A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The teacher, under this system, is the scientific, observing supervisor of this mental “playground” where the children acquire intellectual vigor, independence, and initiative as spontaneously, joyfully, and tirelessly as they acquire physical independence and vigor as a by-product of physical play. We have long realized that children do not need to be driven by force, or even persuaded, to take the amount of exercise necessary to develop their growing bodies. Indeed the difficulty has been to keep them from doing it so continuously as to interfere with our sedentary adult occupations and tastes. We have learned that all we need to do is to provide the jumping-rope and then leave the child alone with other children. The most passionately inspired pedagogue can never learn to skip rope for a child, any more than in after years he can ever learn the conjugation of a single irregular verb for a pupil. The learner must do his own learning, and, this granted, it follows naturally that the less he is interfered with by arbitrary restraint and vexatious, unnecessary rules, the more quickly and easily he will learn. An observation of the typical, joyfully busy child in a Casa dei Bambini furnishes more than sufficient proof that he enjoys acquiring mental as well as physical agility and strength, and asks nothing better than a fair and unhindered chance at this undertaking.

But even when this deep-laid foundation principle of self-education has been grasped, all is not plain sailing for the adventurer on the Montessori ocean. A set of theories relating to such complicated organisms as human beings, cannot in the nature of things be of primer-like simplicity. For my own convenience I very soon made two main divisions of the different branches on which the Montessori system is developed out of its central main idea. One division, the practical, is made up of theories based on acute, scientific knowledge of the child’s body, his muscles, brain, and nerves, such as only a doctor and a physiological psychologist combined can have. The second division is made up of theories based on the spiritual nature of man, as disclosed by the study of history, by unbiased direct observation of present-day society, and by that divining fervor of enthusiastic reverence for the element of perfectibility in human nature which has always characterized founders of new religions.

This chapter is to be devoted to the narration of what a person, neither a doctor nor a physiological psychologist, was able to understand of the first division.

I think the first point which struck me especially was the insistence on the fact that very little children have no greater natural interest than in learning how to do something with their bodies. We all know how much more fascinating a place our kitchens seem to be for our little children than our drawing-rooms. I have heard this inevitable gravitation towards those back regions of the house accounted for on the theory the “children seem to like servants better than other people. There seems to be some sort of natural affinity between a child and a cook.” One morning spent in the Casa dei Bambini showed me the true reason. Children like cooks and chamber-maids better than callers in the parlor, because servants are always doing something imitable; and they like kitchens and pantries better than drawing-rooms because the drawing-room is a museum full of objects, interesting it is true, but inclosed in the padlocked glass-case of the command, “Now, don’t touch!” while the kitchen is a veritable treasure-house of Montessori apparatus.

The three-year-old child who, eluding pursuit from the front of the house, sits down on the kitchen floor with a collection of cookie-cutters of different shapes in his lap, and amuses himself by running his fingers around their edges, is engaged in a true “stereognostic exercise” as it is alarmingly dubbed in scientific nomenclature. If there is a closet of pots and pans, and he has time before he is dragged off to clean clothes and the vacuity of adult-invented toys, to fit the right covers to the pots and see which pan goes inside which, he has gone through a “sensory exercise for developing his sense of dimension.” If he is struck by the fact that the package of oatmeal, although so large, weighs less than the smaller bag of salt, he has been initiated into a “baric exercise”; while if there are some needles of ice left on the floor by a careless iceman, with these and a permitted dabbling in warm dishwater, he unconsciously invents for himself a “thermic exercise.” If the cook is indulgent or too busy to notice, there may be added to these interests the creative rapture to be evolved from a lump of dough, or a fumbling attempt to fathom the mysterious inwardness of a Dover egg-beater.

I have heard it said of the Montessori method that a system of education accomplished with such simple everyday means could scarcely claim that it is either anything new or the discovery of any one person. It seems to me that is about like denying any novelty to the discovery that pure air will cure consumption. The pure air has always been there, consumptives have had nothing to do but to breathe it to get well, but the doctors who first drove that fact into our impervious heads deserve some credit and can certainly claim that they were innovators with their descent upon the stuffy sickrooms and their command to open the windows.

Children from time immemorial have always done their best, struggling bravely against the tyranny of adult good intentions, to educate themselves by training their senses in all sorts of sense exercise. They have always been (generations of exasperated mothers can bear witness to it!) “possessed” to touch and handle all objects about them. What Dr. Montessori has done is to appear suddenly, like the window-breaking doctors, and to cry to us, “Let them do it!” Or rather, to suggest something better for them to touch and handle since it is neither necessary nor desirable that one’s three-year-old should perfect his sense of form either on one’s cherished Sèvres vase or on a more or less greasy cooking utensil. Nor has he that perverse fondness for the grease of the kettle, or that wicked joy in the destruction of valuable bric-à-brac which our muddle-headed observation has led us to attribute to him. Those are merely fortuitous, and for him negligible, accompaniments to the process of learning how to distinguish accurately different forms. Dr. Montessori assures us, and proves her assertion, that his sole interest is in the varying shapes of the utensils he handles, and that if he is given cleaner, lighter articles with more interesting shapes, he requires no urging to turn to them from his greasy and heavy pots and pans.

Bearing in mind, therefore, the humble and familiar relatives of the Montessori apparatus to be found in our own kitchens and dining-rooms, let us look at it a little more in detail.

The buttoning-frames have been described (page 13). One’s invention can vary them nearly to infinity. In the Casa dei Bambini there are these frames arranged for buttons and buttonholes, for hooks and eyes, for lacings, patent snap-fasteners, ribbon-ends to tie, etc., etc. The aim of this exercise is so apparent that it is scarcely necessary to mention it, except for the constant temptation of a child-lover before the Montessori apparatus to see in it only the most enchanting diversion for a child, which amuses him, though so simply, far more than the most elaborate of mechanical toys. But, and here is where our wool-gathering wits must learn a lesson from purposeful forethought: we should never forget that there is no smallest item in the Montessori training which is intended merely to amuse the child. He is given these buttoning-frames not because they fascinate him and keep him out of mischief, but because they help him to learn to handle, more rapidly than he otherwise would, the various devices by which his clothes and shoes are held together, on his little body. As for the profound and vitally important reason why he should be taught and allowed as soon as possible to dress himself, that will be treated in the discussion of the philosophical side of this baby-training (page 129 ff.).