Montessori children

by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

It would seem as if we have lost sight of the real character of this elusive, subtle, unexplainable fruition of the mental faculties, the imagination. It is the unforeseen mind power which makes poets and painters and sculptors and conquerors. It is a mind vision which sees success beyond defeat, worth hidden in rags, and good blossoming out of evil. It makes us hear the piping of Pan as the wind blows the reeds beside the river; it promises us a pot of gold if we can build ourselves a rainbow bridge across every cloud of despair; it shows us the lineaments of God in the guise of sorrow and poverty.

Imagination in the child finds varied expressions. There are a great many instances where a child who is lonely and longs for companionship sees and holds daily intercourse with an invisible playmate whom he can describe with great accuracy of detail. In the majority of cases this invisible playmate in disposition, appearance, and tastes is unlike any member of the family or any friend of the child’s. Where did the child find this fancy?

A child has the power of a seer to develop the unknown potentialities in apparently dead things. This dry brown leaf, frost-killed of the sap of life, is, in the child’s fancy, a gnome, jumping along in the path in front of him to warn the birds of the coming of winter. An acorn is a golden goblet brimming with fairy nectar; a hollow tree is a magic place in which to set up a domicile. No one schooled the child in these tricks of thought. How did he find them?

Dr. Montessori explains the growth of child imagination.

The child is born with a certain defined mental equipment. He has instincts, inherited memories they might be called, and he struggles to feed these instincts. He has capacities for acquiring good or bad habits very early. He has a race-old longing to gain knowledge by means of his senses. Our part in the education of the child is to study his instinctive activities, giving them opportunities for free expression where they are important for the child’s best mental development. A child likes to play in the dirt because his ancestors lived in caves and tilled the soil; it is necessary for the child’s best development that he play in sand and model in clay and plant little gardens. A child instinctively fights because his ancestors survived only by warfare; this child instinct we must inhibit.

We must establish good habits in a child early. We must help him, through various sense exercises, to gain clear percepts of his environment. We must try not to force our adult view-point upon the child, but endeavor to establish in him a habit of independent self-active thought.

Then, after we have strengthened the general intellectual processes of the child mind, Dr. Montessori points to us a miracle. Dovetailing instinct and habit and perception, the child intellect begins to build. Clear percepts become concepts; mental images become ideals, imagination appears, building from the clay of everyday-mind stuff a golden castle of dreams.

Imagination cannot be taught. It can scarcely be defined. It can never be prescribed and trained. It is that flowering of the mind processes by means of which a bit of brown sod appears tinted with light and color to the artist, full of potentialities of growth to the gardener, smells of home to the wanderer. If the three types of minds, as children, had been told that a similar piece of sod was a blanket for the sleeping seeds, one questions if it would have been gilded for them in adult life with this glow of individual fancy. On the contrary, the painter has been trained to see color, the gardener has experienced the cultivation of life in the earth, the home lover’s hungry senses grasped the memory of former sense stimuli.

Dr. Montessori tells us that the imagination develops variously in different individuals. There may be a child who will never be able to pierce the veil of reality and find his way into the court of fantasy. There will be also the child who develops a seerlike quality of idealism. He moves in a world of blissful unrealities; he sees angels’ wings in the clouds and angels’ eyes in the stars. Our part in the education of little children is to build the tower for a possible poising of the child’s wings of fancy. Then we will wait hopefully for the wonder flight.