Then, there is the obvious fact that doctors, like lawyers, see professionally only the ailing or malcontents of the human family, and they suffer from a tendency common to us all, to generalize from the results of their own observation. Our own observation of our own community may quite honestly lead us to the opposite of their conclusions, namely that it is well worth while to make every effort for the diffusion of theories which tend to improve daily life, since, on the whole, people seem to have picked up very quickly indeed the reasonable doctrine of the prevention of illness by means of healthy lives. If they have done this, and are, to all appearances, trying hard to learn more about the process, it is reasonable to hope that they will catch at a similar reasonable mental and moral hygiene for their children, and that they will learn to leave off the unnecessary mental and moral restrictions, the unwise interference with the child’s growth and undue insistence on conformity to adult ideas of regularity, just as they have learned how to leave off the innumerable layers of starched petticoats, the stiff scratchy pantalets, and the close, smothering sunbonnets in which our loving and devoted great-grandmothers required our grandmothers to grow up.
Lastly, there is a vital element in the situation which is perhaps not sufficiently considered by people anxious to avoid the charge of sentimentality. This element is the strength of parental affection, perhaps the strongest and most enduring passion which falls to the lot of ordinary human beings. Only a Napoleon can carry ambition to the intensity of a passion. Great, overmastering love between man and woman is not so common as our romantic tradition would have us believe. In the world of religion, saints are few and far between. Most of us manage to live without being consumed by the reforming fever of those rare souls who suffer under injustice to others as though it were practised on themselves. But nearly every house which contains children, shelters also two human beings the hard crust of whose natural egotism and moral sloth has been at least cracked by the shattering force of this primeval passion for their young, two human beings, who, no matter how low their position in the scale of human ethical development, have in them to some extent that divine capacity for willing self-sacrifice which comes, under other conditions, only to the rarest and most spiritual-minded members of the race. It is not sentimentality but a simple statement of fact to say that there is in parents who take care of their own children (as most American parents do) a natural fund of energy, patience, and willingness to undergo self-discipline, which cannot be counted upon in any other numerous class of people. The Montessori system, with its fresh, vivid presentation of axiomatic truths, with a fervent hope of a practical application of them to the everyday life of every child, addresses itself to these qualities in parents; and, for the sound development of its fundamental idea of self-education and self-government, trusts not only to the wise conclaves of professional pedagogues, but to the co-operation of the fathers and mothers of the world.
CHAPTER XIII
IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MONTESSORI SYSTEM AND THE KINDERGARTEN?
NO one realizes more acutely than I that the composition of this chapter presupposes an amount of courage on my part which it is perhaps hardly exaggeration to call foolhardiness. That I am really venturing upon a battleground is evident to me from the note of rather fierce anticipatory disapproval which I hear in the voice of everyone who asks me the question which heads this chapter. It always accented, “Is there any real difference between the Montessori system and the kindergarten?” with the evident design of forcing a negative answer.
Oddly enough, the same reluctance to grant the possibility of anything new in the Italian method characterizes the attitude of those who intensely dislike the kindergartens, as well as that of its devoted adherents. People who consider the kindergarten “all sentimental, enervating twaddle” ask the question with a truculent tone which makes their query mean, “This new system is just the same sort of nonsense, isn’t it now?”; while those who feel that the kindergarten is one of the vital, purifying, and uplifting forces in modern society evidently use the question as a means of stating, “It can’t be anything different from the best kindergarten ideas, for they are the best possible.”
I have seen too much beautiful kindergarten work and have too sincere an affection for the sweet and pure character of Froebel to have much community of feeling with the rather brutal negations of the first class of inquirers. If they can see nothing in kindergartens but the sentimentality which is undoubtedly there, but which cannot possibly, even in the most exaggerated manifestations of it, vitiate all the finely uplifting elements in those institutions, it is of no use to expect from them an understanding of a system which, like the Froebelian, rests ultimately upon a religious faith in the strength of the instinct for perfection in the human race.
It is therefore largely for the sake of people like myself, with a natural sympathy for the kindergarten, that I am setting out upon the difficult undertaking of stating what in my mind are the differences between a Froebelian and a Montessori school for infants.
I must begin by saying that there are a great many resemblances, as is inevitable in the case of two methods which work upon the same material—children from three to six. And of course it is hardly necessary formally to admit that the ultimate aim of the two educators is alike, because the aim which is common to them—an ardent desire to do the best thing possible for the children without regard for the convenience of the adults who teach them—is the sign manual throughout all the ages, from Plato and Quintilian down, which distinguishes the educator from the mere school-teacher.