A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

There are a good many differences in the didactic apparatus and use of it, some of which are too technical to be treated fully here, such as the fact that Froebel, moved by his own extreme interest in crystals and their forms, provides a number of exercises for teaching children the analysis of geometrical forms, whereas Dr. Montessori thinks best not to undertake this with children so young. Kindergarten children are not taught reading and writing, and Montessori children are. Kindergarten children learn more about the relations of wholes to parts in their “number work,” while in the Casa dei Bambini there is more attention paid to numbers in their series.

There are of course many other differences in technic and apparatus, such as might be expected in two systems founded by educators separated from each other by the passage of sixty years and by a difference in race as well as by training and environment. This is especially true in regard to the greater emphasis laid by Dr. Montessori on the careful, minute observation of the children before and during any attempt to instruct them. Trained as she has been in the severely unrelenting rule for exactitude of the positive sciences, in which intelligent observation is elevated to the position of the cardinal virtue necessary to intellectual salvation, her instinct, strengthened since then by much experience, was to give herself plenty of time always to examine the subject of her experimentation. Just as a scientific horticulturist observes minutely the habits of a plant before he tries a new fertilizer on it, and after he has made the experiment goes on observing the plant with even more passionately absorbed attention, so Dr. Montessori trains her teachers to take time, all they need, to observe the children before, during, and after any given exercise. This is, of course, the natural instinct of Froebel, of every born teacher, but the routine of the average school or kindergarten gives the teacher only too few minutes for it, not to speak of the long hours necessary.

On the other hand, even in the details of the technic, there is much similarity between the two systems. Some of the kindergarten blocks are used in Montessori “sensory exercises.” In both institutions the ideal, seldom attained as yet, is for the systematic introduction of gardening and the care of animals. In both the children play games and dance to music; some regular kindergarten games are used in the Casa dei Bambini; in both schools the first aim is to make the children happy; in neither are they reproved or punished. Both systems bear in every detail the imprint of extreme love and reverence for childhood. And yet the moral atmosphere of a kindergarten is as different from that of a Casa dei Bambini as possible, and the real truth of the matter is that one is actually and fundamentally opposed to the other.

To explain this, a few words of comment on Froebel, his life, and the subsequent fortunes of his ideas may be useful. These facts are so well known, owing to the universal respect and affection for this great benefactor of childhood, that the merest mention of them will suffice. The dates of his birth and death are significant, 1782-1852, as is a brief bringing to mind of the intensely German Protestant piety of his surroundings. He died sixty years ago, and a great deal of educational water has flowed under school bridges since then. He died before anyone dreamed of modern scientific laboratories, such as those in which the Italian educator received her sound, practical training, a training which not only put at her disposition an amount of accurate information about the subject of her investigation which would have dazzled Froebel, but formed her in the fixed habit of inductive reasoning which has made possible the brilliant achievements of modern positive sciences, and which was as little common in Froebel’s time as the data on which it works. That he felt instinctively the needs for this solid foundation is shown by his craving for instruction in the natural sciences, his absorption of all the scanty information within his reach, his subsequent deep meditation upon this information, and his attempts to generalize from it.

Another factor in Froebel’s life which scarcely exists nowadays was the tradition of physical violence and oppression towards children. That this has gradually disappeared from the ordinary civilized family, is partly due to the general trend away from physical oppression of all sorts, and partly to Froebel’s own softening influence, for which we can none of us feel too fervent a gratitude. He was forced to devote considerable of his energy to combating this tendency, which was not a factor at all in the problems which confronted Dr. Montessori.

Some time after his death his ideas began to spread abroad not only in Europe (the kindergartens of which I know nothing about, except that they are very successful and numerous), but also in the United States, about whose numerous and successful kindergartens we all know a great deal. The new system was taken up by teachers who were intensely American, and hence strongly characterized by the American quality of force of individuality. It is a universally accepted description of American women (sometimes intended as a compliment, sometimes as quite the reverse) that, whatever else they are, they are less negative, more forceful, more direct, endowed with more positive personalities than the women of other countries. These women, full of energy, quivering with the resolution to put into full practice all the ideas of the German educator whose system they espoused, “organized a campaign for kindergartens” which, with characteristic thoroughness, determination, and devotion, they have carried through to high success.

They, and the educators among men who became interested in the Froebelian ideas, have been by no means willing to consider all advance impossible because the founder of the system is no longer with them. They have been progressively and intelligently unwilling to let 1852 mark the culmination of kindergarten improvement, and they have changed, and patched, and added to, and taken away from the original method as their best judgment and the increasing scientific data about children enabled them. This process, it goes without saying, has not taken place without a certain amount of friction. Naturally everyone’s “best judgment” scarcely coincided with that of everyone else. There have been honest differences of opinion about the interpretation of scientific data. True to its nature as an essentially religious institution, the kindergarten has undergone schisms, been rent with heresies, has been divided into orthodox and heterodox, into liberals and conservatives, although the whole body of the work has gone constantly forward, keeping pace with the increasing modern preoccupation with childhood.

Indeed it seems to me that one may say without being considered unsympathetic that it has now certain other aspects of a popular, prosperous religious sect, among which is a feeling of instinctive jealousy of similar regenerating influences which have their origin outside the walls of the original orthodox church.

Undoubtedly they have some excuse in the absurdly exaggerated current reports and rumors of the miracles accomplished by the Montessori apparatus; but it seems to outsiders that what we have a right to expect from the heads of the organized, established kindergarten movement is an open-minded, unbiased, and extremely minute and thorough investigation into the new ideas, rather than an inspection of popular reports and a resultant condemnation. It is because I am as much concerned as I am astonished at this attitude on their part that I am venturing upon the following slight and unprofessional discussion of the differences between the typical kindergarten and the typical Casa dei Bambini.

To begin with, kindergarteners are quite right when they cry out that there is nothing new in the idea of self-education, and that Froebel stated as plainly as Montessori does that the aim of all education is to waken voluntary action in the child. For that matter, what educator worthy of the name has not felt this? The point seems to be, not that Froebel states this vital principle any less clearly, but so much less forcibly than the Italian educator. Not foreseeing the masterful women, with highly developed personalities, who were to be the apostles of his ideas in America, and not being surrounded by the insistence on the value of each individuality which marks our modern moral atmosphere, it did not occur to him, apparently, that there was any special danger in this direction. For, of course, our modern high estimate of the value of individuality results not only in a vague though growing realization of the importance of safeguarding the nascent personalities of children, but in a plenitude of strongly marked individualities among the adults who teach children, and in a fixed habit of using the strength of this personality as a tool to attain desired ends.