It has been said that the average American child exhausts the possibilities of the Montessori apparatus at the age of five years. Of course he does. Dr. Montessori planned it as a means of lighting the flame, touching the torch, opening the switch.
With a marvelous completeness it does this. Our part lies in keeping the flame burning, guiding the express train of the child mind into the higher places of reason, imagination, and personal achievement.
THE GREAT SILENCE
Montessori Development of Repose
It was an amazing fact, but a significant one, that four-year-old Joanina had never been allowed to feel herself.
As she lay in her carved-wood cradle, a bundle of cooing, pink delight, she felt for her toes, that she might assure herself of her own identity as represented in those wriggling lumps of flesh. But Joanina’s mother bound the little limbs in swaddling bands and the bambino lost her toes temporarily. When she was a bit older, and was allowed to bask, kitten-like, on a rug in the garden path, she was charmed to hold her flower-like baby hands up to the light, watching the Roman sunshine trickle through outstretched fingers as she tried to count them. But, always, her emotional, kindly intentioned madre would toss a bright-colored ball into the reaching hands or, bending over the baby, would play pat-a-cake with her, or she would suggest a romp up and down the garden. Her self-imposed quiet was always interrupted by her mother’s unrest.
As Joanina grew to a slim little girl of Italy, whose great, wistful brown eyes reflected a large curiosity and awe at the surprises of the world in which she found herself, she was daily surrounded by forces that drew her away from herself. Her home was full of glaring colored pictures hung on vividly dyed wall paper. Her mother and father talked together in high-pitched, shrill voices, and through the wide casement windows came the harsh sounds of traveling street musicians and brawling venders. Always, as a treat on Sunday or a festa, Joanina was taken to see a procession or to a band concert in one of the parks. The crowded, hot stone streets, the noisy cracking of the cab-drivers’ whips, the struggle to make her own short legs keep up with the longer steps of the madre, wearied and excited the little maid.
But she grew accustomed to noise and boisterousness in her days; she grew to expect them as well. Then she came to depend upon outside forces for keeping the motor of her baby spirit going. She begged for new toys, exhausting quickly the pleasure to be found in old playthings. She asked for new frocks, aping the vanity of her mother and the other women she saw on the Corso on feast days. She allowed her child playmates to plan her games. She cried to be taken into the turbid streets. From a placid, reposeful baby, Joanina developed into a restless, passionate, distraction-seeking little girl. Germs of discontent, disquiet, hysteria were planted in her child soul.
When Joanina found herself one morning in the Trionfale Children’s House, she experienced an unconscious feeling of peace. The very wide spaces of the two rooms where the little ones busily and happily worked; the cool gray walls unbroken in their sweep save by a blue and white terra-cotta bas-relief here and there; the plain brown linen curtains that softened and toned the yellow sunlight and rippled with a flower-scented breeze—these helped to make Joanina’s peace. Dropping into one of the little white chairs, she looked about her with eyes that again melted into the calm wonder of her babyhood. She could not have explained it, but there was already at home in her life a new, quiet repose.