Dr. Montessori has two answers to make to such doubters. One is that the rule in her schools, like the rule in civilized society, is that no act is allowed which transgresses against the common welfare, or is in itself uncomely or offensive. That the children are free, does not mean that they may throw books at each other’s heads, or light a bonfire on the floor, any more than free citizens of a republic may obstruct traffic, or run a drain into the water-supply of a town. It means simply that they are subject to no unnecessary restraint, and above all to no meddling with their instinctive private preferences. The second answer, even more convincing to hard-headed people than the first, is the work done in the Case dei Bambini, where every detail of the Montessori theory has been more than proved, with an abundance of confirmatory detail which astonishes even Dr. Montessori herself. The bugbear of discipline simply does not exist for these schools. By taking advantage of their natural instincts and tendencies, the children are made to perform feats of self-abnegation, self-control, and collective discipline, impossible to obtain under the most rigid application of the old rules, and, as for the amount of information acquired unconsciously and painlessly by those babies, it is one of the fairy-stories of modern times.
CHAPTER IX
APPLICATION OF THIS PHILOSOPHY TO AMERICAN HOME LIFE
NATURALLY, the question which concerns us is, how the spiritual discoveries made in this new institution in a far-away city of Italy, can be used to benefit our own children, in our own everyday, American family life. It must be stated uncompromisingly, to begin with, that they can be applied to our daily lives only if we experience a “change of heart.” The use of the vernacular of religion in this connection is not inappropriate, for what we are facing, in these new principles, is a new phase of the religion of humanity. We are simply, at last, to include children in humanity, and since despotism, even the most enlightened varieties of it, has been proved harmful to humanity, we are to abstain from being their despots, even their paternal, wise, and devoted despots. This does not mean that they are not to live under some form of government of which we are the head. We have as much right to safeguard their interests against their own weaknesses as society has to safeguard ours, in forbidding grade railways in big cities for instance, but we have no more right than society has to interfere with inoffensive individual tastes, preferences, needs, and, above all, initiative.
At this point I can hear in my mind’s ear a chorus of indignant parents’ voices, crying out that nothing is further from their theory or practice than despotism over the children, and that, so far from ruling their little ones, they are the absolute slaves of their offspring (forgetting that in many cases there is no more despotic master than a slave of old standing). To answer this natural protest I wish here to be allowed a digression for the purpose of attempting a brief analysis of a trait of human egotism, the understanding of which bears closely on this phase of the relations of parent and child. I refer to the instinctive pleasure taken by us all in the dependence of someone upon us.
This is so closely connected with benevolence that it is usually wholly unrecognized as a separate and quite different characteristic. Even when it is seen, it is identified only by those who suffer from it, and any intimation of its existence on their part savors so nearly of ingratitude that they have not, as a rule, ventured to complain of what is frequently an almost intolerable tyranny. Just as it is the spiteful member of a family who is the only one to blurt out home-truths which run counter to the traditional family illusions, so it is only a thoroughly bad-tempered analyst, one who takes a malicious pleasure in dwelling on human meannesses, who can perform the useful function of diagnosing this little suspected, very prevalent, human vice.
Here is the sardonic Hazlitt, derisively relieving his mind on the subject of benefactors. “... Benefits are often conferred out of ostentation or pride. As the principle of action is a love of power, the complacency in the object of friendly regard ceases with the opportunity or the necessity for the manifest display of power; and when the unfortunate protégé is just coming to land and expects a last helping hand, he is, to his surprise, pushed back in order that he may be saved from drowning once more. You are not haled ashore as you had supposed by those kind friends, as a mutual triumph, after all your struggles and their exertions on your behalf. It is a piece of presumption in you to be seen walking on terra firma; you are required at the risk of their friendship to be always swimming in troubled waters that they may have the credit of throwing out ropes and sending out life-boats to you without ever bringing you ashore. The instant you can go alone, or can stand on your own ground, you are discarded.”
Now the majority of us in these piping times of mediocrity have no grounds, fancied or real, for assuming the rôle of tyrannical Providence to other people. But the instinct, in spite of the decreased opportunity for its exercise, is none the less alive in our hearts; and when chance throws in our way a little child, our primitive, instinctive affection for whom confuses in our minds the motives underlying our pseudo-benevolent actions, do we not wreak upon it unconsciously all that latent desire to be depended upon, to be the stronger, to be looked up to, to gloat over the weakness of another?
If this seems an exaggerated statement, consider for a moment the real significance of the feeling expressed by the mothers we have all met, when they cry, “Oh, I can’t bear to have the babies grow up!” and when they refuse to correct the pretty, lisping, inarticulate baby talk. I have been one of those mothers myself, and I certainly would have regarded as malicious and spiteful any person who had told me that my feelings sprang from almost unadulterated egotism, and that I “couldn’t bear to have the babies grow up” because I wanted to continue longer in my complacent, self-assumed rôle of God, that I wished to be surrounded by little sycophants who, knowing no standard but my personality, could not judge me as anything but infallible, and that I was wilfully keeping the children granted me by a kind Heaven as weak and dependent on me as possible that they might continue to secrete more food for my egotism.