Montessori children

by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

She thought that she was a good mother, but the tear-brimming eyes of the little one, disgraced, hurt, should have mirrored her cruelty. We can’t allow children to finger cut glass, but we ought to furnish them with a substitute for sense-training that will remove the necessity.

Perfecting the sense of touch with the geometric insets.

Our children are born into a world of which they know nothing. They are discoverers, travelers touching an unknown shore, and the first business of their new-found life is to adjust themselves to their environment. Like valiant explorers they plunge into the wilderness in which they find themselves. We furnish them with food and clothing for the journey, but we have quite neglected to offer them at the beginning any chart or compass.

Because of this, the way of a child of two and a half to four years is a stumbling way in our homes. He is hedged in by a wilderness of furnishings and bric-à-brac and household appliances and mechanical devices and different kinds of materials and strange forms and varied colors. It is the business of being a child to notice and handle and smell and test and use these different objects, but we continually thwart him in his attempts to make these social adjustments. In so doing we turn the child into a militant instead of a discoverer. He must conquer his wilderness. Prevented from learning through the medium of his senses, he fights to learn, and we say that he is destructive and wilful and lacking in thoughtfulness.

Dr. Montessori offers our children in the didactic material for sense-training a valuable guide for adjusting himself to his environment. The solid insets, the tower, the broad and long stair teach him through his own experiment and discovery the qualities which all the objects in his world possess; height, breadth, length, thickness in all their combinations and gradations. The color spools give him a chance to recognize and learn practically all the various tints and shades that surround him in his colorful world. The geometric insets bring to him, through his senses of touch and vision, the many and wonderful combinations of line with line and with curves which constitute the form of the world. By means of the Montessori textiles and other appliances for exercising the sense of touch, he learns to detect and discriminate the most minute gradations of softness and roughness, smoothness and coarseness. The Montessori sense-training apparatus guides the child on his spiritual trip through his environment.

It is the guide, however, for the very young child whose senses are hungry. We are so used to waiting on our one, two, and three-year-old babies; we are so busy taking out of their hands our own precious belongings and substituting for them a toy, that the Montessori idea of guiding children, mentally, from the cradle, is strange to us. The average five or six-year-old child completes the Montessori sense-training quickly. What next? we ask.

To be able to, blindfolded, fit a polished wood rectangle in a corresponding rectangular frame is, to the minds of some of us, the climax of a Montessori exercise. To Montessori herself it is only the beginning of education in form; we must help the child to see, feel, recognize form in various combinations; to draw, to love as pure form in the world about him as he has learned with this geometric inset. The Montessori sense-training appliances should be used as the genetic psychologist uses his various instruments and mental tests. They are to arouse and awake into activity habits of quick perception, keen appreciation, and constructive invention.

The greatest thing we can do for a child is to so educate it that it knows its environment and can adjust itself to social conditions. We do this when we teach our children to see, to hear, to touch intelligently. The lure of the senses is a spiritual spell in childhood. If we catch it, then, and turn it into channels of knowledge, we may develop a Marconi, conqueror of space; a Rodin, conqueror of form; a Burbank, conqueror of life—a Carrel, conqueror of death. At least we will have developed an observer who knows how to use his senses in the practical living of life.