Montessori children

by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

From his first day he showed an amazing inventiveness along lines of disorder. To tear a finished picture that his little girl neighbor had zealously colored, to swoop down upon the heights of the pink tower whose perfect building some other baby had just achieved in a patch of sunlight on the floor and overturn it—these seemed to be Otello’s most joyful triumphs. And always, as he planned some act of disorder, he looked up, expectantly, for the blow, the harsh command with which the misdirected force of childhood is so often met by the brute force of the adult.

But these never came. Instead, he saw a group of sympathetic little ones run softly across the wide spaces of the room to help Mario in rearranging his color spools. There was no thought of him, Otello the law breaker, but only the love of Mario in their hearts. In place of the reproof that he almost longed for, that he might meet it with rebellion, he felt the touch of warm lips on his forehead, and he heard the soft voice of the directress:

“Ah, Otello, that was wrong.”

There was no other word of blame, no command, you must not, for him to meet with his marvelous strength of will and, I shall. He might choose the thing that was wrong—or——

It was one sweet spring morning in Italy that I saw the miracle happen to Otello, a morning when the free breezes from the Roman hills brought heavy odors of grape and orange blooms and the birds sang their freedom outside the windows of the Trionfale Children’s House. Otello sat in a little white chair in front of a little white table, suddenly quiet and thinking. He saw, all about him, other little white chairs and low white tables. If he wished he might choose another chair; no one would insist that he stay in one seat. The brown linen curtains at the windows rustled pleasantly with the perfume-laden wind. If Otello wished he might go out in the playground for a breath of that wind. No one would prevent him. In front of him he saw another large room with a piano and low white cabinets filled with fascinating Montessori materials, and colored rugs for spreading on the stone floor, and many babies, of his own kind, sitting there busily at work. A child might dash over and spoil the work of a dozen children at one attack. Or a child might do a little experimenting himself with these materials that so engrossed the others. Otello chose the latter course, and going to one of the cabinets, he selected one of the solid insets, a long polished wood frame, into which fit ten fascinatingly smooth cylinders of varying diameters. Holding the cylinders by their shining brass knobs, he put them in their proper places in the frame, took them out, put them in again a dozen, a score of times. Unconsciously he was training his sense of touch, but more than this, he was exercising his conscience in a new way. A small cylinder refused to fit in a large hole in the frame; a large cylinder could not be forced, no matter how strenuously he hammered it with his little clenched fist, into a small hole. Before Otello put each cylinder in its proper place, he tested it with a larger or smaller hole.

“Wrong!” he whispered to himself in the first instance; and,

“Right!” he ejaculated when the good, smooth little piece of wood dropped out of sight in its own hole.

After almost three-quarters of an hour of this will training, for the little child who persists in a piece of work and completes it is taking the first steps toward properly directed will, Otello looked up from his work. Mario, his neighbor, bent over the color spools again. From the pocket of Mario’s apron protruded one of the crown jewels of childhood—a big glass marble. Otello had no marble. With all the longing of his heart he had wanted one. Mario bent lower over his color matching and the shining glass sphere, as if it were alive, slipped from his pocket, dropped to the floor, and rolled across to Otello.

With quick stealthiness Otello grasped it in his eager little fingers. It was his marble now; no one had seen him take it; in his little brown palm it held and scintillated a hundred colors. How happy it made him to own it; he would slip it into the hole in his shoe to keep it safe until he reached home! But, even as he made a hurried movement to hide his booty, his prisoned soul burst its cocoon. With one of the rare smiles in his eyes that one sees in the undying children of Raphael, Otello ran over to Mario and dropped the marble in his lap.