Ah, there was an education! An education indeed! Its A B C was that every child of the house should be delighted to be turned out of his or her bed, to sleep four in a four-poster, or on a mattress on the floor, so that one more guest might be given welcome. Its simple mathematics were concerned mainly with the addition of guests, the eager subtraction of one's own comforts, the multiplications of welcomes, and the long divisions of all delights and pleasures, which by some kind of higher calculus miraculously increased the meaning and richness of life. Its geography, if any, was no geography at all, beyond the fact that the guest-room was the sunniest and largest and best in the house, and that exports from all the other rooms flowed into it and rendered it the most desirable and the "most important city." As to history, it consisted of people at all times and of all ages, and the traditions of men and women of many types. It concerned itself, not with the succession of kings and durations of dynasties so much as with a succession of visitors and the probable length of their stay.
I cannot say what enlightenment or learning or benefit the guests themselves derived from these visits; though, if measured by the frequent length of their sojourn, these must have been very considerable; but I do know that we, the children of that household, gained high benefits immensely educative; I know that we assimilated much knowledge, and attained to much learning of a very high order, intellectual and spiritual; and what is best of all, I know that in that old home, antedating and long anticipating Madame Montessori and her "Houses of Childhood," we learned with neither desk, blackboard, nor semblance of schooling, and never for a moment so much as dreamed that we were being taught.
This is not the place to enter on a discussion of the Montessori method. Briefly Madame Montessori's chief tenets may be stated thus: Liberty for the child; a careful education of the child's senses, resulting in an extraordinary sense-control to which the child attains without consciousness of learning.
The "didactic material" (frankly so called by the author of this distinctive system of education) is material by means of which the child's senses are trained. It consists of many parts. To name only a few—there are one hundred and twenty-eight color-tablets; thirty-six geometrical insets; three series of thirty-six cards; the "dimension material" consists of nine cylinders, each differing from the rest in height and diameter, ten quadrilateral prisms, ten four-sided striped rods, and so on. This and much more is the equipment daily used in the "Houses of Childhood."
The home of my childhood was bare, bare of such things. Neither cubes nor cylinders were there that I remember, nor thermatic tests, nor color-tablets, nor quadrilateral prisms; and yet—
What was there of especial value? There was, first of all, the household. "The household," to quote Emerson further, "is a school of power. There within the door learn the tragi-comedy of human life. Here is the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and night go round. In that routine are the sacred relations, the passions that bind and sever. Here is poverty and all the wisdom its hated necessities can teach; here labor drudges, here affections glow, here the secrets of character are told, the guards of man, the guards of woman, the compensations which, like angels of justice, pay every debt; the opium of custom, whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is Economy, and Glee, and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frankness, and Calamity, and Death, and Hope."
Didactic material enough, if one chooses to call it that. But, besides all this, there were guests—guests who came and lingered, guests of an almost incredible variety. By recalling a few of them I can best explain somewhat of their influence on my life.
The first one I remember very clearly was a beautiful young lady,—beautiful to me,—who spent I believe about six months with us. I might have been a trifle over five years old. I remember her with great exactness. Certain sparkling characteristics that she wore as noticeably as the several heavy rings on her white hand, shine still with surprising clearness in my memory.
She was slender. She affected overskirts. She wore elbow-sleeves, and trains, though she could hardly have been over eighteen or nineteen. Her hair was plastered on her fashionably high forehead in what were then known as "water-waves."
On a collar of box-plaited lace she often wore a jet necklace, set in gold, a kind of jewelry much in fashion at that time, I believe. Also I remember that she had a pair of lemon-colored kid gloves; and on dress occasions she wore heavy gold bracelets.