“Mario, don’t run your fingers along the window ledge; don’t handle the door latch. You will soil them. You must not play with copper bowls and pots; they are for cooking, not for little boys.”
As the warfare continued, Mario grew bolder. To be stopped when one is playing with a fruit measure or a door latch or a bright, red copper bowl with no malicious designs upon these but only to satisfy a sense of hunger for knowledge of form, hurt his spirit.
“I will,” he announced one day, when his grandmother tried to rescue her cap from his deft fingering, and he pulled off one of the long, silken streamers.
“I will not,” he further asserted when his mother wished the copper pot to cook her beans, and when she tried to take it from him forcibly, Mario stamped and shrieked and struck his madre.
The habit of saying “I will” or “I won’t” in situations that demand the will to decide, “I won’t” or “I will” is an easy habit for a little child to form and a most dangerous one, morally. It is seldom a self-formed but a parent-stimulated habit. When his mother put Mario, for reformation and “to get rid of him,” in The House of the Children at the Trionfale School in Rome, it was with the assurance:
“He’s a bad little boy. He never does what he ought to; he’s always in mischief.”
“What should be a little child’s ‘oughts’ the first years of life? Isn’t what we call getting into mischief, perhaps, the big business of childhood?” we asked ourselves as we watched Mario in his Montessori development. So, at least, Mario’s teacher decided.
“Go as you please, do as you wish, play with whatever you like—only be careful not to hurt the work or the body of any other little one,” were the words that turned Mario’s struggles to educate himself into a joy instead of a fight.
Sitting in the light of the Roman sunshine and the smiles of the other children of the Children’s House, Mario began to do the thing he was born for in babyhood—he began to see with his fingers.
