That thou mayst never guess nor ever see
The all-endured, this nothing-done costs me.”
CHAPTER XIV
MORAL TRAINING
A PERUSAL of the methods of the Montessori schools and of the philosophy underlying them may lead the reader to question if under this new system the child is regarded as a creature with muscular and intellectual activities only, and without a soul. While the sternest sort of moral training is given to the parent or teacher who attempts to use the Montessori system, apparently very little is addressed directly to the child.
Nothing could more horrify the founder of the system than such an idea. No modern thinker could possibly be more penetrated with reverence for the higher life of the spirit than she, or could bear its needs more constantly in mind.
Critics of the method who claim that it makes no direct appeal to the child’s moral nature, and tends to make of him a little egotist bent on self-development only, have misapprehended the spirit of the whole system.
One answer to such a criticism is that conscious moral existence, the voluntary following of spiritual law, being by far the rarest, highest, and most difficult achievement in human life, is the one which develops latest, requires the longest and most careful preparation and the most mature powers of the individual. It is not only unreasonable to expect in a little child much of this conscious struggle toward the good, but it is utterly futile to attempt to force it prematurely into existence. It cannot be done, any more than a six-months baby can be forced to an intellectual undertaking of even the smallest dimension.
As a matter of fact, a normal child under six is mostly a little egotist bent on self-development, and to develop himself is the best thing he can do, both for himself and others, just as the natural business of a healthy child under a year of age is to extract all the physical profit possible out of the food, rest, care, and exercise given him. And yet even here, the line between the varieties of growth—physical, intellectual, and moral—is by no means hard and fast. The six-months baby, although living an almost exclusively physical life, in struggling to co-ordinate the muscles of his two arms so that he can seize a rattle with both hands, is battling for the mastery of his brain-centers, just as the three-year-old, who leads a life composed almost entirely of physical and intellectual interests, still, in the instinct which leads him to pity and water a thirsty plant, is struggling away from that exclusive imprisonment in his own interests and needs which is the Old Enemy of us all. The fact that this altruistic interest is not an overmastering passion which moves him to continuous responsible care for the plant, and the other fact that, even while he is giving it a drink, he has very likely forgotten his original purpose in the fascinations of the antics of water poured out of a sprinkling-pot, should not in the least modify our recognition of the sincerely moral character of his first impulse.