Spontaneous Activity in Education

by Maria Montessori

Suppose that we should find ourselves among a race of giants, with legs immensely long and bodies enormously large in comparison with ours, and also with powers of rapid movement infinitely greater than ours, people extraordinarily agile and intelligent compared with ourselves. We should want to go into their houses; the steps would be each as high as our knees, and yet we should have to try to mount them with their owners; we should want to sit down, but the seats would be almost as high as our shoulders; clambering painfully upon them, we should at last succeed in perching upon them. We should want to brush our clothes, but all the clothes-brushes would be so huge that we could not lay hold of them nor sustain their weight; and a clothes-brush would be handed to us if we wanted to brush our nails. We should perhaps be glad to take a bath in one of the washstand basins; but the weight of these would make it impossible for us to lift them. If we knew that these giants had been expecting us, we should be obliged to say: they have made no preparations for receiving us, or for making our lives among them agreeable. The baby finds all that he himself needs in the form of playthings made for dolls; rich, varied and attractive surroundings have not been created for him, but dolls have houses, sitting-rooms, kitchens and wardrobes; for them all that the adult possesses is reproduced in miniature. Among all these things, however, the child cannot live; he can only amuse himself. The world has been given to him in jest, because no one has yet recognized him as a living man. He discovers that society has prepared a mockery for his reception.

That children break their toys is so well known that this act of destruction of the only things specially manufactured for them is taken to be a proof of their intelligence. We say: "He destroys it because he wishes to understand [how things are made];" in reality he is looking to see if there is anything interesting inside the toys, because externally they have no interest whatever for him; sometimes he breaks them up violently, like an angry man. Then, according to us, he is destroying out of naughtiness.

It is the tendency of the child actually to live by means of the things around him; he would like to use a washstand of his own, to dress himself, really to comb the hair on a living head, to sweep the floor himself; he too would like to have seats, tables, sofas, clothes-pegs, and cupboards. What he desires is to work himself, to aim at some intelligent object, to have comfort in his own life. He has not only to "behave like a man," but to "construct a man;" such is the dominant tendency of his nature, of his mission.

We have seen him in the Case dei Bambini happy and patient, slow and precise like the most admirable workman, and the most scrupulous conservator of things. The smallest trifles suffice to make him happy; it delights him to hang up his clothes on pegs fixed low down on the walls, within reach of his hands; to open a light door, the handle of which is proportioned to the size of his hand; to place a chair, the weight of which is not too great for his arms, quietly and gracefully. We offer a very simple suggestion: give the child an environment in which everything is constructed in proportion to himself, and let him live therein. Then there will develop within the child that "active life" which has caused so many to marvel, because they see in it not only a simple exercise performed with pleasure, but the revelation of a spiritual life. In such harmonious surroundings the young child is seen laying hold of the intellectual life like a seed which has thrown out a root into the soil, and then growing and developing by one sole means: long practice in each exercise.

When we see little children acting thus, intent on their work, slow in executing it, because of the immaturity of their structure, just as they walk slowly because their legs are still short, we feel intuitively that life is being elaborated within them, as a chrysalis slowly elaborates the butterfly within the cocoon. To impede their activity would be to do violence to their lives. But what is the usual method with young children? We all interrupt them without compunction or consideration, in the manner of masters to slaves who have no human rights. To show "consideration" to young children as to adults would even seem ridiculous to many persons. And yet with what severity do we enjoin children "not to interrupt" us! If the little one is doing something, eating by himself, for instance, some adult comes and feeds him; if he is trying to fasten an overall, some adult hastens to dress him; every one substitutes an alien action to his, brutally, without the smallest consideration. And yet we ourselves are very sensitive as to our rights in our own work; it offends us if any one attempts to supplant us; in the Bible the sentence, "And his place shall another take" is among the threats to the lost.

What should we do if we were to become the slaves of a people incapable of understanding our feelings, a gigantic people, very much stronger than ourselves? When we were quietly eating our soup, enjoying it at our leisure (and we know that enjoyment depends upon being at liberty), suppose a giant appeared and snatching the spoon from our hand, made us swallow it in such haste that we were almost choked. Our protest: "For mercy's sake, slowly," would be accompanied by an oppression of the heart; our digestion would suffer. If again, thinking of something pleasant, we should be slowly putting on an overcoat with all the sense of well-being and liberty we enjoy in our own houses, and some giant should suddenly throw it upon us, and having dressed us, should in the twinkling of an eye, carry us out to some distance from the door, we should feel our dignity so wounded, that all the expected pleasure of the walk would be lost. Our nutrition does not depend solely on the soup we have swallowed, nor our well-being upon the physical exercise of walking, but also upon the liberty with which we do these things. We should feel offended and rebellious, not at all out of hatred of these giants, but merely from our recognition of the innate tendency to free functions in all that pertains to life. It is something within us which man does not recognize, which God alone knows, a something which manifests itself imperceptibly to us to the end that we may complete it. It is this love of freedom which nourishes and gives well-being to our life, even in its most minute acts. Of this it was said: "Man does not live by bread alone." How much greater this need must be in young children, in whom creation is still in action!

With strife and rebellion they have to defend their own little conquests of their environment. When they want to exercise their senses, such as that of touch, for instance, every one condemns them: "Do not touch!" If they attempt to take something from the kitchen, some scraps to make a little dish, they are driven away, and mercilessly sent back to their toys. How often one of those marvelous moments when their attention is fixed, and that process of organization which is to develop them begins in their souls, is roughly interrupted; moments when the spontaneous efforts of the young child are groping blindly in its surroundings after sustenance for its intelligence. Do we not all retain an impression of something having been forever stifled in our lives?

Without being able to give any definite reason, we feel that something precious was lost on our life-journey, that we were defrauded and depreciated. Perhaps at the very moments when we were about to create ourselves, we were interrupted and persecuted, and our spiritual organism was left rickety, weak, and inadequate.

Let us imagine to ourselves certain adults, not mature and stable like the majority of grown men, but in a state of spiritual auto-creation, as are men of genius. Let us take the case of a writer under the influence of poetic inspiration, at the moment when his beneficent and inspiring work is about to take form for the help of other men. Or that of the mathematician who perceives the solution of a great problem, from which will issue new principles beneficial to all humanity. Or again, that of an artist, whose mind has just conceived the ideal image which it is necessary to fix upon the canvas lest a masterpiece be lost to the world. Imagine these men at such psychological moments, broken in upon by some brutal person shouting to them to follow him at once, taking them by the hand, or pushing them out by the shoulders. And for what? The chess-board is set out for a game. Ah! such men would say, "You could not have done anything more atrocious! Our inspiration is lost; humanity will be deprived of a poem, an artistic masterpiece, a useful discovery, by your folly."