Montessori children

by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

As one watched the phenomenon of this natural unfolding of the social instinct in the method, there were daily examples of its spontaneity. The children, from a collection of units, had been transformed into a small community in which there were groups of workers, some large, some small, but all co-operative. The children carried on the sense exercises and took bold adventures into the fields of reading and writing together. The Montessori directress was always their captain and guide, but the grouping and working with some other child or children was the result of childish initiative.

It developed in this way.

The children learned to live together. They found that the integrity of Clara’s group, of Mario’s, or Otello’s, was preserved only if the individuals in it gave themselves up to the good of the whole. It was pleasanter to move tables and chairs softly, to wait one’s turn, and to avoid jostling one’s neighbor. So kindness and neighborliness and gentleness were learned by the children through their own endeavor.

The children learned together. There were groups of various grades of age and mental ability. Here the children of three and four emptied out an entire box of color spools and, each choosing a color, helped each other grade. There, a trio of energetic babies slopped in their basins, endeavoring to wash each other to a common cleanliness. In a quiet corner an older child taught less advanced children to spell with the movable alphabet or to work out arithmetic calculations with the rods. This group learning was carefully watched and safeguarded by the directress, but she never forced her personality upon the children. The children, left to their own efforts, found a stimulus to a wholesome kind of competition. They tried to outstrip each other in learning, and put forth more effort than if they had been urged by the teacher.

And, best of all, the children were good together.

If one child did anything that interfered with the rights of the others he was kindly but effectually isolated. He was denied nothing save his privilege of being an active, happy member of the child republic. To be allowed to go back to it was his ultimate joy.

The Montessori House of the Children is a place of more unusual development of group activities among little children than we have realized. There is a larger opportunity for making children into little citizens than in almost any other scheme of education.

We have thought that the present practice of the kindergarten, in which group activities are organized and directed by the kindergartner, gives little children the opportunity for the development of the social instinct which they so much need. At a signal, they rise and carry chairs, or march in step, or play a game, but the signal was given by the teacher. She directs the game. We have wandered so far from the leading of the gentle Froebel whose guiding star was the natural impulses of individual children in his garden of little ones.

It is vastly more difficult to lead a number of children safely through a first transition period, when all their self-activity turns into channels of disorder, than to check that disorder by force of adult will. This is the task Dr. Montessori sets for us, however, and she shows us, as the result of our patient leading of the children into habits of self-directed order, her peaceful, industrious Houses of the Children. Like a hive of bees, the little ones swarm in the flowering of their interests. They are intent upon community welfare.

The problem of helping a child to be a perfect social unit is as pressing a problem for the home as for the school. We are following the letter and not the spirit of Montessori when we offer a home child the intellectual stimulus of her didactic apparatus and deny him companionship in the use of it. It is eye-opening for a child to so learn form that he can detect slight variation of outline and is able to perceive the beautiful combination of lines which make a cathedral or an arch. It is soul-opening for this same child to help another child to a perception of this beauty.