sake of the five, finely accurate instruments which this education puts under his control. The child who was identifying the different fabrics was blindfolded to help him concentrate his sense of touch on the problem and not aid this sense or mislead it, as we often do, with his sight.
It may be well here to set down a few facts about the relative positions of the senses of touch and of sight, facts which are not known to many of us, and the importance of which is not realized by many who happen to know them. Everyone knows, to begin with, that a new-born baby’s eyes, while physically perfect, are practically useless, and that the ability to see with them accurately comes very gradually. It seems that it comes much more gradually than the people usually in charge of little children have ever known, and that, roughly speaking, up to the age of six, children need to have their vision reinforced by touch if, without great mental fatigue, they are to get an accurate conception of the objects about them.
[58]It appears furthermore that, as if in compensation for this slow development of vision, the sense of touch is extraordinarily developed in young children. In short, that the natural way for little ones to learn about things is to touch them. Dr. Montessori found that the finger-tips of little children are extremely sensitive, and she claims that there is no necessity, granted proper training, why this valuable faculty, only retained by most adults in the event of blindness, should be lost so completely in later life.
Now it is plain to be seen that we adults, with our fixed habit of learning about things from looking at them, have, in neglecting this means of approach to the child-brain, been losing a golden opportunity. If children learn more quickly and with less fatigue through their fingers than through their eyes, why not take advantage of this peculiarity—a peculiarity which extends even more vividly to child-memory, for it is established beyond question that a little child can remember the “feel” of a given object much more accurately and quickly than the look of it. It is easy to understand, once this explanation is given, the great stress that is laid, in Montessori training, on the different exercises for developing and utilizing the sense of touch.
One of the first things a child just admitted to a Casa dei Bambini is taught is to keep his hands scrupulously clean, because we can “touch things better” with clean finger-tips than with dirty ones. And, of[59] course, he is allowed to take the responsibility of keeping his own hands clean, and encouraged to do it by the presence of the little dainty washstands, just the right height for him, supplied with bowl, pitcher, etc., just the right size for him to handle. The joy of the children in these simple little washstands, and their deft, delighted, frequent use of them is a reproach to us for not furnishing such an easily secured amelioration in the life of every one of our babies.
The education of the sense of touch, like all the Montessori exercises for the senses, begins with a few simple and strongly contrasting sensations and proceeds little by little, to many only very slightly differing sensations, following the growth of the child’s ability to differentiate. The child with clean finger-tips begins, therefore, with the first broad distinction between rough and smooth. He is taught to pass his finger-tips lightly, first over a piece of sandpaper, and then over a piece of smoothly polished wood, or glossy enameled paper, and is told briefly, literally in two words, the two names of those two abstract qualities.
Here, in passing, with the first mention of this sort of exercise, it should be stated that the children are taught to make these movements of the hand and all others like them always from left to right, so that a muscular habit will be established which will aid them greatly later when they come to “feel” their letters, which are, of course, always written from left to right.
[60]The children are encouraged to keep their eyes closed while they are “touching” things, because they can concentrate their attention in this way. And here another general observation should be made: that in the Montessori language “touching” does not mean the brief haphazard contact of hand with object which we usually mean, but a systematic examination of an object by the finger-tips such as a blind person might make.
After the first broad distinction is learned between rough and smooth, there are then to be conquered all the intervening shades and refinements of those qualities. The children take the greatest delight in these exercises and almost at once begin to invent new ones for themselves, “feeling” whatever materials are near them and giving them their proper names, or asking what their names are. It is as if their little minds were suddenly opened, as our dully perceptive adult minds seldom are, to the infinite variety of surfaces in the world. They notice the materials of their own dresses, the stuffs used in upholstering furniture, curtains, dress fabrics, wood, smooth and rough, steel, glass, etc., etc., with exquisitely fairy-light strokes of their sensitive little finger-tips, which seem almost visibly to grow more discriminating.
The “technical apparatus” for continuing this training is varied, but always simple. A collection of slips of sandpaper of varying roughness to be placed in order from fine to coarse by the child (blindfolded[61] or not, as he seems to prefer); other collections of bits of fabrics of all sorts to be identified by touch only; of slips of cardboard, enameled or rough; blotting-paper, writing-paper, newspaper, etc., etc.; of objects of different shapes, cubes, pyramids, balls, cylinders, etc., for the blindfolded child to identify; later on of very small objects like seeds of different shapes or sizes; finally, of any objects which the child knows by sight, his playthings, articles around the house, to be recognized by his touch only.
There is one result on the child’s character of this sort of exercise which Dr. Montessori does not specifically mention but which has struck me forcibly in practical experimentation with it. I have found that little hands and fingers trained by these fascinating “games” to light, attentive, discriminating, and unhurried handling of objects, lose very quickly that instinctive childish, violent but very uncertain clutch at things, which has been for so many generations the cause of so much devastation in the nursery. Little tots of four, trained in this way, can be trusted with glassware and other breakable objects, which would go down to certain destruction in the fitfully governed hands of the average undisciplined child of twelve. In other words the child of four has fitted himself by means of a highly enjoyable process to be, in one more respect, an independent, self-respecting, trustworthy citizen of his world.
