A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

OF course one day’s observations do not give even a bird’s-eye view of all the operations of a Montessori school, and this chapter is intended to supplement somewhat the very incomplete survey of the last and to touch at least, in passing, upon some of the other important activities in which the children are engaged. If this description seems lacking in continuity and uniformity, it represents all the more faithfully the impressions of an observer of a Casa dei Bambini. For there one sees no trace of the slightly Prussian uniformity of action to which we are accustomed in even the freest of our primary schools and kindergartens. You need not expect at ten o’clock to hear the “ten-o’clock class in reading,” for possibly on that day no child will happen to feel like reading. You need not think that the teacher will call up the star pupil to have him write for you. He may be lying on the floor absorbed in an arithmetical game and a Montessori teacher would as soon blow up her schoolroom with dynamite as interfere with the natural direction, taken for the moment by the self-educating instincts of her children.

In planning a visit to a Casa dei Bambini, you can be sure of only one thing, not, however, an inconsiderable thing, and that is that all the children will be happily absorbed in some profitable undertaking. It never fails. There are no “blue Mondays.” Rain or shine outdoors, inside the big room there always blows across the heart of the visitor a fine, tonic breath of free, and hence, never listless life. On days in winter when the sirocco blows, the debilitating wind from Africa, which reduces the whole population of Rome to inert and melancholy passivity, the children in the Casa are perhaps not quite so briskly energetic as usual in their self-imposed task of teaching and governing themselves, but they are by far the most briskly energetic Romans in the city.

It is all so interesting to them, they cannot stop to be bored or naughty. Just as one of our keen, hungry-minded Yankee school-teachers, turned loose for the first time in an historic European city, throws herself with such fervor into the exploration of all its fascinating and informing sights that she is astonished to hear later that it was one of the hottest and most trying summers ever known, so these equally hungry-minded, healthy children fling themselves upon the fascinating and informing wonders of the world about them with such ardor that they are always astonished when the long, happy day is done.

The freedom accorded them is absolute, the only rule being that they must not hurt or annoy others, a rule which, after the first brief chaos at the beginning, when the school is being organized, is always respected with religious care by these little citizens; although to call a Montessori school a “little republic” and the children “little citizens,” gives much too formal an idea of the free-and-easy, happily unforced and natural relations of the children with each other. The phrase Casa dei Bambini is being translated everywhere nowadays by English-speaking people as “The House of Childhood,” whereas its real meaning, both linguistic and spiritual, is, “The Children’s Home.”

That is what it is, a real home for children, where everything is arranged for their best interests, where the furniture is the right size for them, where there are no adult occupations going on to be interrupted and hindered by the mere presence of the children, where there are no rules made solely to facilitate life for grown-ups, where children, without incurring the reproach (expressed or tacit) of disturbing their elders, can freely and joyously, and if they please, noisily, develop themselves by action from morning to night. With the removal by this simple means of most of the occasions for friction in the life of little children, it is amazing to see how few, how negligibly few occasions there are for naughtiness. The great question of discipline which so absorbs us all, solves itself, melts into thin air, becomes non-existent. Each child gives himself the severest sort of self-discipline by his interest in his various undertakings. He learns self-control as a by-product of his healthy absorption in some fascinating pursuit, or as a result of his instinctive imitation of older children.

For instance, no adult was obliged to shout commandingly to the little-girl waitress not to drop her soup-tureen to brush the fly from her nose. She was so filled with the pride of her responsible position that she obeyed the same inner impulse towards self-control which induces adult self-sacrifice. On the other hand, the buttoning boy did not refrain by a similar, violent effort of his will from snatching the blocks from the arithmetical children. It simply never occurred to him, so happily absorbed was he in his own task.

I asked, of course, the question which obsesses every new observer in a Children’s Home, “But what do you do, with all this fine theory of absolute freedom, when a child is naughty? Sometimes, even if not often, you surely must encounter the kicking, screaming, snatching, hair-pulling ‘bad’ child!” I was told then that the health of such a child is looked into at once, such perverted violence being almost certainly the result of deranged physical condition. If nothing pathological can be discovered, he is treated as a morally sick child, given a little table by himself, from which he can look on at the cheerful, ordered play of the schoolroom, allowed any and all toys he desires, petted, soothed, indulged, pitied, but (of course this is the vital point) severely let alone by the other children, who are told that he is “sick” and so cannot play with them until he gets well. This quiet isolation, with its object-lesson of good-natured play among the other children, has a hypnotically calming effect, the child’s “naughtiness” for very lack of food to feed upon, or resistance to blow its flames, disappears and dies away.

This, I say, was the explanation given me at first, but later, when I came to know more intimately the little group of Montessori enthusiasts in Rome, I learned more about the matter. One of my Montessori friends told me laughingly, “We found that nobody would believe us at all when we told the simple truth, when we said that we never, literally never, do encounter that hypothetical, ferociously naughty, small child. They look at us with such an obvious incredulity that, for the honor of the system, we had to devise some expedient. So we ransacked our memories for one or two temporary examples of ‘badness’ which we met at first before the system was well organized, and remembered how we had dealt with them. Now, when people ask us what we do when the children begin to scratch and kick each other, instead of insisting that children as young as ours, when properly interested, never do these things, we tell them the old story of our device of years ago.”

I have said that the real translation for Casa dei Bambini is The Children’s Home, and I feel like insisting upon this rendering, which gives us so much more idea of the character of the institution. At least, from now on, in this book, that English phrase will be used from time to time to designate a Montessori school. It is, for instance, their very own home not only in the sense that it is a place arranged specially for their comfort and convenience, but furthermore a place for which they feel that steadying sense of responsibility which is one of the greatest moral advantages of a home over a boarding-house, a moral advantage of home life which children in ordinary circumstances are rarely allowed to share with their elders. They are boarders (though gratuitous ones) with their father and mother, and, as a natural consequence, they have the remote, detached, unsympathetic aloofness from the problem of running the house which is characteristic of the race of boarders.

In the Casa dei Bambini this is quite different. Because it is their home and not a school, the hours are very long, practically all the day being spent there. The children have the responsibility not only for their own persons, but for the care of their Home. They arrive early in the morning and betake themselves at once to the small washstands with pitchers and bowls of just the size convenient for them to handle. Here they make as complete a morning toilet as anyone could wish, washing their faces, necks, hands, and ears (and behind the ears!), brushing their teeth, making manful efforts to comb their hair, cleaning their finger-nails with scrupulous care, and helping each other with fraternal sympathy. It is astonishing (for anyone who had the illusion that she knew child-nature) to note the contrast between the vivid purposeful attention they bestow on all these processes when they are allowed to do them for themselves, and the bored, indifferent impatience we all know so well when it is our adult hands which are doing all the work. The big ones (of five and six) help the little ones, who, eager to be “big ones” in their turn, struggle to learn as quickly as possible how to do things for themselves.