A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I was penetrated with that poignant, almost tearful sympathy in their intense enjoyment which children’s pleasure awakens in every adult who has to do with them. “Ah, what a good time they are having!” I cried to myself, and then reflected that they had been having some sort of very good time ever since I had come into the room. And yet even my unpractised eye could see a difference between this good time and the kindergarten, charming as that is to watch. No prettily-dressed, energetic, thoroughgoing young lady had beckoned the children away from their self-chosen occupations. There was no set circle here with the lovely teacher in the middle, and every child’s eyes fastened constantly on her nearly always delightful but also overpoweringly developed adult personality. There was no set “game” being played, the discontinuation of which depended on the teacher’s more or less accurate guess at when the children were becoming tired. Indeed, as I reflected on this, I noticed that, although the bigger ones were continuing their musical march with undiminished pleasure, the younger ones had already exhausted the small amount of consecutive interest their infant organisms are capable of, and, without spoiling the fun for the others, indeed without being observed, had suddenly stopped dancing and prancing as suddenly as they began and, with the kitten-like fitfulness of their age, were wandering away in groups of two and three out to the great, open courtyard.

I suppose they went on playing quieter games there, but I did not follow them, so absorbed was I in watching the four little girls who had now at last finished their very leisurely meal and were preparing the tables for the other children. They were about four and a half and five years old, an age at which I would have thought children as capable of solving a problem in calculus as of undertaking, without supervision, to set tables for twenty other babies. They went at their undertaking with no haste, indeed with a slowness which my racial impatience found absolutely excruciating. They paused constantly for prolonged consultations, and to verify and correct themselves as they laid the knife, fork, spoon, plate, and napkin at each place. Interested as I was, and beginning, as I did, to understand a little of the ideas of the school, I still was so under the domination of my lifetime of over-emphasis on the importance of the immediate result of an action, that I felt the same impulse I had restrained with difficulty beside the buttoning boy—to snatch the things from their incompetent little hands and whisk them into place on the tables.

But then I noticed that the clock showed only a little after eleven, and that evidently the routine of the school was planned expressly so that there would be no need for haste.

The phrase struck my mental ear curiously, and arrested my attention. I reflected on that condition with the astonished awe of a modern, meeting it almost for the first time. “No need for haste”—it was like being transported into the timeless ease of eternity.

And then I fell to asking myself why there was always so much need for haste in my own life and in that of my children? Was it, after all, so necessary? What were we hurrying so to accomplish? I remembered my scorn of the parties of Cook’s tourists, clattering into the Sistine Chapel for a momentary glance at the achievement of a lifetime of genius, painted on the ceiling, and then galloping out again for a hop-skip-and-jump race down through the Stanze of Raphael. It occurred to me, disquietingly, that possibly, instead of really training my children, I might be dragging them headlong on a Cook’s tour through life. It also occurred to me that if the Montessori ideas were taken up in my family, the children would not be the only ones to profit by them.

The Meal Hour.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir

When I emerged from this brown study, the little girls had finished their task and there stood before me tables set for twenty little people, set neatly and regularly, without an item missing. The children, called in from their play in the courtyard, came marching along (they do take collective action when collective interests genuinely demand it) and sat down without suggestions, each, I suppose, at the place he had occupied while working at those same tiny tables. I held my breath to see the four little waitresses enter the room, each carrying a big tureen full of hot soup. I would not have trusted a child of that age to carry a glass of water across a room. The little girls advanced slowly, their eyes fixed on the contents of their tureens, their attention so concentrated on their all-important enterprise that they seemed entirely oblivious of the outer world. A fly lighted on the nose of one of these solemnly absorbed babies. She twisted the tip of that feature, making the most grotesque grimaces in her effort to dislodge the tickling intruder, but not until she had reached a table and set down her sacred tureen in safety, did she raise her hand to her face. I revised on the instant all my fixed convictions about the innate heedlessness and lack of self-control of early childhood; especially as she turned at once to her task of ladling out the soup into the plates of the children at her table, a feat which she accomplished as deftly as any adult could have done.

The napkins were unfolded, the older children tucked them under their chins and began to eat their soup. The younger ones imitated them more or less handily, though with some the process meant quite a struggle with the napkin. One little boy, only one in all that company, could not manage his. After wrestling with it, he brought it to the teacher, who had dropped down on a chair near mine. So sure was I of what her action inevitably would be, that I fairly felt my own hands automatically follow hers in the familiar motions of tucking a napkin under a child’s round chin.

I cannot devise any way to set down on paper with sufficient emphasis the fact that she did not tuck that napkin in. She held it up in her hands, showed the child how to take hold of a larger part of the corner than he had been grasping, and, illustrating on herself, gave him an object-lesson. Then she gave it back to him. He had caught the idea evidently, but his undisciplined little fingers, out of sight there, under his chin, would not follow the direction of his brain, though that was evidently, from the grave intentness of his baby face, working at top speed. With a sigh, that irresistible sigh of the little child, he took out the crumpled bit of linen and looked at it sadly. I clasped my hands together tightly to keep them from flying at him and accomplishing the operation in a twinkling. Why, the poor child’s soup was getting cold!