A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The first thing that Dr. Montessori’s penetrating and daring eye had seen in her survey of the problem of education, and the fact to which she devotes throughout her most forceful, direct, and pungent explanation, had simply never occurred to me, in spite of Froebel’s mild divination of it; namely, that children are nothing more or less than human beings. I was as astonished by this fact as I was amazed that I had not thought of it myself; and I instantly perceived a long train of consequences leading off from it to a wholly unexplored country. True, children are not exactly like adults; but then, neither are women exactly like men, nor are slow, phlegmatic men exactly like the red-headed, quick-tempered type; but they all belong to the genus of human beings, and those principles which slow centuries of progress have proved true about the genus as a whole hold true about subdivisions of it. Children are much weaker physically than most adults, their judgment is not so seasoned by experience, and their attention is more fitful. Hence, on the whole, they need more guidance than grown-ups. But, on the other hand, the motives, the instincts, the needs, the potential capacities of children are all human and nothing but human. Their resemblances to adults are a thousand times more numerous and vital than their differences. What is good for the one must, in a not excessively modified form, be good for the other.

With this obvious fact firmly in mind, Dr. Montessori simply looked back over history and drew upon the stores of the world’s painfully acquired wisdom as to the best way to extract the greatest possibilities from the world’s inhabitants. If it is true, she reasoned, that men and women have reached their highest development only when they have had the utmost possible liberty for the growth of their individualities, if it is true that slavery has been the most ruinously unsatisfactory of all social expedients, both for masters and slaves, if society has found it necessary for its own good to abolish not only slavery but caste laws and even guild rules; if, with all its faults, we are agreed that democracy works better than the wisest of paternal despotisms, then it ought to be true that in the schoolroom’s miniature copy of society there should be less paternal despotism, more democracy, less uniformity of regulation and more,—very much more,—individuality.

Therefore, although we cannot allow children as much practical freedom as that suitable for men of ripe experience, it is apparent that it is our first duty as parents to make every effort to give them as full a measure of liberty as possible, exercising our utmost ingenuity to make the family life an enlightened democracy. But this is not an easy matter. A democracy, being a much more complicated machine than an autocracy, is always harder to organize and conduct. Moreover the family is so old a human institution that, like everything else very old, it has acquired barnacle-like accretions of irrelevant tradition. Elements of Russian tyranny have existed in the institution of the family so long that our very familiarity with them prevents us from recognizing them without an effort, and prevents our conceiving family life without them; quite as though in this age of dentistry, we should find it difficult to conceive of old age without the good old characteristic of toothlessness. To renovate this valuable institution of the family (and one of the unconscious aims of the Montessori system is nothing more or less than the renovation of family life), we must engage upon a daily battle with our own moral and intellectual inertia, rising each morning with a fresh resolve to scrutinize with new eyes our relations to our children. We must realize that the idea of the innate “divine right of parents” is as exploded an idea as the “divine right of kings.” Fathers and mothers and kings nowadays hold their positions rightfully only on the same conditions as those governing other modern office-holders, that they are better fitted for the job than anyone else.

I speak from poignant personal experience of the difficulty of holding this conception in mind. When I said above that I “saw at once a long train of consequences following this new principle of personal liberty for children,” I much overstated my own acumen; for I am continually perceiving that I saw these consequences but very vaguely through the dimmed glasses of my unconscious, hidebound conservatism, and I am constantly being startled by the possibility of some new, although very simple application of it in my daily contact with the child-world. A wholesome mental exercise in this connection is to run over in one’s mind the dramatic changes in human ideas about family life which have taken place gradually from the Roman rule that the father was the governor, executioner, lawgiver, and absolute autocrat, down to our own days. For all our clinging to the idea of a closely intimate family-life, most of us would turn with horror from any attempt to return to such tyranny as that even of our own Puritan forebears. It is possible that our descendants may look back on our present organization with as much astonished and uncomprehending revulsion.

The principle, then, of the Montessori school is the ideal principle of democracy, namely, that human beings reach their highest development (and hence are of most use to society) only when for the growth of their individuality they have the utmost possible liberty which can be granted them without interfering with the rights of others. Now, when Dr. Montessori, five years ago, founded the first Casa dei Bambini, she not only believed in that principle but she saw that children are as human as any of us; and, acting with that precipitate Latin faith in logic as a guide to practical conduct which is so startling to Anglo-Saxons, she put these two convictions into actual practice. The result has electrified the world.

She took as her motto the old, old, ever-misunderstood one of “Liberty!”—that liberty which we still distrust so profoundly in spite of the innumerable hard knocks with which the centuries have taught us it is the only law of life. She was convinced that the “necessity for school discipline” is only another expression of humanity’s enduring suspicion of that freedom which is so essential to its welfare, and that schoolroom rules for silence, for immobility, for uniformity of studies and of results, are of the same nature and as outworn as caste rules in the world of adults, or laws against the free choice of residence for a workman, against the free choice of a profession for women, against the free advance of any individual to any position of responsibility which he is capable of filling.

All over again in this new field of education Dr. Montessori fought the old fight against the old idea that liberty means red caps and riots and guillotines. All afresh, as though the world had never learned the lesson, she was obliged to show that liberty means the only lasting road to order and discipline and self-control. Once again, for the thousandth time, people needed to be reminded that the reign of the tyrant who imposes laws on human souls from the outside (even though that tyrant intends nothing but the best for his subjects and be called “teacher”), produces smothered rebellion, or apathy, or broken submissiveness, but never energetic, forward progress.

For this constant turning to that trust in the safety of freedom which is perhaps the only lasting spiritual conquest of our time, is the keynote of her system. This is the real answer to the question, “What is there in the Montessori method which is so different from all other educational methods?” This is the vital principle often overlooked in the fertility of invention and scientific ingenuity with which she has applied it.

This reverence for the child’s personality, this supreme faith that liberty of action is not only safe to give children, but is the prerequisite of their growth, is the rock on which the edifice of her system is being raised. It is also the rock on which the barks of many investigators are wrecked. When they realize that she really puts her theory into execution, they cry out aghast, “What! a school without a rule for silence, for immobility, a school without fixed seats, without stationary desks, where children may sit on the floor if they like, or walk about as they please; a school where children may play all day if they choose, may select their own occupations, where the teacher is always silent and in the background—why, that is no school at all—it is anarchy!”

One seems to hear faint echoes from another generation crying out, “What! a society without hereditary aristocracy, without a caste system, where a rail-splitter may become supreme governor, where people may decide for themselves what to believe without respect for authority, and may choose how they wish to earn their livings, ... this is no society at all! It is anarchy!”