The muscular education of Montessori that has a direct bearing upon the direction and development of the child’s will is included in the primary activities of everyday life, in walking, greeting, rising, and handling objects gracefully; in the proper care of the person, in taking part in the management of the household, in gardening, in such handwork as clay modeling and drawing and in all properly co-ordinated gymnastic and rhythmic movements. This new and direct will-training is possible in any home.
A more subtle but quite as important phase of control of the will through doing is seen in connection with the child’s use of the didactic apparatus, especially the solid and geometric insets, the tower, and the broad and long stair. In the use of each of these there lies for the child a very important quality of self-correction. A broad cylinder will not fit into a narrow hole; the plain rectangular inset cannot be made to slip into the outline of the board intended for a square; a misplaced block or rod spoils the sequence of form and number in the tower or the stairs. After being shown the perfect way of carrying on each of these exercises, the child experiments with them alone. He discovers that the material admits of two possibilities: error and success. The success possibility is the greater, however; it is easier to drop a solid inset into an opening that fits than to endeavor to crush it into a hole that is too small. So, by persistent and repeated experiment, the child attains a habit of correcting his own mistakes. This habit he carries over into the other willed activities of his life.
The Montessori method presents three steps in the home development of the child’s will. First, we must give our children as wide and free an opportunity as possible to be active, especially with their hands, along those lines which will lead to muscular control. Second, we must not interfere with a little child’s concentrated occupation through play. Last, whatever task we set for him to do, we must outline a right way in which it should be accomplished and encourage him to correct his own errors in it.
A mother said to me recently, “I keep the children in bibs still, although I suppose they have outgrown them. We can’t have our meals delayed while we wait for three active youngsters to fold napkins.”
Dr. Montessori would have patiently and painstakingly instituted the napkin habit, realizing that in even so simple and homely an operation as folding a square of linen neatly lie undreamed possibilities of strengthening a child’s will.