In other words, when there is some real occasion for formulating or obeying a law which facilitates social life, they formulate it and obey it from an inward conviction, based on genuine circumstances of their own lives, that they must do so, or life would not be tolerable for any of them; and when there is no genuine occasion for their making this really great sacrifice for the common weal, they are left, as we all desire to be left, to the pursuit of their own lives. No artificial occasion for this sacrifice is manufactured by the routine of the school—an artificial occasion which is apt to be resented by the stronger spirits among children even as young as those of kindergarten age. They feel, as we all do, that there is nothing intrinsically sacred or valuable about the compromises necessary to attain peaceable social life, and that they should not be demanded of us except when necessary. Crudely stated, Froebel’s purpose seems to have been that the child should, in two or three hours at a given time every day, do his social living and have it over with. And although this statement is both unsympathetic and incomplete, there is in it the germ of a well-founded criticism of the method which many of us have vaguely felt, although we have not been able to formulate it before studying the principles of a system which seems to avoid this fault.
A conversation I had in Rome with an Italian friend, not in sympathy with the Montessori ideas, illustrates another phase of the difference between the average kindergarten and the Casa dei Bambini. My friend is a quick, energetic, positive woman who “manages” her two children with a competent ease which seems the most conclusive proof to her that her methods need no improvement. “Oh, no, the Case dei Bambini are quite failures,” she told me. “The children themselves don’t like them.” I recalled the room full of blissful babies which I had come to know so well, and looked, I daresay, some of the amused incredulity I felt, for she went on hastily, “Well, some children may. Mine never did. I had to put both the boy and the girl back into a kindergarten. My little Ida summed up the whole matter. She said, ‘Isn’t it queer how they treat you at a Casa dei Bambini! They ask me, “Now which would you like to do, Ida, this, or this?” It makes me feel so queer. I want somebody to tell me what to do!’”
My friend went on to generalize, quite sure of her ground, “That’s the sweet and natural child instinct—to depend on adults for guidance. That’s how children are, and all the Dr. Montessoris in the world can’t change them.”
The difference between that point of view and Dr. Montessori’s is the fundamental difference between the belief in aristocracy, and the value of authority for its own sake, which still lingers among conservatives even in our day, and the whole-hearted belief in democracy which is growing more and more pronounced among most of our thinkers.
Ida is being trained under her mother’s masterful eye to carry on docilely what an English writer has called “the dogmatic method with its demand for mechanical obedience and its pursuit of external results.” She is acquiring rapidly the habit of standing still until somebody tells her what to do, and she has already acquired an unquestioning acquiescence in the illimitable authority of somebody else, anyone who will speak positively enough to regulate her life in all its details. In other words, a finely consistent little slave is being manufactured out of Ida, and if in later years she should develop more of her mother’s forcefulness, it will waste a great deal of its energy in a wild, unregulated revolt against the chains of habit with which she finds herself loaded, and in the end will probably wreak itself on crushing the individuality out of her children in their turn.
Sweet little four-year-old Ida, freed for a moment from the twilight cell of her passive obedience, and blinking pitifully in the free daylight of the Casa dei Bambini, is a figure which has lingered long in my memory and has been one of the factors inducing me to undertake the perhaps too ambitious enterprise of writing this book.
In still another way the Montessori insistence on spontaneity of the children’s action safeguards them, it seems to me, against one of the greatest dangers of kindergarten life, and obviates one of the justest criticisms of the American development of Froebel’s method, namely overstimulation and mental fatigue. When I first thoroughly grasped this fundamental difference, I was reminded of the saying of a wise old doctor who, when I was an intense, violently active girl of seventeen, had given me some sound advice about how to lift the little children with whom I happened to be playing: “Don’t take hold of their hands to swing them around!” he cried to me. “You can’t tell when the strain may be too great for their little bones and tendons. You may do them a serious hurt. Have them take hold of your hands! And when they’re tired, they’ll let go.”
Insets Around Which the Child Draws, and Then Fills in the Outline With Colored Crayons.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir
It now seems to me that in the kindergarten the teachers are the ones who take hold of the children’s hands, and in the Casa dei Bambini it is the other way about. What Dr. Montessori is always crying to her teachers is just the exhortation of my old doctor. What she is endeavoring to contrive is a system which allows the children to “let go” when they themselves, each at a different time, feel the strain of effort. The kindergarten teacher is making all possible conscientious efforts to train herself to an impossible achievement, namely to know (what of course she never can know with certainty) when each child loses his spontaneous interest in his exercises or game. She is as genuinely convinced as the Montessori directress that she must “let go” at that moment, but she is not trained so to take hold of the child that he himself makes that all-important decision.