A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The end and aim of the horse-breaker’s effort is to create an animal who will obey literally, with no volition of his own, any command of any human being. The conscientious parent who faces squarely this ultimate logical conclusion of the animal-trainer’s system, must see that his own aim, being entirely opposed to that, must be attained by very different means; and that, since his final goal is to produce a being wholly and wisely self-governing, the sooner the child can be induced to begin the exercise of the faculty of self-government, the more seasoned in experience it will be when vital things begin to depend on it.

It is highly probable that in the heart of the modern parent of the best type, if there is still some of the animal-trainer’s instinct, he is quite and honestly unconscious of it and would be ashamed of it if he recognized it. I think most of us can say sincerely that we have no conscious wish for anything but the child’s best welfare. But in saying this, we admit at once that our problem is vastly more subtle and complicated than the horse-breaker’s, and that we are in need of every ray of light from any source possible.

The particular, vivifying truth which we must imprint on our minds in this connection is that spontaneity of action is the absolute prerequisite for any moral or intellectual advance on the part of any human being. Nor is this, though so constantly insisted upon by Dr. Montessori, any new invention of hers. Dimly felt, it has regulated more or less the best action of the best preachers, the best teachers and lawgivers since the beginning of the world. Pestalozzi formulated it in the hard saying, all the more poignant because it came from a man who had devoted himself with such passionate affection to his pupils, “I have found that no man in God’s wide earth is able to help any other man. Help must come from the bosom alone.” Froebel, in all his general remarks on education, states this principle clearly. Finally, it has been crystallized in the homely adage of old wives, “Every child’s got to do its own growing.”

We all admit the truth of this theory. What is so startling about Dr. Montessori’s attitude towards it, is that she really acts upon it! More than that, she expects us to act on it, all the time, in all the multiform crises of our lives as parents, in this intricate problem of discipline and the training of the will-power as well as in the simpler form of physically refraining from interfering with the child’s efforts to feed and dress himself.

And yet it is natural enough that we should find at first sight such general philosophic statements rather vague and remote, and not at all sufficiently reassuring as we stand face to face with the problem of securing obedience from a lively child of three. We may have seen how we overlooked the obvious reason why a child who cannot obey a command will not; and we may be quite convinced that the first step in securing both self-control and obedience from a child is to put the necessary means in his power; and yet we may be still frankly at a loss and deeply apprehensive about what seems the hopeless undertaking of directly securing obedience even after the child has learned how to obey. All that Dr. Montessori has done for us so far is to call our attention to the fact, which we did not in the least perceive before, that a child is no more born into the world with a full-fledged capacity to obey orders, than to do a sum in arithmetic. But though we agree that we must first teach him his numbers before expecting him to add and subtract, how, we ask ourselves anxiously, can we be in the least sure that he will be willing to use his numbers to do sums with, that he will be willing to utilize his careful preparatory training when it comes to the point of really obeying orders.

At this juncture I can recommend from successful personal experience a courageous abandonment of our traditional attitude of deep distrust towards life, of our medieval conviction that desirable traits can only be hewed painfully out across the grain of human nature. The old monstrous idea which underlay all schooling was that the act of educating himself was fundamentally abhorrent to a child and that he could be forced to do it only by external violence. This was an idea, held by more generations of school-teachers and parents than is at all pleasant to consider, when one reflects that it would have been swept out upon the dump-heap of discarded superstitions by one single, unprejudiced survey of one normal child under normal conditions.

Dr. Montessori, carrying to its full extent a theory which has been slowly gaining ground in the minds of all modern enlightened teachers, has been the first to have the courage to act without reservation on the strength of her observation that the child prefers learning to any other occupation, since the child is the true representative of our race which does advance, even with such painful slowness, away from ignorance towards knowledge. Now, in addition she tells us just as forcibly, that they prefer right, orderly, disciplined behavior to the unregulated disobedience which we slanderously insist is their natural taste. As a result of her scientific and unbiased observation of child-life she informs us that our usual lack of success in handling the problems of obedience comes because, while we do not expect a child at two or three or even four to have mastered completely even the elements of any other of his activities, we do expect him to have mastered all the complex muscular, nervous, mental, and moral elements involved in the act of obedience to a command from outside his own individuality.

She points out that obedience is evidently a deep-rooted instinct in human nature, since society is founded on obedience. Indeed, on the whole, history seems to show that the average human being has altogether too much native instinct to obey anyone who will shout out a command; and that the advance from one bad form of government to another only slightly better, is so slow because the mass of grown men are too much given to obeying almost any positive order issued to them. Going back to our surprised recognition of the child as an inheritor of human nature in its entirety, we must admit that obedience is almost certainly an instinct latent in children.

The obvious theoretic deduction from this reasoning is, that we need neither persuade nor force a child to obey, but only clear-sightedly remove the various moral and physical obstructions which lie in the way of his obedience, with the confident expectation that his latent instinct will develop spontaneously in the new and favorable conditions.

When we plant a bean in the ground we do not feel that we need to try to force it to grow; indeed, we know very well that we can do nothing whatever about that since it is governed entirely by the presence or absence in the seed of the mysterious element of life; nor do we feel any apprehension about the capacity of that smooth, small seed, ultimately to develop into a vine which will climb up the pole we have set for it, will blossom, and bear fruit. We know that, barring accidents (which it is our business as gardeners to prevent), it cannot do anything else, because that is the nature of beans, and we know all about the nature of beans from a long acquaintance with them.