THE POSSIBILITY OF AMERICAN ADAPTATIONS OF, OR ADDITIONS TO, THE MONTESSORI APPARATUS  
HOLDING firmly in mind the guiding principle formulated in the paragraph preceding, it may not be presumptuous for us, in addition to exercising our children with the apparatus devised by Dr. Montessori, to attempt to apply her main principles in ways which she has not happened to hit upon. She herself would be the first to urge us to do this, since she constantly reiterates that she has but begun the practical application of her theories, and she calls for the co-operation of the world in the task of working out complete applications suitable for different conditions.
It is my conviction that, as soon as her theories are widely known and fairly well assimilated, she will find, all over the world, a multitude of ingenious co-partners in her enterprise, people who, quite unconscious of her existence, have been for years approximating her system, although never doing so systematically and thoroughly. Is it not said that each new religion finds a congregation ready-made, of those who have been instinctively practising the as yet unformulated doctrines?
[106]An incident in my own life which happened years ago, is an example of this. One of the children of the family, an adored, delicate little boy of five, fell ill while we were all in the country. We sent at once in the greatest haste to the city for a trained nurse, and while awaiting her arrival, devoted ourselves to the task of keeping the child amused and quiet in his little bed. The hours of heart-sickening difficulty and anxiety which followed can be imagined by anyone who has, without experience, embarked on that undertaking. We performed our wildest antics before that pale, listless little spectator, we offered up our choicest possessions for his restless little hands, we set in motion the most complicated of his mechanical toys; and we quite failed either to please or to quiet him.
The nurse arrived, cast one glance at the situation, and swept us out with a gesture. We crept away, exhausted, beaten, wondering by what possible miraculous tour de force she meant single-handed to accomplish what had baffled us all, and holding ourselves ready to secure for her anything she thought necessary, were it the horns of the new moon. In a few moments she thrust her head out of the door and asked pleasantly for a basket of clothes-pins, just common wooden clothes-pins.
When we were permitted to enter the room an hour or so later, our little patient scarcely glanced at us, so absorbed was he in the fascinatingly various angles at which clothes-pins may be thrust into each other’s[107] clefts. When he felt tired, he shut his eyes and rested quietly, and when returning strength brought with it a wave of interest in his own cleverness, he returned to the queer agglomeration of knobby wood which grew magically under his hands. Now Dr. Montessori could not possibly have used that “sensory exercise,” as they have no clothes-pins in Italy, fastening their washed garments to wires, with knotted strings; and the nurse was probably married with children of her own before Dr. Montessori opened the first Casa dei Bambini; but that was a true Montessori device, and she was a real “natural-born” Montessori teacher. And I am sure that everyone must have in his circle of acquaintances several persons who have such an intuitive understanding of children that Dr. Montessori’s arguments and theories will seem to them perfectly natural and axiomatic. One of my neighbors, the wife of a farmer, a plain Yankee woman who would be not altogether pleased to hear that she is bringing up her children according to the theories of an inhabitant of Italy, has, by the instinctive action of her own wits, hit upon several inventions which might, without surprising the Directress, be transferred bodily to any Casa dei Bambini. All of her children have gone through what she calls the “folding-up fever,” and she has laid away in the garret, waiting for the newest baby to grow up to it, the apparatus which has so enchanted and instructed all the older ones. This “apparatus,” to use the unfortunately mouth-filling and inflated name[108] which has become attached to Dr. Montessori’s simple expedients, is a set of cloths of all shapes and sizes, ranging from a small washcloth to an old bedspread.
When the first of my neighbor’s children was a little over three, his mother found him, one hot Tuesday, busily employed in “folding up,” that is, crumpling and crushing the fresh shirtwaists which she had just laboriously ironed smooth. She snatched them away from him, as any one of us would have done, but she was nimble-witted enough to view the situation from an impersonal point of view which few of us would have adopted. She really “observed” the child, to use the Montessori phrase; she put out of her mind with a conscious effort her natural, extreme irritation at having the work of hours destroyed in minutes, and she turned her quick mind to an analysis of the child’s action, as acute and sound as any the Roman psychologist has ever made. Not that she was in the least conscious of going through this elaborate mental process. Her own simple narration of what followed, runs: “I snatched ’em away from him and I was as mad as a hornit for a minit or two. And then I got to thinkin’ about it. I says to myself, ‘He’s so little that ’tain’t nothin’ to him whether shirtwaists are smooth or wrinkled, so he couldn’t have taken no satisfaction in bein’ mischievous. Seems ’s though he was wantin’ to fold up things, without really sensin’ what he was doin’ it with. He’s seen me fold things up. There’s other things than shirtwaists he could fold, that ’twouldn’t[109] do no harm for him to fuss with.’ And I set th’ iron down and took a dish-towel out’n the basket and says to him, where he set cryin’, ‘Here, Buddy, here’s somethin’ you can fold up.’ And he set there for an hour by the clock, foldin’ and unfoldin’ that thing.”
That historic dish-towel is still among the “apparatus” in her garret. Five children have learned deftness and exactitude of muscular action by means if it, and the sixth is getting to the age when his mother’s experienced eye detects in him signs of the “fever.”
Now, of course, the real difference between that woman and Dr. Montessori, and the real reason why Dr. Montessori’s work comes in the nature of a revelation of new forces, although hundreds of “natural mothers” long have been using devices strongly resembling hers, is that my neighbor hasn’t the slightest idea of what she is doing and she has a very erroneous idea of why she is doing it, inasmuch as she regards the fervor of her children for that fascinating sense exercise, as merely a Providential means to enable her to do her housework untroubled by them. She could not possibly convince any other mother of any good reason for following her examples because she is quite ignorant of the good reason.
Dr. Montessori, on the other hand, with the keen self-consciousness of its own processes which characterizes the trained mind, is perfectly aware not not only of what she is doing, but of a broadly[110] fundamental and wholly convincing philosophical reason for doing it; namely, that the child’s body is a machine which he will have to use all his life in whatever he does, and the sooner he learns the accurate and masterful handling of every cog of this machine the better for him.
Now, whenever frontier conditions exist, people generally are forced to learn to employ their senses and muscles much more competently than is possible under the usual modern conditions of specialized labor performed almost entirely away from the home; and though for most of us the old-fashioned conditions of farm-life so ideal for children, the free roaming of field and wood, the care and responsibility for animals, the knowledge of plant-life, the intimate acquaintance with the beauties of the seasons, the enforced self-dependence in crises, are impossibly out of reach, we can give our children some of the benefits to be had from them by analyzing them and seeing exactly which are the elements in them so tonic and invigorating to child-life, and by adapting them to our own changed conditions. There are even a few items which we might take over bodily. A number of families in my acquaintance have inherited from their ancestors odd “games” for children, which follow perfectly the Montessori ideas. One of them is called the “hearth-side seed-game” and is played as the family sits about the hearth in the evening,—though it might just as well be played about a table in the dining-room with the light turned low. Each child[111] is given a cup of mixed grains, corn, whea............