A Recapitulatory Table of Development
Diagrams of average developments
The rise in the level of the plane is related to the qualities of more advanced intellectual work; and the straightening of the line is related to qualities of internal construction and of the organization of the personality; qualities which would be considered of a moral order, such as serenity, discipline, self-mastery as manifested in obedience and in the various activities of the child.
When work has become a habit, the intellectual level rises rapidly, and organized order causes good conduct to become a habit. Children then work with order, perseverance, and discipline, persistently and naturally; the permanent, calm, and vivifying work of the physical organism resembles the respiratory rhythm.
The pivot, the medium of this construction of the personality, is working in freedom, in accordance with the natural wants of the inner life; thus freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline. The great achievement of the "Children's Houses" (Case dei Bambini) is to produce disciplined children.
It is this internal organization which gives them a special "type," or character, the type or character required to continue the free exercise of activities for the conquests of culture in successive stages.
The elementary school period presents itself insensibly as a continuation of the "Children's Houses." In these, behavior is a habit superposed on and fused with the earlier habit of work. Henceforth it will be sufficient to present the material of further culture, and the child, gradually exercising himself upon it, will pass from one intellectual stage of culture to another.
The difference shown in the successive ages arises from an intellectual interest which is no longer merely the impulse to exercise oneself by repetition of the exercises, but is a higher interest directed to the work itself, and tending to complete an external work, or to complete a branch of knowledge as a whole. Thus the child creates and seeks for things organized in themselves; for instance, he desires to compose a design by means of combinations of geometrical figures with the metal insets, and devotes himself to this work with the greatest intensity until he has completed it. Again, we see a child occupied for seven or eight consecutive days with the same work. Another child becomes interested in the potentialities of numbers or in the arithmetical frame, and perseveres with the same work for days, until his knowledge of it has matured.