A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Next to him sat a little girl, with a pile of small pieces of money before her on her tiny table. She was engaged in sorting these into different piles according to their size, and, though I stood by her some time, laughing at the passion of accuracy which fired her, she was so absorbed that she did not even notice my presence. As I turned away I almost stumbled over a couple of children sitting on the floor, engaged in some game with a variety of blocks which looked new to me. They were ten squared rods of equal thickness, of which the shortest looked to be a tenth the length of the longest, and the others of regularly diminishing lengths between these two extremes. These were painted in alternate stripes of red and blue, these stripes being the same width as the shortest rod. The children were putting these together in consecutive order so as to make a sort of series, and although they were evidently much too young to count, they were aiding themselves by touching with their fingers each of the painted stripes, and verifying in this way the length of the rod. I could not follow this process, although it was plainly something arithmetical, and turned to ask the teacher about it.

I saw her across the room engaged in tying a bandage about a child’s eyes. Wondering if this were some new, scientific form of punishment, I stepped to that part of the room and watched the subsequent proceedings. The child, his lips curved in an expectant smile, even laughing a little in pleasant excitement, turned his blindfolded face to a pile of small pieces of cloth before him. Several children, walking past, stopped and hung over the edge of his desk with lively interest. The boy drew out from the pile a piece of velvet. He felt of this intently, running the sensitive tips of his fingers lightly over the nap, and cocking his head on one side in deep thought. The child-spectators gazed at him with sympathetic attention. When he gave the right name, they all smiled and nodded their heads in satisfaction. He drew out another piece from the big pile, coarse cotton cloth this time, which he instantly recognized; then a square of satin over which his little finger-tips wandered with evident sensuous pleasure. His successful naming of this was too much for his envious little spectators. They turned and fled toward the teacher and when I reached her, she was the center of a little group of children, all clamoring to be blindfolded.

“How they do love that exercise!” she said, looking after them with shining eyes ... I could have sworn, with mother’s eyes!

“Are you too busy and hurried,” I asked, “to explain to me the game those children are playing with the red and blue rods?”

She answered with some surprise, “Oh, no, I’m not busy and hurried at all!” (quite as though we were not all living in the twentieth century) and went on, “The children can come and find me if they need me.”

So I had my first lesson in the theory of self-education and self-dependence underlying the Montessori apparatus, to the accompaniment of occasional requests for aid, or demands for sympathy over an achievement, made in clear, baby treble. That theory will be taken up later in this book, as this chapter is intended only to be a plain narration of a few of the sights encountered by an ordinary observer in a morning in a Montessori school.

After a time I noticed that four little girls were sitting at a neatly-ordered small table, spread with a white cloth, apparently eating their luncheons. The teacher, in answer to my inquiring glance at them, explained that it was their turn to be the waitresses that day, for the children’s lunch, and so they ate their own meal first.

She was called away just then, and I sat looking at the roomful of busy children, listening to the pleasant murmur of their chats together, watching them move freely about as they liked, noting their absorbed, happy concentration on their tasks. Already some of the sense of the miraculous which had been so vivid in my mind during my first survey of the school was dulled, or rather, explained away. Now that I had seen some of the details composing the picture, the whole seemed more natural. It was not surprising, for instance, that the little girl sorting the pieces of money should not instead be pulling another child’s hair, or wandering in aimless and potentially naughty idleness about the room. It was not necessary either to force or exhort her to be a quiet and untroublesome citizen of that little republic. She would no more leave her fascinating occupation to go and “be naughty” than a professor of chemistry would leave an absorbing experiment in his laboratory to go and rob a candy-store. In both cases it would be leaving the best sort of a “good time” for a much less enjoyable undertaking.

In the midst of these reflections (my first glimmer of understanding of what it was all about), a lively march on the piano was struck up. Not a word was spoken by the teacher, indeed I had not yet heard her voice raised a single time to make a collective remark to the whole body of children, but at once, acting on the impulse which moves us all to run down the street towards the sound of a brass band, most of the children stopped their work and ran towards the open floor-space near the piano. Some of the older ones, of five, formed a single-file line, which was rapidly recruited by the monkey-like imitativeness of the little ones, into a long file. The music was martial, the older children held their heads high and stamped loudly as they marched about, keeping time very accurately to the strongly marked rhythm of the tune. The little tots did their baby best to copy their big brothers and sisters, some of them merely laughing and stamping up and down without any reference to the time, others evidently noticing a difference between their actions and those of the older ones, and trying to move their feet more regularly.

No one had suggested that they leave their work-tables to play in this way (indeed a few too absorbed to heed the call of the music still hung intently over their former occupations), no one suggested that they step in time to the music, no one corrected them when they did not. The music suddenly changed from a swinging marching air to a low, rhythmical croon. The older children instantly stopped stamping and began trotting noiselessly about on their tiptoes, imitated again as slavishly as possible by the admiring smaller ones. The uncertain control of their equilibrium by these littler ones, made them stagger about, as they practised this new exercise, like the little bacchantes, intoxicated with rhythm, which their glowing faces of delight seemed to proclaim them.