He has not only achieved this valuable accomplishment with enormous economy of time, but he has been spared, into the bargain, the endless hours of soul-killing drudgery from which the children in our schools now suffer. The Montessori child has, it is true, gone through a far more searching preparation for this achievement, but it has all been without any strain on his part, without any consciousness of effort except that which springs from the liveliest spontaneous desire. It has tired him, literally, no more than if he had spent the same amount of time playing tag.
I have heard some scientific talk which sounded to my ignorant ears very profound and psychological, about whether this capacity of Montessori children to write can be considered as a truly “intellectual achievement,” or only a sort of unconsciously learned trick. This is a fine theoretic distinction which I think most mothers will feel they can safely ignore. Whatever it is from a psychological standpoint, and however it may be rated in the Bradstreet of pure science, it is an inestimable treasure for our children.
Reading comes after writing in the Montessori system, and has not apparently as inherently close a connection with it as is sometimes thought. That is, a child who can form letters perfectly with his pencil and can compose words with the movable alphabet may still be unable to recognize a word which he himself has neither written nor composed. But, of course, with such a start as the Montessori system gives him, the gap between the two processes is soon bridged. There are various reasons why a detailed account of the Montessori method of teaching reading need not be given here. One is that this book is written for mothers and not teachers, and since the methods for teaching reading in our schools are much better than those used for teaching writing, mothers will naturally, as a rule, leave reading until the child is under a teacher. Furthermore, there is nothing so very revolutionary in the Montessori method in this regard and there exist already in this country several excellent methods for teaching reading. And yet a few notes on some features of the Montessori system will be of interest.
Like many variations of our own system it begins with the recognition of single words. At first these are composed with the movable alphabet. Later, when the child can interpret readily words composed in this way, they are written in large clear script on slips of paper. The child spells the word out letter by letter, and then pronounces these sounds more and more rapidly until he runs them together and perceives that he is pronouncing a word familiar to him. This is always a moment of great satisfaction to him and of encouragement to his teacher.
After this has continued until the children recognize single words quickly, the process is extended to phrases. Here the teacher goes very slowly, with great care, to avoid undue haste and lack of thoroughness. There is a danger here that the children will fall into the mechanical habit (familiar to us all) of reading aloud a page with great glibness, although the sense of the words has made no impression on their minds. To avoid this the Montessori Directress adopts the simple expedient of not allowing them at first to read aloud. She carries on, instead, a series of silent conversations with the children, writing on the board some simple request for an action on their part. “Please stand up,” “Please shut your eyes,” and so on. Later longer and more complicated sentences are written on slips of paper and distributed to the children. They read these to themselves (not being misled by their oral fluency into thinking they understand what they do not), and show that they have understood by performing the actions requested. In other words, these are short letters addressed by the teacher to the children, and answered by silent action on the part of the children. Like all of the Montessori devices, this is self-corrective. It is perfectly easy for the child to be sure whether he has understood the sentence or not, and his attention is fixed, not on pronouncing correctly (which has nothing to do with understanding the sentences before him), but on the comprehension of the written symbols. As for the teacher, she has an absolutely perfect check on the child. If he does not understand, he does not do the right thing. It means the elimination of the “fluent bluffer,” a phenomenon not wholly unfamiliar to teachers, even when they are dealing with very young children.
CHAPTER VI
SOME GENERAL REMARKS ABOUT THE MONTESSORI APPARATUS IN THE AMERICAN HOME
THE first thing to do, if you can manage it, is to secure a set of the Montessori apparatus. It is the result of the ripest thought, ingenuity, and practical experience of a gifted specialist who has concentrated all her forces on the invention of the different devices of her apparatus. But there are various supplementary statements to be made which modify this simple advice.
One is, that the arrival in your home of the box containing the Montessori apparatus means just as much for the mental welfare of your children as the arrival in the kitchen of a box of miscellaneous groceries means for their physical health. The presence on the pantry shelf of a bag of the best flour ever made will not satisfy your children’s hunger unless you add brains and good judgment to it, and make edible, digestible bread for them. There is nothing magical or miraculous about the Montessori apparatus. It is as yet the best raw material produced for satisfying the intellectual hunger of normal children from three to six, but it will have practically no effect on them if its use is not regulated by the most attentive care, supplemented by a keen and never-ceasing objective scrutiny of the children who are to use it. This is one reason why mothers find it harder to educate their children by the Montessori system (as by all other systems) than teachers do, for they have an age-long mental habit of clasping their little ones so close in their arms that, figuratively speaking, they never get a fair, square look at them.