Of course all these different exercises are much more entertaining when, like other fun-producing[62] “games,” they are “played” with a crowd of other children. When one child of a group is blindfolded, and as our American children say “It,” while the others sit about, watching his identification of more and more difficult objects, ready, all of them, for a shout of applause at a success, or at a failure for an instant laughing pounce on the coveted blindfold and application of it to the child next in order, of course there is much more jolly laughter, the interest is keener, and the attention more concentrated by the contact with other wits, than can be the case with a single child, even with an audience of the most sympathetic mother or aunt. There is absolutely no adequate substitute for the beneficial action and reaction of children upon one another such as form such a considerable part of the Montessori training in a Casa dei Bambini. On the other hand, those of us who live, as we almost all do, far from any variety of a Montessori school, can, with the exercise of our ingenuity and mother-wit, arrange a great number of more or less adequate temporary expedients. A large number of the Montessori devices, if they were not called “sensory exercises,” would be recognized as merely fascinating new games for children. What is blind-man’s buff but a “sensory exercise for training the ear,” since what the person who is “It” does is to try to catch the slight movements made by the other players accurately enough to pursue and capture them? Children have another game called, for some mysterious reason of[63] childhood, “Still pond, no more moving!” a variety of blind-man’s buff, which trains still more finely the sense of hearing, since the players are required to stand perfectly still, and the one who is “It” must detect their presence by such almost imperceptible sounds as their breathing, or the rustling caused by an involuntary movement. If Montessori herself had invented this game, it could not be more perfectly devised for bodily control. Children who wriggle about in ordinary circumstances without the slightest capacity to control their bodies, even in response to the sternest adult commands for quiet, will stand in some strained position without moving a finger, their concentration so intense that even their breathing is light and inaudible. We must all have seen children happily playing such games; many of us have spent hours and hours of our childhood over them; Froebel used them and others like them plentifully in his system; there are all sorts of more or less hit-or-miss imitations of them being constructed by modern child-tamers; but no one before this Italian woman-doctor ever analyzed them so that we plain unprofessional people could fully grasp their fascination for us; ever told us that children like them because they afford an opportunity to practise self-control, and that similar games based on the same idea that it is “fun” to exercise one’s different senses in company or in competition with one’s youthful contemporaries, would be just as entertaining as these self-invented games, handed down for untold[64] generations from one set of children to another. All the varieties of blindfold sensory exercises are variations on the theme of blind-man’s buff, which is so perennially interesting to all children. Any small group of young children, two or three little neighbors come in to play, will with a little guidance at first readily “play” any of the “tactile exercises” described above (pages 60, 61) for hours on end, instead of wrangling about the rocking-horse—a toy invented for solitary or semi-solitary consumption. Any group of children, collected anywhere for ever so short a time, can be converted into a half-hour’s Montessori school, though as a rule the younger they are the better material they are, since they have not fallen into bad mental habits.
The various exercises or “games” for exercising the sense of touch, although not described here in all the detail of their elaboration in the Casa dei Bambini, can be elaborated from these suggestions as one’s own, or what is more likely, the children’s inventiveness may make possible.
The definite education of taste and smell has not been very much developed by Dr. Montessori, although simple exercises have been successfully devised, such as dropping on the tongue tiny particles of substances, sweet, sour, salt, bitter, etc., having the child rinse his mouth out carefully between each test. Similar exercises with different-smelling substances can be undertaken with blindfolded children, asking them to guess what they are smelling. Dr. Montessori[65] lays no great stress on this, however, as the sense of smell with children is not highly developed.
Practice in judging weight is given by the use of pieces of wood of the same size but of different weights, chestnut contrasted with oak, poplar-wood with maple, etc., etc., the child learning by slightly lifting them up and down on the palm of his hand. Later on this can be varied by the use of any objects of about the same size but of different weights, and later still by single objects of weights disproportionate to their size, such as a bit of lead or a small pillow.
The difference between these carefully devised exercises and the haphazard, almost unconscious comparison by the child in the kitchen of the bag of salt and the box of oatmeal, is a very good example of the way in which Dr. Montessori has systematized and ordered, graded and arranged the exercises which every child instinctively craves. The average mother, with leisure to devote to her much-loved child, calls him away from the pantry-shelf where he may upset the oatmeal box or spill the salt, thus “getting into mischief,” and leads him, with mistaken affection, back to his toy animals. The luckier child of a poorer, busier, or more indifferent mother is allowed to “mess around” in the kitchen until he makes himself too intolerable a nuisance. He goes through in this way many valuable sense exercises, but he wastes a great deal of his time in misdirected and futile effort, and does, as a matter of fact, make a great[66] deal of trouble for his elders which is not at all a necessary accompaniment to his own life, liberty, or pursuit of information.
Dr. Montessori has neither led the child away from his instinctively chosen occupations, nor left him in the state of anarchic chaos resulting from his natural inability to choose, among the bewildering variety of objects in the world, those which are best suited for his self-development. She has, so to speak, taken out into the kitchen, beside the child, busy with his self-chosen amusements, her highly trained brain, stored with pertinent scientific information, and she has looked at him long and hard. As a result she is able to show us, what our own blurred observation never would have distinguished, just which elements, in the heterogeneous mass of his naturally preferred toys, are the elements towards which the tendrils of his rapidly-growing intellectual and muscular organism are reaching.