A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Now I myself, like all the American matrons of my circle of acquaintances, am laboring conscientiously to teach my children “good manners,” but I decided, on the instant, nothing would induce me to collect twenty children of our town and have a Montessori teacher enter the room to be greeted by them. The contrast would be too painful. These were mostly children of very poor, ignorant, and utterly untrained parents, and ours are children of people who flatter themselves that they are the opposite of all that; but I shuddered to think of the long silent, discourteous stare which is the only recognition of the presence of a visitor in our schools. And yet I felt at once that I was attaching too much importance to a detail, the merest trifle, the slightest, most superficial indication of the life beneath. We Anglo-Saxons notice too acutely, I thought, these surface differences of manner.

But, on the other hand, I was forced to consider that I knew from bitter experience that children of that age are still near enough babyhood to be absolutely primeval in their sincerity, and that it is practically impossible to make them, with any certainty of the result, go through a form of courtesy which they do not feel genuinely. Also I observed that no one had pushed the children towards us, as I push mine, toward a chance visitor, with the command accompanied by an inward prayer for obedience, “Go and shake hands with Mrs. Blank.”

In fact, I noticed it for the first time, there seemed no one there to push the children or to refrain from doing it. That collection of little tots, most of them too busy over their mysterious occupations even to talk, seemed, as far as a casual glance over the room went, entirely without supervision. Finally, from a corner, where she had been sitting (on the floor apparently) beside a child, there rose up a plainly-dressed woman, the expression of whose quiet face made almost as great an impression on me as the children’s greetings had. I had always joined with heartfelt sympathy in the old cry of “Heaven help the poor teachers!” and in our town, where we all know and like the teachers personally, their exhausted condition of almost utter nervous collapse by the end of the teaching year is a painful element in our community life. But I felt no impulse to sympathize with this woman with untroubled eyes who, perceiving us for the first time, came over to shake hands with us. Instead, I felt a curious pang of envy, such as once or twice in my sentimental and stormy girlhood I felt at the sight of the peaceful face of a nun. I am now quite past the possibility of envying the life of a nun, but I must admit that it suddenly occurred to me, as I looked at that quiet, smiling Italian woman, that somehow my own life, for all its full happiness, must lack some element of orderliness, of discipline, of spiritual economy which alone could have put that look of calm certainty on her face. It was not the passive, changeless peace that one sees in the eyes of some nuns, but a sort of rich, full-blooded confidence in life.

She lingered beside us some moments, chatting with my companion, who was an old friend of hers, and who introduced her as Signorina Ballerini. I noticed that she happened to stand all the time with her back to the children, feeling apparently none of that lion-tamer’s instinct to keep an hypnotic eye on the little animals which is so marked in our instructors. I can remember distinctly that there was for us school-children actually a different feel to the air and a strange look on the familiar school-furniture during those infrequent intervals when the teacher was called for an instant from the room and left us, as in a suddenly rarefied atmosphere, giddy with the removal of the pressure of her eye; but when this teacher turned about casually to face the room again, these children did not seem to notice either that she had stopped looking at them or that she was now doing it again.

We used to know, as by a sixth sense, exactly where, at any moment, the teacher was, and a sudden movement on her part would have made us all start as violently and as instinctively as little chicks at the sudden shadow of a hawk ... and this, although we were often very fond indeed of our teachers. Remembering this, I noticed with surprise that often, when one of these little ones lifted his face from his work to ask the teacher a question, he had been so unconscious of her presence during his concentration on his enterprise that he did not know in the least where to look, and sent his eager eyes roving over the big room in a search for her, which ended in such a sudden flash of joy at discovering her that I felt again a pang of envy for this woman who had so many more loving children than I have.

