A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Exercises in Practical Life.

Building “the Tower.”
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir

It is apparent, of course, that the blindfolded child who was identifying the pieces of different fabrics was training his sense of touch. The sight of this exercise reminds the average person with a start of surprise that he too was born with a sense of touch which might have been cultivated if anyone had thought of it; for most of us, by the enormity of our neglect of our five senses, reduce them, for all practical purposes to two, sight and hearing, and distrust any information which comes to us by other means. Our complacency under this self-imposed deprivation is astonishing. It is as if a man should wear a patch over one eye because he is able to see with one and thinks it not worth while to use two. Now, it is apparent that our five senses are our only means of conveying information to our brains about the external world which surrounds us, and it is equally apparent that to act wisely and surely in the world, the brain has need of the fullest and most accurate information possible. Hence it is a foregone conclusion, once we think of it at all, that the education of all the senses of a child to rapidity, agility, and exactitude is of great importance, not at all for the sake of the information acquired at the time by the child, but for the sake of the five, finely accurate instruments which this education puts under his control. The child who was identifying the different fabrics was blindfolded to help him concentrate his sense of touch on the problem and not aid this sense or mislead it, as we often do, with his sight.

It may be well here to set down a few facts about the relative positions of the senses of touch and of sight, facts which are not known to many of us, and the importance of which is not realized by many who happen to know them. Everyone knows, to begin with, that a new-born baby’s eyes, while physically perfect, are practically useless, and that the ability to see with them accurately comes very gradually. It seems that it comes much more gradually than the people usually in charge of little children have ever known, and that, roughly speaking, up to the age of six, children need to have their vision reinforced by touch if, without great mental fatigue, they are to get an accurate conception of the objects about them.

It appears furthermore that, as if in compensation for this slow development of vision, the sense of touch is extraordinarily developed in young children. In short, that the natural way for little ones to learn about things is to touch them. Dr. Montessori found that the finger-tips of little children are extremely sensitive, and she claims that there is no necessity, granted proper training, why this valuable faculty, only retained by most adults in the event of blindness, should be lost so completely in later life.

Now it is plain to be seen that we adults, with our fixed habit of learning about things from looking at them, have, in neglecting this means of approach to the child-brain, been losing a golden opportunity. If children learn more quickly and with less fatigue through their fingers than through their eyes, why not take advantage of this peculiarity—a peculiarity which extends even more vividly to child-memory, for it is established beyond question that a little child can remember the “feel” of a given object much more accurately and quickly than the look of it. It is easy to understand, once this explanation is given, the great stress that is laid, in Montessori training, on the different exercises for developing and utilizing the sense of touch.

One of the first things a child just admitted to a Casa dei Bambini is taught is to keep his hands scrupulously clean, because we can “touch things better” with clean finger-tips than with dirty ones. And, of course, he is allowed to take the responsibility of keeping his own hands clean, and encouraged to do it by the presence of the little dainty washstands, just the right height for him, supplied with bowl, pitcher, etc., just the right size for him to handle. The joy of the children in these simple little washstands, and their deft, delighted, frequent use of them is a reproach to us for not furnishing such an easily secured amelioration in the life of every one of our babies.

The education of the sense of touch, like all the Montessori exercises for the senses, begins with a few simple and strongly contrasting sensations and proceeds little by little, to many only very slightly differing sensations, following the growth of the child’s ability to differentiate. The child with clean finger-tips begins, therefore, with the first broad distinction between rough and smooth. He is taught to pass his finger-tips lightly, first over a piece of sandpaper, and then over a piece of smoothly polished wood, or glossy enameled paper, and is told briefly, literally in two words, the two names of those two abstract qualities.

Here, in passing, with the first mention of this sort of exercise, it should be stated that the children are taught to make these movements of the hand and all others like them always from left to right, so that a muscular habit will be established which will aid them greatly later when they come to “feel” their letters, which are, of course, always written from left to right.