Color Boxes Comprising Spools of Eight Colors and Eight Shades of Each Color.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir
CHAPTER VIII
SOME REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYSTEM
WHEN I first began to understand to some extent the thoroughgoing radicalism of the philosophy of liberty which underlies all the intricate detail of Dr. Montessori’s system, I used to wonder why it went home to me with such a sudden inward conviction of its truth, and why it moved me so strangely, almost as the conversion to a new religion. This Italian woman is not the first, by any means, to speak eloquently of the righteousness of personal liberty. As far back as Rabelais’ “Fay ce que vouldras” someone was feeling and expressing that. Even the righteousness of such liberty for the child is no invention of hers. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Émile,” in spite of all its disingenuous evading of the principle in practice, was founded on it in theory; and Froebel had as clear a vision as any seer, as Montessori herself, of just the liberty his followers admit in theory and find it so hard to allow in practice.
Why, then, should those who come to Rome to study the Montessori work, stammerers though they might be, wish, all of them, to go away and prophesy? For almost without exception this was the common result among the widely diverse national types I saw in Rome; always granting, of course, that they had seen one of the good schools and not those which present a farcical caricature of the method.
In thinking the matter over since, I have come to the conclusion that the vividness of inward conviction arises from the fact that the founder of this “new” philosophy bases it on the theory of democracy; and there is no denying that the world to-day is democratic, that we honestly in our heart of hearts believe, as we believe in the law of gravity, that, on the whole, democracy, for all its shortcomings, has in it the germ of the ideal society of the future.
Now, our own democracy was based, a hundred or so years ago, on the idea that men reach their highest development only when they have, for the growth of their individuality, the utmost possible freedom which can be granted them without interfering with the rights and freedom of others. Little by little during the last half-century the idea has grown that, inasmuch as women form half the race, the betterment of the whole social group might be hastened if this beneficial principle were applied to them.
If you will imagine yourself living sixty or so years ago, when, to conservative minds, this idea of personal liberty for women was like the sight of dynamite under the foundations of society, and to radical minds shone like the dawn of a brighter day, you can imagine how startling and thrilling is the first glimpse of its application to children. I felt, during the beginning of my consideration of the question, all the sharp pangs of intellectual growing-pains which must have racked my grandfather when it first occurred to him that my grandmother was a human being like himself, who would very likely thrive under the same conditions which were good for him. For, just as my grandfather, in spite of the sincerest affection for his wife, had never conceived that he might be doing her an injury by insisting on doing her thinking for her, so I, for all my love for my children, had never once thought that, by my competent, loving “management” of them, I might be starving and stunting some of their most valuable moral and intellectual qualities.
In theory I instantly granted this principle of as much personal liberty as possible for children. I could not help granting it, pushed irresistibly forward as I was by the generations of my voting, self-governing ancestors; but the resultant splintering upheaval of all my preconceived ideas about children was portentous.