IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MONTESSORI SYSTEM AND THE KINDERGARTEN?  
NO one realizes more acutely than I that the composition of this chapter presupposes an amount of courage on my part which it is perhaps hardly exaggeration to call foolhardiness. That I am really venturing upon a battleground is evident to me from the note of rather fierce anticipatory disapproval which I hear in the voice of everyone who asks me the question which heads this chapter. It always accented, “Is there any real difference between the Montessori system and the kindergarten?” with the evident design of forcing a negative answer.
Oddly enough, the same reluctance to grant the possibility of anything new in the Italian method characterizes the attitude of those who intensely dislike the kindergartens, as well as that of its devoted adherents. People who consider the kindergarten “all sentimental, enervating twaddle” ask the question with a truculent tone which makes their query mean, “This new system is just the same sort of nonsense, isn’t it now?”; while those who feel that the kindergarten is one of the vital, purifying, and uplifting forces in modern society evidently use the[172] question as a means of stating, “It can’t be anything different from the best kindergarten ideas, for they are the best possible.”
I have seen too much beautiful kindergarten work and have too sincere an affection for the sweet and pure character of Froebel to have much community of feeling with the rather brutal negations of the first class of inquirers. If they can see nothing in kindergartens but the sentimentality which is undoubtedly there, but which cannot possibly, even in the most exaggerated manifestations of it, vitiate all the finely uplifting elements in those institutions, it is of no use to expect from them an understanding of a system which, like the Froebelian, rests ultimately upon a religious faith in the strength of the instinct for perfection in the human race.
It is therefore largely for the sake of people like myself, with a natural sympathy for the kindergarten, that I am setting out upon the difficult undertaking of stating what in my mind are the differences between a Froebelian and a Montessori school for infants.
I must begin by saying that there are a great many resemblances, as is inevitable in the case of two methods which work upon the same material—children from three to six. And of course it is hardly necessary formally to admit that the ultimate aim of the two educators is alike, because the aim which is common to them—an ardent desire to do the best thing possible for the children without regard for[173] the convenience of the adults who teach them—is the sign manual throughout all the ages, from Plato and Quintilian down, which distinguishes the educator from the mere school-teacher.
There are a good many differences in the didactic apparatus and use of it, some of which are too technical to be treated fully here, such as the fact that Froebel, moved by his own extreme interest in crystals and their forms, provides a number of exercises for teaching children the analysis of geometrical forms, whereas Dr. Montessori thinks best not to undertake this with children so young. Kindergarten children are not taught reading and writing, and Montessori children are. Kindergarten children learn more about the relations of wholes to parts in their “number work,” while in the Casa dei Bambini there is more attention paid to numbers in their series.
There are of course many other differences in technic and apparatus, such as might be expected in two systems founded by educators separated from each other by the passage of sixty years and by a difference in race as well as by training and environment. This is especially true in regard to the greater emphasis laid by Dr. Montessori on the careful, minute observation of the children before and during any attempt to instruct them. Trained as she has been in the severely unrelenting rule for exactitude of the positive sciences, in which intelligent observation is elevated to the position of the[174] cardinal virtue necessary to intellectual salvation, her instinct, strengthened since then by much experience, was to give herself plenty of time always to examine the subject of her experimentation. Just as a scientific horticulturist observes minutely the habits of a plant before he tries a new fertilizer on it, and after he has made the experiment goes on observing the plant with even more passionately absorbed attention, so Dr. Montessori trains her teachers to take time, all they need, to observe the children before, during, and after any given exercise. This is, of course, the natural instinct of Froebel, of every born teacher, but the routine of the average school or kindergarten gives the teacher only too few minutes for it, not to speak of the long hours necessary.
On the other hand, even in the details of the technic, there is much similarity between the two systems. Some of the kindergarten blocks are used in Montessori “sensory exercises.” In both institutions the ideal, seldom attained as yet, is for the systematic introduction of gardening and the care of animals. In both the children play games and dance to music; some regular kindergarten games are used in the Casa dei Bambini; in both schools the first aim is to make the children happy; in neither are they reproved or punished. Both systems bear in every detail the imprint of extreme love and reverence for childhood. And yet the moral atmosphere of a kindergarten is as different from that of a Casa dei Bambini as possible, and the real[175] truth of the matter is that one is actually and fundamentally opposed to the other.