What could be these “games” which so absorbed these children, far too young for any possibility of pretense on their part? Moving with the unhampered, unobserved ease which is the rule in a Montessori schoolroom, I began walking about, looking more closely at what the children were holding, and I could have laughed at the simplicity of many of the means which accomplished the apparent miracle of self-imposed order and discipline before me ... if I had not been ready to cry at my own stupidity for not thinking of them myself. One little boy about three and a half years old had been intent on some operation ever since we had entered the room, and even now as I drew near his little table and chair, he only glanced up for an instant’s smile without stopping the action of his fingers. I leaned over him, hoping that the device which so held his attention was not too complicated for my inexperienced, unpedagogical mind to take in. He was holding a light wooden frame about eighteen inches square, on which were stretched two pieces of cotton cloth, meeting down the middle like the joining of a garment. On one of these edges was a row of buttonholes and on the other a row of large bone buttons. The child was absorbed in buttoning and unbuttoning those two pieces of cloth.

He was new at the game, that was to be seen by the clumsy, misdirected motions of his baby fingers, but the process of his improvement was so apparent as, his eyes shining with interest, he buttoned and unbuttoned steadily, slowly, without an instant’s interruption, that I watched him, almost as fascinated as he. A child near us, apparently playing with blocks, upset them with a loud noise, but my buttoning boy, wrapped in his magic cloak of concentration, did not so much as raise his eyes. I myself could not look away, and as I gazed I thought of the many times a little child of mine had tried to learn the secret of the innumerable fastenings which hold her clothes together and how I, with the kindest impulse in the world, had stopped her fumbling little fingers saying, “No, dear, Mother can do that so much better. Let Mother do it.” It occurred to me now that the situation was very much as if, in the midst of a fascinating game of billiards, a professional player had snatched the cue from my husband’s hands, saying, “You just stand and watch me do this. I can do it much better than you.”

The child before me stopped his work a moment and looked down at his little cotton waist. There was a row of buttons there, smaller but of the same family as those on the frame. As he gazed down, absorbed, at them, I could see a great idea dawn in his face. I leaned forward. He attacked the middle button, using with startling exactitude of imitation the same motion he had learned on his frame. But this button was not so large or so well placed. He had to bend his head over, his fingers were cramped, he made several movements backward. But then suddenly the first half of his undertaking was accomplished. The button was on one side, the buttonhole on the other. I held my breath. He set to work again. The cloth slipped from his boneless little fingers, the button twisted itself awry, I fairly ached with the idiotic habit of years of interference to snatch it and do it for him. And then I saw that he was slowly forcing it into place. When the bone disk finally shone out, round and whole, on the far side of the buttonhole, the child drew a long breath and looked up at me with so ecstatic a face of triumph that I could have shouted, “Hurrah!” Then, without paying any more attention to me, he rose, sauntered over to a corner of the room where a thick piece of felt covered the floor, and lay down on his back, his hands clasped under his head, gazing with tranquil, reposeful vacuity at the ceiling. He was resting himself after accomplishing a great step forward. I did not fail to notice that, except for my entirely fortuitous observation of his performance, nobody had seen his absorption any more than they now saw his apparent idleness.

I tucked all these observations away in a corner of my mind for future reflection, and moved on to the nearest child, a little girl, perhaps a year older than the boy, who was absorbed as eagerly as he over a similar light wooden frame, covered with two pieces of cloth. But these were fastened together with pieces of ribbon which the child was tying and untying. There was no fumbling here. As rapidly, as deftly, with as careless a light-hearted ease as a pianist running over his scales, she was making a series of the flattest, most regular bow-knots, much better, I knew in my heart, than I could accomplish at anything like that speed. Although she had advanced beyond the stage of intent struggle with her material, her interest and pleasure in her own skill was manifest. She looked up at me, and then smiled proudly down at her flying fingers.

Beyond her another little boy, with a leather-covered frame, was laboriously inserting shoe-buttons into their buttonholes with the aid of an ordinary button-hook. As I looked at him, he left off, and stooping over his shoes, tried to apply the same system to their buttons. That was too much for him. After a prolonged struggle he gave it up for the time, returning, however, to the buttons on his frame with entirely undiminished ardor.