It is true that the best kindergarteners learn from years of experience (which involves making mistakes on a good many children) about when, in general, to let go; but not the most inspired teacher can tell, as the child himself does, when the strain is first felt in the immature, undeveloped brain. And it is this margin of possibility of mistake on the part of the best kindergarten teachers which results only too frequently, with our nervous, too responsive American children, in the flushed faces and unnaturally bright eyes of the little ones who return to us after their happy, happy morning in the kindergarten, unable to eat their luncheons, unable to take their afternoon naps, quivering between laughter and tears, and finding very dull the quiet peace of the home life.
This observation finds any amount of confirmatory evidence in the astonishingly great diversity in mental application among children when really left to their own devices. There is no telling how long or how short a time any given play or game will hold their attention, and both kindergarteners and Montessori teachers agree that it is of value only so long as it really does genuinely hold their attention. Some children are interested only so long as they must struggle against obstacles, and once the enterprise runs smoothly, have no further use for it. With others, the pleasure seems to increase a hundredfold when they are once sure of their own ability.
For it is by no means true that the kindergarten teacher is always apt to continue a given game or exercise too long. It is only too long for some of the children. There are apt to be others whom she deprives, by her discontinuation of the game, of an invigorating exercise which they crave with all their might, and which they would continue, if left free to follow their own inclination, ten times longer than she would dare to think of asking them to do. The pertinacity of children in some exercise which happens exactly to suit their needs is one of the inevitable surprises to people observing them carefully for the first time. Since my attention has been called to it, I have observed this crazy perseverance on unexpected occasions in all children acting freely. Not long ago a child of mine conceived the idea of climbing up on an easy-chair, tilting herself over the arm, sliding down into the seat on her head, and so off in a sprawling heap on the floor. I began to count the number of times she went through this extremely violent, fatiguing, and (as far as I could see) uninteresting exercise, and was fairly astounded by her obstinacy in sticking to it. She had done it thirty-four times with unflagging zest, shouting and laughing to herself, and was apparently going on indefinitely when, to my involuntary relief, she was called away to supper.
In Rome I remember watching a little boy going through the exercises with the wooden cylinders of different sizes which fit into corresponding holes (page 70). He worked away with a busy, serene, absorbed industry, running his forefinger around the cylinders and then around the holes, until he had them all fitted in. Then with no haste, but with no hesitation, he emptied them all out and began over again. He did this so many times that I felt an impatient fatigue at the sight of the laborious little creature, and turned my attention elsewhere. I had counted up to the fourteenth repetition of his feat before I stopped watching him, and when I glanced back again, a quarter of an hour later, he was still at it. All this, of course, without a particle of that “minimum amount of supervision consistent with conscientious child-training.” He was his own supervisor, thanks to the self-corrective nature of the apparatus he was using. If he put a cylinder in the wrong hole he discovered it himself and was forced to think out for himself what the trouble was.
Dr. Montessori says (and I can easily believe her from my own experience) that nothing is harder for even the most earnest and gifted teachers to learn than that their duty is not to solve all the difficulties in the way of the children, or even to smooth these out as much as possible, but on the contrary expressly to see to it that each child is kept constantly supplied with difficulties and obstacles suitable to his strength.
A kindergarten teacher tries faithfully to teach her children so that they will not make errors in their undertakings. She holds herself virtually responsible for this. With a Puritan conscientiousness she blames herself if they do make mistakes, if they do not understand, by grasping her explanation, all the inwardness of the process under consideration, and she repeats her explanations with unending patience until she thinks they do. The Montessori teacher, on the other hand, confines herself to pointing out to the child what the enterprise before him is. She does not, it is true, drop down before him the material for the Long Stair and leave him to guess what is to be done with it. She herself constructs the edifice which is the goal desired. She makes sure that he has a clear concept of what the task is, and then she mixes up the blocks and leaves him to work out his own salvation by the aid of the self-corrective material.
Dr. Montessori has a great many amusing stories to tell of her first struggles with her teachers to make them realize her point of view. Some of them became offended, and resolved, since they were not allowed to help the children, to do nothing at all for them, a resolution which resulted naturally in a state of things worse than the first. It was very hard for them to learn that it was their part to set the machinery of an exercise in motion and then let the child continue it himself. I quite appreciate the difficulty of learning the distinction between directing the children’s activity and teaching them each new step of every process. My own impulse made me realize the truth of Dr. Montessori’s laughing picture of the teacher’s instinctive rush to the aid of some child puzzling over the geometric insets, and I knew, from having gone through many such profuse, voluble, vague, confusing explanations myself, that what they always said was, “No, no, dear; you’re trying to put the round one in the square hole. See, it has no corners. Look for a hole that hasn’t any corners, etc., etc.” It was not until I had sat by a child, restraining myself by a violent effort of self-control from “correcting” his errors, and had seen the calm, steady, untiring hopeful perseverance of his application, untroubled and unconfused by adult “aid,” that I was fully convinced that my impulse was to meddle, not to aid. And I admit that I have many backslidings still.
Half playfully and half earnestly, I am continually quoting to myself the curious quatrain of the Earl of Lytton, a verse which I think may serve as a whimsical motto for all of us energetic American mothers and kindergarteners who may be trying to learn more self-restraint in our relations with little children:
“Since all that I can do for thee
Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be,