To explain this, a few words of comment on Froebel, his life, and the subsequent fortunes of his ideas may be useful. These facts are so well known, owing to the universal respect and affection for this great benefactor of childhood, that the merest mention of them will suffice. The dates of his birth and death are significant, 1782-1852, as is a brief bringing to mind of the intensely German Protestant piety of his surroundings. He died sixty years ago, and a great deal of educational water has flowed under school bridges since then. He died before anyone dreamed of modern scientific laboratories, such as those in which the Italian educator received her sound, practical training, a training which not only put at her disposition an amount of accurate information about the subject of her investigation which would have dazzled Froebel, but formed her in the fixed habit of inductive reasoning which has made possible the brilliant achievements of modern positive sciences, and which was as little common in Froebel’s time as the data on which it works. That he felt instinctively the needs for this solid foundation is shown by his craving for instruction in the natural sciences, his absorption of all the scanty information within his reach, his subsequent deep meditation upon this information, and his attempts to generalize from it.
Another factor in Froebel’s life which scarcely[176] exists nowadays was the tradition of physical violence and oppression towards children. That this has gradually disappeared from the ordinary civilized family, is partly due to the general trend away from physical oppression of all sorts, and partly to Froebel’s own softening influence, for which we can none of us feel too fervent a gratitude. He was forced to devote considerable of his energy to combating this tendency, which was not a factor at all in the problems which confronted Dr. Montessori.
Some time after his death his ideas began to spread abroad not only in Europe (the kindergartens of which I know nothing about, except that they are very successful and numerous), but also in the United States, about whose numerous and successful kindergartens we all know a great deal. The new system was taken up by teachers who were intensely American, and hence strongly characterized by the American quality of force of individuality. It is a universally accepted description of American women (sometimes intended as a compliment, sometimes as quite the reverse) that, whatever else they are, they are less negative, more forceful, more direct, endowed with more positive personalities than the women of other countries. These women, full of energy, quivering with the resolution to put into full practice all the ideas of the German educator whose system they espoused, “organized a campaign for kindergartens” which, with characteristic[177] thoroughness, determination, and devotion, they have carried through to high success.
They, and the educators among men who became interested in the Froebelian ideas, have been by no means willing to consider all advance impossible because the founder of the system is no longer with them. They have been progressively and intelligently unwilling to let 1852 mark the culmination of kindergarten improvement, and they have changed, and patched, and added to, and taken away from the original method as their best judgment and the increasing scientific data about children enabled them. This process, it goes without saying, has not taken place without a certain amount of friction. Naturally everyone’s “best judgment” scarcely coincided with that of everyone else. There have been honest differences of opinion about the interpretation of scientific data. True to its nature as an essentially religious institution, the kindergarten has undergone schisms, been rent with heresies, has been divided into orthodox and heterodox, into liberals and conservatives, although the whole body of the work has gone constantly forward, keeping pace with the increasing modern preoccupation with childhood.
Indeed it seems to me that one may say without being considered unsympathetic that it has now certain other aspects of a popular, prosperous religious sect, among which is a feeling of instinctive jealousy of similar regenerating influences which have their[178] origin outside the walls of the original orthodox church.
Undoubtedly they have some excuse in the absurdly exaggerated current reports and rumors of the miracles accomplished by the Montessori apparatus; but it seems to outsiders that what we have a right to expect from the heads of the organized, established kindergarten movement is an open-minded, unbiased, and extremely minute and thorough investigation into the new ideas, rather than an inspection of popular reports and a resultant condemnation. It is because I am as much concerned as I am astonished at this attitude on their part that I am venturing upon the following slight and unprofessional discussion of the differences between the typical kindergarten and the typical Casa dei Bambini.
To begin with, kindergarteners are quite right when they cry out that there is nothing new in the idea of self-education, and that Froebel stated as plainly as Montessori does that the aim of all education is to waken voluntary action in the child. For that matter, what educator worthy of the name has not felt this? The point seems to be, not that Froebel states this vital principle any less clearly, but so much less forcibly than the Italian educator. Not foreseeing the masterful women, with highly developed personalities, who were to be the apostles of his ideas in America, and not being surrounded by the insistence on the value of each individuality which marks our modern moral atmosphere, it did[179] not occur to him, apparently, that there was any special danger in this direction. For, of course, our modern high estimate of the value of individuality results not only in a vague though growing realization of the importance of safeguarding the nascent personalities of children, but in a plenitude of strongly marked individualities among the adults who teach children, and in a fixed habit of using the strength of this personality as a tool to attain desired ends.
