A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The difference in this regard between the two educators may perhaps be stated fancifully in the following way: Froebel gives his teachers, among many other maxims to hang up where they may be constantly in view, a statement running somewhat in this fashion: “All growth must come from a voluntary action of the child himself.” Dr. Montessori not only puts this maxim first and foremost, and exhorts her teachers to bear it incessantly in mind during the consideration of any and all other maxims, but she may be supposed to wish it printed thus: “All growth must come from a VOLUNTARY action of the child HIMSELF.”

The first thing she requires of a directress in her school is a complete avoidance of the center of the stage, a self-annihilation, the very desirability (not to mention the possibility) of which has never occurred to the kindergarten teacher whose normal position is in the middle of a ring of children with every eye on her, with every sensitive, budding personality receiving the strongest possible impressions from her own adult individuality. Without the least hesitation or doubt, she has always considered that her part is to make that individuality as perfect and lovable as possible, so that the impression the children get from it may be desirable. The idea that she is to keep herself strictly in the background for fear of unduly influencing some childish soul which has not yet found itself, is an idea totally unheard of.

I find in a catalogue of kindergarten material this sentence in praise of some new device. “It obviates the need of supervision on the part of the teacher as far as is consistent with conscientious child-training.” Now the Montessori ideal is a device which shall be so entirely self-corrective that absolutely no interference by the teacher is necessary as long as the child is occupied with it. I find in that sentence the keynote of the difference between the two systems. In the kindergarten the emphasis is laid, consciously, or unconsciously, but very practically always, on the fact that the teacher teaches. In the Casa dei Bambini the emphasis is all on the fact that the child learns.

In the beginning of her study the kindergarten teacher is instructed, it is true, as a philosophic consideration, that Pestalozzi held and Froebel accepted the dictum that, just as the cultivator creates nothing in his trees and plants, so the educator creates nothing in the children under his care. This is duly set down in her note-book, but the apparatus given her to work with, the technic taught her, what she sees of the work of other teachers, the whole tendency of her training goes to accentuate what is already racially strong in her temperament, a fixed conviction of her own personal and individual responsibility for what happens about her. She feels keenly (in the case of nervous constitutions, crushingly) the weight of this responsibility, really awful when it is felt about children. She has the quick, energetic, American instinct to do something herself, at once to bring about a desired condition. She is the swimmer who does not trust heartily and wholly to the water to keep him up, but who stiffens his muscles and exhausts himself in the attempt by his own efforts to float. Indeed, that she should be required above all things to do nothing, not to interfere, is almost intellectually inconceivable to her.

This, of course, is a generalization as inaccurate as all generalizations are. There are some kindergarten teachers with great natural gifts of spiritual divination, strengthened by the experiences of their beautiful lives, who feel the inner trust in life which is so consoling and uplifting to the Montessori teacher. But the average American kindergarten teacher, like all the rest of us average Americans, needs the calming and quieting lesson taught by the great Italian educator’s reverent awe for the spontaneous, ever-upward, irresistible thrust of the miraculous principle of growth.

In spite of the horticultural name of her school the ordinary kindergarten teacher has never learned the whole-hearted, patient faith in the long, slow processes of nature which characterizes the true gardener. She is not penetrated by the realization of the vastness of the forces of the human soul, she is not subdued and consoled by a calm certainty of the rightness of natural development. She is far gayer with her children than the Montessori teacher, but she is really less happy with them because, in her heart of hearts, she trusts them less. She feels a restless sense of responsibility for each action of each child. It is doubtless this difference in mental attitude which accounts for the physical difference of aspect between our pretty, smiling, ever-active, always beckoning, nervously conscientious kindergarten teacher, always on exhibition, and the calm, unhurried tranquillity of the Montessori directress, always unobtrusively in the background.

The latter is but moving about from one little river of life to another, lifting a sluice gate here for a sluggish nature, constructing a dam there to help a too impetuous nature to concentrate its forces, and much of the time occupied in quietly observing, quite at her leisure, the direction of the channels being constructed by the different streams. The kindergarten teacher tries to do this, but she seems obsessed with the idea, unconscious for the most part, that it is, after all, her duty to manage somehow to increase the flow of the little rivers by pouring into them some of her own superabundant vital force. In her commendable desire to give herself and her whole life to her chosen work, she conceives that she is lazy if she ever allows herself a moment of absolute leisure, and unoccupied, impersonal observation of the growth of the various organisms in her garden. She must be always helping them grow! Why else is she there? she demands with a wrinkled brow of nervous determination to do her duty, and with the most honest, hurt surprise at any criticism of her work.

It is possible that this tendency in American kindergartens is not only a result of the American temperament, but is inherent in Froebel’s original conception of the kindergarten as the place where the child gets his real social training, as opposed to the home where he gets his individual training. Standing midway between Fichte with his hard dictum that the child belongs wholly to the State and to society, and Pestalozzi’s conviction that he belongs wholly to the family, Froebel thought to make a working compromise by dividing up the bone of contention, by leaving the child in the family most of the time, but giving him definite social training at definite hours every day.

Now there is bound to be, in such an effort, some of the same danger involved in a conception of religious life which ordains that it shall be lived chiefly between half-past ten and noon on every Sunday morning. It may very well happen that a child does not feel social some morning between nine and eleven, but would prefer to pursue some laudable individual enterprise. It may be said that the slight moral coercion involved in insisting that he join in one of the group games or songs of the kindergarten is only good discipline, but the fact remains that coercion has been employed, even though coated with sweet and coaxing persuasion, and the picture of itself conceived by the kindergarten as a place of the spontaneous flowering of the social instinct among children has in it some slight pretense. In the Casa dei Bambini, on the other hand, the children learn the rules and conditions of social life as we must all learn them, and in the only way we all learn them, and that is by living socially.

The kindergarten teacher, set the task of seeing that a given number of children engage in social enterprises practically all the time during a given number of hours every day, can hardly be blamed if she is convinced that she must act upon the children nearly every moment, since she is required to round them up incessantly into the social corral. The long hours of the Montessori school and the freedom of the children, living their own everyday lives as though they were (as indeed they are) in their own home, make a vital difference here. The children, in conducting their individual lives in company with others, are reproducing the actual conditions which govern social life in the adult world. They learn to defer to each other, to obey rules, even to rise to the moral height of making rules, to sink temporarily their own interests in the common weal, not because it is “nice” to do this, not because an adored, infallible, lovely teacher supports the doctrine by her unquestioned authority, not because they are praised and petted when they do, but (and is not this the real grim foundation of laws for social organization?) because they find they cannot live together at all without rules which all respect and obey.