A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Now, sincerity in moral impulse is a prerequisite to healthy moral life, the importance of which cannot be overstated by the most swelling devices of rhetoric. It is an essential in moral life as air is in physical life; in other words moral life of any kind is entirely impossible without it. Hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, is a far worse enemy than ignorance, since it poisons the very springs of spiritual life, and yet few things are harder to avoid than unconscious hypocrisy. A realization of this truth is perhaps the explanation of a recent tendency in America for fairly intelligent, fairly conscientious parents utterly to despair of seeing any light on this problem, and to attempt to solve it by running away from it, to throw up the whole business in dismay at its difficulty, to attempt no moral training at all because so much that is given is bad, and to “let the children go, until they are old enough to choose for themselves.”

It is possible that this method, chosen in desperation, bad though it obviously is, is better than the older one of attempting to explain to little children the mysteries of the ordering of the universe before which our own mature spirits pause in bewildered uncertainty. The children of six who conceive of God as a policeman with a long white beard, oddly enough placed in the sky, lying on the clouds, and looking down through a peephole to spy upon the actions of little girls and boys, have undoubtedly been cruelly wronged by the creation of this grotesque and ignoble figure in their little brains, a figure which, so permanent are the impressions of childhood, will undoubtedly, in years to come, unconsciously render much more difficult a reverent and spiritual attitude towards the Ultimate Cause. But because this attempt at spiritual instruction is as bad as it can be, it does not follow that the moral nature of the little child does not need training fitted to its capacities, limited though these undoubtedly are in early childhood. There is no more reason for leaving a child to grow up morally unaided by a life definitely designed to develop his moral nature, than for leaving him to grow up physically unaided by good food, to expect that he will select this instinctively by his own unaided browsings in the pantry among the different dishes prepared for the varying needs of his elders.

The usual method by which bountiful Nature, striving to make up for our deficiencies, provides for this, is by the action of children upon each other. This factor is, of course, notably present in the Casa dei Bambini in the all-day life in common of twenty children. In families it is especially to be seen in the care and self-sacrifice which older children are obliged to show towards younger ones. But in our usual small prosperous American families, this element of enforced moral effort is often wanting. Either there are but one or two children, or if more, the younger ones are cared for by a nurse, or by the mother sufficiently free from pressing material care to give considerable time to the baby of the family. And on the whole it must be admitted that Nature’s expedient is at best a rough-and-ready one. Though the older children may miss an opportunity for spiritual discipline, it is manifestly better for the baby to be tended by an adult.

But there are other organisms besides babies which are weaker than children, and the care for plants and animals seems to be the natural door through which the little child may first go forth to his lifelong battle with his own egotism. It is always to be borne in mind that the Case dei Bambini now actually existing are by no means ideal embodiments of Dr. Montessori’s ideas (see page 227). She has not had a perfectly free hand with any one of them and herself says constantly that many phases of her central principle have never been developed in practice. Hence the absence of any special morally educative element in the present Casa dei Bambini does not in the least indicate that Dr. Montessori has deliberately omitted it, any more than the perhaps too dryly practical character of life in the original Casa dei Bambini means anything but that the principle was being applied to very poor children who were in need, first of all, of practical help. For instance, music and art were left out of the life there, simply because, at that time, there seemed no way of introducing them. It is hard for us to realize that the whole movement is so extremely recent that there has not been time to overcome many merely material obstacles. In the same way, although circumstances have prevented Dr. Montessori from developing practically the Casa dei Bambini as far in the direction of the care of plants and animals as she would like, she is very strongly in favor of making this an integral and important part of the daily life of little children.

In this she is again, as in so many of the features of her system, only using the weight of her scientific reputation to force upon our serious and respectful attention means of education for little children which have all along lain close at hand, which have been mentioned by other educators (Froebel has, of course, his elder boys undertake gardening), but of which, as far as very young children go, our recognition has been fitful and imperfect. She is the modern doctor who proclaims with all the awe-compelling paraphernalia of the pathological laboratory back of him, that it is not medicine, but fresh air which is the cure for tuberculosis. Most parents already make some effort to provide pets (if they are not too much trouble for the rest of the family) with a vague, instinctive idea that they are somehow “good for children,” but with no conscious notion of how this “good” is transferred or how to facilitate the process; and child-gardens are not only a feature of some very advanced and modern schools and kindergartens, but are provided once in a while by a family, although nearly always, as in Froebel’s system, for older children. But as those institutions are now conducted in the average family economy, the little child gets about as casual and irregular an opportunity to benefit by them as the consumptive of twenty years ago by the occasional whiffs of fresh air which the protecting care of his nurses could not prevent from reaching him. The four-year-old, as he and his pets are usually treated, does not feel real responsibility for his kitten or his potted plant and, missing that, he misses most of the good he might extract from his relations with his little sisters of the vegetable and animal world.

