We would laugh at an ignorant, city-bred person gardening for the first time, who, the instant the two broad cotyledons showed above the ground, began tying strings to them to induce them to climb his pole. Our advice to him would be the obvious counsel, “Leave them alone until they grow their tendrils. You not only can’t do any good by trying to induce those first primitive leaves to climb, but you may hurt your plant so that it will never develop normally.”
The question seems to be, whether we will have the courage and good sense to take similar sound advice from a more experienced and a wiser child-gardener. Dr. Montessori not only expounds to us theoretically this doctrine that the child, properly trained, will spontaneously obey reasonable orders suited to his age with a prompt willingness which grows with his growth, but she shows us in the garden of her schools, bean-poles wreathed triumphantly with vines to the very top. Or, to drop a perhaps too-elaborated metaphor, she shows us children of three or four who willingly obey suggestions suited to their capacities, developing rapidly and surely into children of six and seven whose obedience in all things is a natural and delightful function of their lives. She not only says to us, “This theory will work in actual practice,” but, “It has worked. Look at the result!”
Of course the crux of the matter lies in that phrase, “proper training.” It means years of patient, intelligent, faithful effort on the part of the guardian, to clear away from before the child the different obstacles to the free natural growth of this, as of all other desirable instincts of human nature. To give our children this “proper training” it is not enough to have intellectually grasped the theory of the Montessori method. With each individual child we have a fresh problem of its application to him. Our mother-wits must be sharpened and in constant use. Dr. Montessori has only compiled a book of recipes, which will not feed our families, unless we exert ourselves, and unless we provide the necessary ingredients of patience, intelligence, good judgment, and devotion.
The prize which seems possible to attain by such efforts makes them, however, worthy of all the time and thought we may possibly put upon them. Apparently, judging by the results obtained in the Casa dei Bambini among Italian children, and by Miss George in her school for American children, there is no more need for the occasional storms of temper or outbreaks of exasperated egotism which are so familiar to all of us who care for children, than there is for the occasional “fits of indigestion,” “feverishness,” or “teething-sickness” the almost universal absence of which in the lives of our scientifically-reared children so astonishes the older generation.
For the notable success of Miss George’s Tarrytown school disposes once and for all of the theory that “it may work for Italians, but not with our naturally self-indulgent, spoiled American children.” Fresh from the Casa dei Bambini in Rome, I visited Miss George’s Children’s Home and, except for the language, would have thought myself again on the Via Giusti. The same happy, unforced interest in the work, the same Montessori atmosphere of spontaneous life, the same utter unconsciousness of visitors, the same astonishing industry.
Counting Boxes.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir
When theoretically by talk and discussion with experts on the subject and practically by the sight of the astonishing results shown in the enlightenment and self-mastery of the older children who had been trained in the system, I was led towards the conviction that children really have not that irresistible tendency towards naughtiness which my Puritan blood led me unconsciously to assume, but that their natural tendency is on the whole to prefer to do what is best for them, I felt as though someone had tried to prove to me that the world before my eyes was emancipating itself from the action of some supposedly inexorable natural law.
Naturally, being an Anglo-Saxon, an inhabitant of a cold climate, and the descendant of those troublesome Puritan forefathers, who have interfered so much with the composition of this book, I could not, all in a breath, in this dizzying manner lose that firm conviction of Original Sin which, though no longer insisted upon openly in the teachings of the church, which I no longer attend as assiduously as my parents, still is, I discovered, a very vital element in my conception of life.
No, the doctrine of Original Sin is in the very marrow of my New England bones, but, as a lover of my kind, I rejoice to be convinced of the smallness of its proportion in relation to other elements of human nature, and I bear witness gladly that I never saw or heard of a single case of wilful naughtiness among all the children in the Casa dei Bambini in Rome. And though I still cling unreasonably to my superstition that there is, at least in some American children, an irreducible minimum of the quality which our country people picturesquely call “The Old Harry,” I am convinced that there is far, far less of it than I supposed, and I am overcome with retrospective remorse for all the children I have misjudged in the course of my life.