The children are encouraged to keep their eyes closed while they are “touching” things, because they can concentrate their attention in this way. And here another general observation should be made: that in the Montessori language “touching” does not mean the brief haphazard contact of hand with object which we usually mean, but a systematic examination of an object by the finger-tips such as a blind person might make.
After the first broad distinction is learned between rough and smooth, there are then to be conquered all the intervening shades and refinements of those qualities. The children take the greatest delight in these exercises and almost at once begin to invent new ones for themselves, “feeling” whatever materials are near them and giving them their proper names, or asking what their names are. It is as if their little minds were suddenly opened, as our dully perceptive adult minds seldom are, to the infinite variety of surfaces in the world. They notice the materials of their own dresses, the stuffs used in upholstering furniture, curtains, dress fabrics, wood, smooth and rough, steel, glass, etc., etc., with exquisitely fairy-light strokes of their sensitive little finger-tips, which seem almost visibly to grow more discriminating.
The “technical apparatus” for continuing this training is varied, but always simple. A collection of slips of sandpaper of varying roughness to be placed in order from fine to coarse by the child (blindfolded or not, as he seems to prefer); other collections of bits of fabrics of all sorts to be identified by touch only; of slips of cardboard, enameled or rough; blotting-paper, writing-paper, newspaper, etc., etc.; of objects of different shapes, cubes, pyramids, balls, cylinders, etc., for the blindfolded child to identify; later on of very small objects like seeds of different shapes or sizes; finally, of any objects which the child knows by sight, his playthings, articles around the house, to be recognized by his touch only.
There is one result on the child’s character of this sort of exercise which Dr. Montessori does not specifically mention but which has struck me forcibly in practical experimentation with it. I have found that little hands and fingers trained by these fascinating “games” to light, attentive, discriminating, and unhurried handling of objects, lose very quickly that instinctive childish, violent but very uncertain clutch at things, which has been for so many generations the cause of so much devastation in the nursery. Little tots of four, trained in this way, can be trusted with glassware and other breakable objects, which would go down to certain destruction in the fitfully governed hands of the average undisciplined child of twelve. In other words the child of four has fitted himself by means of a highly enjoyable process to be, in one more respect, an independent, self-respecting, trustworthy citizen of his world.
Of course all these different exercises are much more entertaining when, like other fun-producing “games,” they are “played” with a crowd of other children. When one child of a group is blindfolded, and as our American children say “It,” while the others sit about, watching his identification of more and more difficult objects, ready, all of them, for a shout of applause at a success, or at a failure for an instant laughing pounce on the coveted blindfold and application of it to the child next in order, of course there is much more jolly laughter, the interest is keener, and the attention more concentrated by the contact with other wits, than can be the case with a single child, even with an audience of the most sympathetic mother or aunt. There is absolutely no adequate substitute for the beneficial action and reaction of children upon one another such as form such a considerable part of the Montessori training in a Casa dei Bambini. On the other hand, those of us who live, as we almost all do, far from any variety of a Montessori school, can, with the exercise of our ingenuity and mother-wit, arrange a great number of more or less adequate temporary expedients. A large number of the Montessori devices, if they were not called “sensory exercises,” would be recognized as merely fascinating new games for children. What is blind-man’s buff but a “sensory exercise for training the ear,” since what the person who is “It” does is to try to catch the slight movements made by the other players accurately enough to pursue and capture them? Children have another game called, for some mysterious reason of childhood, “Still pond, no more moving!” a variety of blind-man’s buff, which trains still more finely the sense of hearing, since the players are required to stand perfectly still, and the one who is “It” must detect their presence by such almost imperceptible sounds as their breathing, or the rustling caused by an involuntary movement. If Montessori herself had invented this game, it could not be more perfectly devised for bodily control. Children who wriggle about in ordinary circumstances without the slightest capacity to control their bodies, even in response to the sternest adult commands for quiet, will stand in some strained position without moving a finger, their concentration so intense that even their breathing is light and inaudible. We must all have seen children happily playing such games; many of us have spent hours and hours of our childhood over them; Froebel used them and others like them plentifully in his system; there are all sorts of more or less hit-or-miss imitations of them being constructed by modern child-tamers; but no one before this Italian woman-doctor ever analyzed them so that we plain unprofessional people could fully grasp their fascination for us; ever told us that children like them because they afford an opportunity to practise self-control, and that similar games based on the same idea that it is “fun” to exercise one’s different senses in company or in competition with one’s youthful contemporaries, would be just as entertaining as these self-invented games, handed down for untold generations from one set of children to another. All the varieties of blindfold sensory exercises are variations on the theme of blind-man’s buff, which is so perennially interesting to all children. Any small group of young children, two or three little neighbors come in to play, will with a little guidance at first readily “play” any of the “tactile exercises” described above (pages 60, 61) for hours on end, instead of wrangling about the rocking-horse—a toy invented for solitary or semi-solitary consumption. Any group of children, collected anywhere for ever so short a time, can be converted into a half-hour’s Montessori school, though as a rule the younger they are the better material they are, since they have not fallen into bad mental habits.
The various exercises or “games” for exercising the sense of touch, although not described here in all the detail of their elaboration in the Casa dei Bambini, can be elaborated from these suggestions as one’s own, or what is more likely, the children’s inventiveness may make possible.
The definite education of taste and smell has not been very much developed by Dr. Montessori, although simple exercises have been successfully devised, such as dropping on the tongue tiny particles of substances, sweet, sour, salt, bitter, etc., having the child rinse his mouth out carefully between each test. Similar exercises with different-smelling substances can be undertaken with blindfolded children, asking them to guess what they are smelling. Dr. Montessori lays no great stress on this, however, as the sense of smell with children is not highly developed.
Practice in judging weight is given by the use of pieces of wood of the same size but of different weights, chestnut contrasted with oak, poplar-wood with maple, etc., etc., the child learning by slightly lifting them up and down on the palm of his hand. Later on this can be varied by the use of any objects of about the same size but of different weights, and later still by single objects of weights disproportionate to their size, such as a bit of lead or a small pillow.
The difference between these carefully devised exercises and the haphazard, almost unconscious comparison by the child in the kitchen of the bag of salt and the box of oatmeal, is a very good example of the way in which Dr. Montessori has systematized and ordered, graded and arranged the exercises which every child instinctively craves. The average mother, with leisure to devote to her much-loved child, calls him away from the pantry-shelf where he may upset the oatmeal box or spill the salt, thus “getting into mischief,” and leads him, with mistaken affection, back to his toy animals. The luckier child of a poorer, busier, or more indifferent mother is allowed to “mess around” in the kitchen until he makes himself too intolerable a nuisance. He goes through in this way many valuable sense exercises, but he wastes a great deal of his time in misdirected and futile effort, and does, as a matter of fact, make a great deal of trouble for his elders which is not at all a necessary accompaniment to his own life, liberty, or pursuit of information.
Dr. Montessori has neither led the child away from his instinctively chosen occupations, nor left him in the state of anarchic chaos resulting from his natural inability to choose, among the bewildering variety of objects in the world, those which are best suited for his self-development. She has, so to speak, taken out into the kitchen, beside the child, busy with his self-chosen amusements, her highly trained brain, stored with pertinent scientific information, and she has looked at him long and hard. As a result she is able to show us, what our own blurred observation never would have distinguished, just which elements, in the heterogeneous mass of his naturally preferred toys, are the elements towards which the tendrils of his rapidly-growing intellectual and muscular organism are reaching.