Our part, therefore, in this connection, is to catch up the hint which the great Italian teacher has let fall and use our own Yankee ingenuity in developing it, always bearing religiously in mind the fundamental principle of self-education which must underlie any attempt of ours to adapt her ideas to our conditions. For, of course, there is nothing new in the idea of associating children with animals and plants—an idea common to nearly all educators since the first child played with a puppy. What is new is our more conscious, sharpened, more definite idea, awakened by Dr. Montessori’s penetrating analysis, of just how these natural elements of child-life can be used to stimulate a righteous sense of responsibility. Our tolerant indifference towards the children’s dogs and cats and guinea-pigs, our fatigued complaint that it is more bother than it is worth to prepare and oversee the handling of garden-plots for the four- and five-year-olds, would be transformed into the most genuine and ardent interest in these matters, if we were penetrated with the realization that their purposeful use is the key to open painlessly and naturally to our children the great kingdom of self-abnegation. There is not, as is apt to be the case with dolls, a more or less acknowledged element of artificiality, even though it be the sweet “pretend” mother-love for a baby doll. The children who really care for plants and animals are in a sane world of reality, as much as we are in caring for children. Their services are of real value to another real life. The four-year-old youngster who rushes as soon as he is awake to water a plant he had forgotten the day before, is acting on as genuine and purifying an impulse of remorse and desire to make amends as any we feel for a duty neglected in adult life. The motives which underlie that most valuable moral asset, responsibility, have been awakened, exercised, strengthened far more vitally than by any number of those Sunday morning “serious talks” in which we may try fumblingly and futilely from the outside to touch the child’s barely nascent moral consciousness. The puppy who sprawls destructively about the house, and the cat who is always under our feet when we are in a hurry, should command respectful treatment from us, since they are rehearsing quaintly with the child a first rough sketch of the drama of his moral life. The more gentleness, thoughtfulness, care, and forbearance the little child learns to show to this creature, weaker than himself, dependent on him, the less difficult he will find the exercise of those virtues in other circumstances. He is forming spontaneously, urged thereto by a natural good impulse of his heart, a moral habit as valuable to him and to those who are to live with him, as the intellectual habits of precision formed by the use of the geometric insets.

Of course, he will in the first place form this habit of unvarying gentleness towards plants and animals, only as he forms so many other habits, in simian imitation of the actions of those about him. He must absorb from example, as well as precept, the idea that plants and animals, being dependent on us, have a moral right to our unfailing care—a conception which is otherwise not suggested to him until he is several years older and has back of him the habit of several years of indifference toward this duty of the strong.

And so here is our hard-working Montessori parent embarked upon the career of animal-rearing, as well as child-training, with the added difficulty that he must care for the animals through the children, and resist stoutly the almost invincible temptation to take over this, like all other activities which belong by right to the child, for the short-cut reason that it is less trouble. If this impulse of the parent be followed, the mere furry presence will be of no avail to the child, except casually. The kitten must be the little girl’s kitten if she is really to begin the long preparation which will lead her to the steady and resolute self-abnegations of maternity, the preparation which we hope will make her generation better mothers than we undisciplined and groping creatures are.

As for plant-life, the Antæus-like character of humanity is too well known to need comment. We are all healthier and saner and happier if we have not entirely severed our connection with the earth, and it is surprising that, recognizing this element as consciously as we do, we have made so comparatively little systematic and regular use of it in the family to benefit our little children. It is not because it is very hard to manage. What has been lacking has been some definite, understandable motive to make us act in this way, beyond the sentimental notion that it is pretty to have flowers and children together. No one before has told us quite so plainly and forcibly that this observation of plants and imaginative sympathy with their needs is the easiest and most natural way for little minds to get a first general notion of the world’s economy, the struggle between helpful and hurtful forces, and of the duty of not remaining a passive onlooker at this strife, but of entering it instinctively, heartily throwing all one’s powers on the side of the good and useful.

I know a child not yet quite three, who, by the maddeningly persistent interrogations characteristic of his age, has succeeded in extracting from a pair of gardening elders an explanation of the difference between weeds and flowers, and who has been so struck by this information that he has, entirely of his own volition, enlisted himself in the army of natural-born reformers. With the personal note of very little children, who find it so impossible to think in terms at all abstract, he has constructed in his baby mind an exciting drama in the garden, unfolding itself before his eyes; a drama in which he acts, by virtue of his comparatively huge size and giant strength, the generous rôle of deus ex machina, constantly rescuing beauty beset by her foes. He throws himself upon a weed, uproots it, and casts it away with the righteously indignant exclamation, “Horrid old weed! Stop eating the flowers’ dinner!”