No one?
Little Raffaelo trudged across the court one morning to the Children’s House in the Scuola Famagosta, near which he lived, and there found a kind welcome and a happy, busy community of children like himself. Neat, in his clean apron, and with big, questioning eyes, he sat apart from the others in one corner of the room, watching. Certain of the children were writing big, plain script on the blackboard; others sat quietly reading to themselves from big picture books. Raffaelo’s glance shifted from these to a child who stood near him, working at a low table. What had he brought from the white shelves in that big wooden box? Raffaelo wondered. Why was he turning the box over? But the table was suddenly covered with a mass of color, such as only the Romans know how to dye. From the box came reel upon reel of ravishingly colored silks, every color that tints sky and field and garden—crimson, orange, lemon, the deep green of the grass, and the gray green of the olive leaf; the blue that makes wild iris and children’s eyes, the purple of grapes when the sun shines on the vineyards. If Raffaelo could have counted, he would have known that there were sixty-four of these flat, white wooden spools, wound with eight colors and eight of each color, showing almost all the grading of color that makes this old earth of ours so lovely.
To match the colors two by two is the first exercise.
The colors trickled like a life-giving stream into Raffaelo’s starved senses. He reached for the color spools, snatching a great fistful away from the other child.
“Mio; mio! Me; me!” he cried.
They were his. Some of us steal bread when we are hungry. Some of us steal love when we are famished for it. Children steal because we or the world have starved them of something which they crave for their natural, best development of body, mind, or soul. The habitual public school teacher, the average mother of to-day, would have said:
“Give those colors back. It’s wicked to take something that is not yours!”
The directress of this Montessori school, in which teaching and mothering are practiced in new ways, watched Raffaelo for a moment, asking herself:
“Why does this child steal? Is he blind to law because his need is so great?”