The kind of toy Dr. Montessori recommends for physical development.
Every Thursday morning a crowd of thirty or forty eager tourists from all over the world wait with impatience to be admitted to the Montessori school on the Via Giusti, Rome. Silently, led by a white-robed sister, they enter the schoolroom and seat themselves in quiet expectant rows to watch the miracle of Montessori physical freedom. A hush, a tinkle of child laughter, and the babies flock in from the garden. Noiselessly, gracefully, with no rude jostling or crowding—and alone—they greet each visitor with outstretched hands. Then, like a bevy of little men and women, eager to work, eager to achieve, they hasten to the cabinets that hold the didactic materials, to choose their material for the day. Nothing drops, nothing is broken, no child hurts his neighbor in his haste, and they find their places, some stretched out on the floor, some seated at the white tables. When the hour for the midday meal comes, the materials are as carefully put back in their places in the cabinet and the little ones lay the tables for luncheon. To see a child balance a tray that holds five filled tumblers, to see another child bring in a huge bowl of warm soup and serve it with no mishaps, these interest curious sightseers as much as the Roman Colosseum or the Roman baths.
But isn’t, after all, the child who has come, by natural steps, to this control of his mind and body the normal child? Are not our children, whom we feed and dress and lead and fasten into high chairs, the abnormal ones? It is vastly easier to lace a child’s shoes, to hold his hand when he goes up and down steps, to fetch and carry for him, than to teach him this muscular co-ordination, but it is just this careful teaching of the simple things of life that makes the Montessori child a sight for tourists.
“What makes these children so good?” I heard a visitor ask her neighbor one morning as she watched the Via Giusti little ones.
A number of factors contribute to the goodness of the Montessori child, but one of the most important of these is that he “knows himself.” He knows his body, what it can do and what it must not do. This physical freedom leads naturally and surely to freedom of the spirit.
THE FREEING OF OTELLO, THE TERRIBLE
Montessori Awakening of Conscience Through Directed Will
He was so wee a bambino to have absorbed so much brutality in his heart. Not quite three summers and winters old was Otello when his mother pushed him across the threshold of the big, cool, white room of the Trionfale Public School at Rome that houses a Montessori Children’s House. There she left him after a volley of guttural speech that told the little dark-eyed girl directress how uncontrolled and passionate was this baby of Rome, a quaint little “man” in stuff dress and bare legs and torn shoes who looked with stolid wonder into the happy eyes of the other babies.
At first it seemed as if the mother were right. In an awed whisper to Dr. Montessori the girl directress spoke of Otello as “the terrible.” He met love with apparent hate, kindness with malevolence, sociability with taciturn aloofness. Did little Mario with painstaking effort lay a carpet of beautifully tinted color spools in careful order on his table; then Otello swooped down from his watchful corner and with one sweep of his fat hand wrought confusion in the beauty. Did a stone lie, harmless, in the school garden; Otello found it and used it with dire results. Did Valia, the toddler, with much toil fill her small wheelbarrow with a precious load of sticks ready to trundle it across the playground; Otello intervened, overturned the barrow, and gloated over Valia’s tears.