“Don’t tell lies!”
He is capricious because we have so often interfered with his normal child activities, because they made him dirty, perhaps, or caused a litter that we thought disorderly. He lies because we have not explained his world to him, or because he fears us. Seldom is a child capricious or untruthful unless we have made him so.
The Montessori directress at the Trionfale Children’s House, first of all, patiently observed Otello. At the end of a week’s time she knew more about him than his mother did, for she had recorded his height, weight, chest, and cranial development and had discovered that he needed physical exercise to help his mental development. We will watch our children’s bodily growth more carefully than we have in the past if we are to be Montessori mothers.
She never commanded the little fellow whose ears were so deafened with the many commands of his mother that he found it a psychological impossibility to obey. Instead she had faith that his new environment, her careful pointing out of right and wrong, and the ordered activities brought about by the Montessori didactic materials would loose his spirit, which had been like a butterfly stabbed by the pin of a scientist.
So we will be patient with our babies and watch them and wait expectantly for the unfolding of their minds and souls which will surely come if we supply the opportunity.
Dr. Montessori gives us a new word for the home and she blots out an old one.
“Why?” is our new word. We will observe the minutest activity of the home child from its first month to the time when it leaves the home for school, asking ourselves the reason for each activity.
“Don’t!” is our blotted-out word. No activity of a child should be inhibited unless it is morally wrong.
From babyhood to the age of six years almost every free movement, every free thought of the child has a meaning in relation to its bodily and mental growth. If we suffocate children’s activities, we suffocate their lives. The good child is not the quiet, inactive child. The perfect child is not the child who is nearest like man.
The only way to keep a child still is to teach him orderly movement. The only way to keep him from handling our things is to give him educational things of his own to handle.