The difference in this regard between the two educators may perhaps be stated fancifully in the following way: Froebel gives his teachers, among many other maxims to hang up where they may be constantly in view, a statement running somewhat in this fashion: “All growth must come from a voluntary action of the child himself.” Dr. Montessori not only puts this maxim first and foremost, and exhorts her teachers to bear it incessantly in mind during the consideration of any and all other maxims, but she may be supposed to wish it printed thus: “All growth must come from a VOLUNTARY action of the child HIMSELF.”
The first thing she requires of a directress in her school is a complete avoidance of the center of the stage, a self-annihilation, the very desirability (not to mention the possibility) of which has never occurred to the kindergarten teacher whose normal position is in the middle of a ring of children with every eye on her, with every sensitive, budding[180] personality receiving the strongest possible impressions from her own adult individuality. Without the least hesitation or doubt, she has always considered that her part is to make that individuality as perfect and lovable as possible, so that the impression the children get from it may be desirable. The idea that she is to keep herself strictly in the background for fear of unduly influencing some childish soul which has not yet found itself, is an idea totally unheard of.
I find in a catalogue of kindergarten material this sentence in praise of some new device. “It obviates the need of supervision on the part of the teacher as far as is consistent with conscientious child-training.” Now the Montessori ideal is a device which shall be so entirely self-corrective that absolutely no interference by the teacher is necessary as long as the child is occupied with it. I find in that sentence the keynote of the difference between the two systems. In the kindergarten the emphasis is laid, consciously, or unconsciously, but very practically always, on the fact that the teacher teaches. In the Casa dei Bambini the emphasis is all on the fact that the child learns.
In the beginning of her study the kindergarten teacher is instructed, it is true, as a philosophic consideration, that Pestalozzi held and Froebel accepted the dictum that, just as the cultivator creates nothing in his trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the children under his care. This is duly set down in her note-book, but the apparatus[181] given her to work with, the technic taught her, what she sees of the work of other teachers, the whole tendency of her training goes to accentuate what is already racially strong in her temperament, a fixed conviction of her own personal and individual responsibility for what happens about her. She feels keenly (in the case of nervous constitutions, crushingly) the weight of this responsibility, really awful when it is felt about children. She has the quick, energetic, American instinct to do something herself, at once to bring about a desired condition. She is the swimmer who does not trust heartily and wholly to the water to keep him up, but who stiffens his muscles and exhausts himself in the attempt by his own efforts to float. Indeed, that she should be required above all things to do nothing, not to interfere, is almost intellectually inconceivable to her.
This, of course, is a generalization as inaccurate as all generalizations are. There are some kindergarten teachers with great natural gifts of spiritual divination, strengthened by the experiences of their beautiful lives, who feel the inner trust in life which is so consoling and uplifting to the Montessori teacher. But the average American kindergarten teacher, like all the rest of us average Americans, needs the calming and quieting lesson taught by the great Italian educator’s reverent awe for the spontaneous, ever-upward, irresistible thrust of the miraculous principle of growth.
In spite of the horticultural name of her school[182] the ordinary kindergarten teacher has never learned the whole-hearted, patient faith in the long, slow processes of nature which characterizes the true gardener. She is not penetrated by the realization of the vastness of the forces of the human soul, she is not subdued and consoled by a calm certainty of the rightness of natural development. She is far gayer with her children than the Montessori teacher, but she is really less happy with them because, in her heart of hearts, she trusts them less. She feels a restless sense of responsibility for each action of each child. It is doubtless this difference in mental attitude which accounts for the physical difference of aspect between our pretty, smiling, ever-active, always beckoning, nervously conscientious kindergarten teacher, always on exhibition, and the calm, unhurried tranquillity of the Montessori directress, always unobtrusively in the background.
The latter is but moving about from one little river of life to another, lifting a sluice gate here for a sluggish nature, constructing a dam there to help a too impetuous nature to concentrate its forces, and much of the time occupied in quietly observing, quite at her leis............