Montessori children

by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

The children learn, also, all the intricate activities involved in the care of their bodies. They wash their faces and hands, brush their hair, clean their finger nails, black their shoes, put on and take off their aprons. The dressing frames that are included in the Montessori didactic materials include all the different fastenings of a child’s clothing; buttoning on red flannel, buttoning on leather, buttoning on drill with tapes, lacing on cloth and on leather, fastening hooks and eyes and snaps, and tying bow knots.

It is quite amazing to see the eagerness with which the Montessori children attack these very universal activities of everyday life. The skill they obtain in them proves the truth of Dr. Montessori’s words:

“We habitually serve children. This is not only an act of servility toward them, but it is dangerous because it tends to suffocate their useful, spontaneous activity. We are inclined to believe that children are like puppets, and we wash them and feed them as if they were dolls. We do not stop to think that the child who does not do, does not know how to do.

“Our duty toward children is, in every case, that of helping them to make a conquest of such useful acts as nature intended man to perform for himself. The mother who feeds her child without making the slightest effort to teach him to hold and use a spoon for himself is not a good mother. She offends the fundamental, human dignity of her son,—she treats him as if he were a doll. Instead, he is a man, confided for a time by nature to her care.”

There are certain phases of the Montessori method which a mother cannot apply in her home because she has not the preliminary training and the necessary teaching skill. There is not a single activity of the Montessori training for personal and community usefulness of the individual as carried out in the Montessori school that may not be practiced in any home. The Montessori schoolroom is a working duplicate of the best conditions which should exist in every home where there is a baby. It is significant that nations have been aroused by the education miracles wrought in the Roman Children’s Houses. What, pray, is the matter with the American children’s houses?

The home is a big workshop for turning out child cosmopolites, small world citizens who will grow up into useful men and women. In the home the child may learn how to care for his body, how to care for pets, plants, and all the things that combine to fill the tool box of everyday living. Here the child may learn that consideration for others which will help him to be kind, quiet, unselfish, and polite. Here, also, he may take a small part in the care of the big human family in preparing food, laying the table, learning household cleanliness and household order. The child instinct to fetch and carry, which shows itself very early in the life of the baby, may be turned into channels of usefulness if the child is taught to happily wait on himself and others.

Much emphasis has been laid upon the didactic apparatus of Montessori which has for its aim the development of the several intellectual processes. Considering these appliances for direct stimulation and perfection of mental activity only, the casual student of Montessori says that the system is barren, that it takes into account none of the emotional activities of the child, that it eliminates educational play from the life of the little one.

As a matter of fact, the play instincts of the child are so carefully met by Dr. Montessori that they blossom into usefulness. Dr. Montessori knows more about the spontaneous play of the child from two and a half years to six than we do. She sees that his play instincts are all, at first, a struggling to be like his elders, to do the same utilitarian things that he sees them do, to imitate on a child plane the work of his mother in the home or his father in the industrial world. With this understanding of the possibilities of child play for developing into future usefulness, Dr. Montessori supplies children with those tools of play which turn child play into exercises of helpfulness.

In the Trionfale School at Rome the free play of the children has been especially safeguarded. The toddlers utilize their instinct to fetch and carry objects by loading, trundling, and unloading the specially built, stout little wheelbarrows provided for them. Very soon this play blossoms into the desire to fetch and carry with some more useful object in view. The children begin to show great skill in removing and replacing their materials from the school cupboards and putting them back in an orderly fashion. They attain perfect muscular control in laying the tables for luncheon and serving the food daintily. In one corner of a sunlit room at Trionfale there is a fascinating little salon. Soft rugs of small size, diminutive green wicker easy-chairs, sofa, and round tea table, books of colored pictures and large dolls’ dishes make it possible for the children to “play house” under ideal conditions. They learn through their play a sweet kind of hospitality, and the little school “drawing-room” of Montessori stands for a necessary development of the social instinct in children which is important.

Dr. Montessori suggests to us those playthings and play activities which will lead our children into the art of being helpful and, which is much more vital, will start in them habits of wanting to be helpful. Her scheme of play is possible of adapting to almost any home, and it has for its basis the instinctive longing of every child to be useful through his play.