Part 1
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MONTESSORI CHILDREN
BY CAROLYN SHERWIN BAILEY
ILLUSTRATED FROM SPECIALLY POSED PHOTOGRAPHS
NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1915
COPYRIGHT, 1913, 1914, BY THE BUTTERICK CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published February, 1915 THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
As a student of child psychology and always most deeply interested in the welfare problems that confront us in connection with the upbringing of little children, I went to Rome in 1913 to study, first-hand, the results of the Montessori system of education. A great deal had been written and said in connection with the technic of the system. Little had been given the world in regard to individual children who were developing their personalities through the auto-education of Montessori. I wished to observe Montessori children.
Through the gracious courtesy of Dr. Montessori, I was given the privilege of observing in the new Trionfale School where the method could be watched from its inception, and in the Fua Famagosta and Franciscan Convent Schools. I was also given the privilege of hearing Dr. Montessori lecture, elucidating certain problems in her theory of education not previously given publicity.
I found little ones of three, four, and five years, surrounded by the many observers of the first international Montessori training class, yet so marvelously poised and self-controlled that they went through the days as if alone. I saw such proofs of the integrity of the system as the instances of Otello, Bruno, and others.
The pages which follow constitute a series of pictures of real child types showing Montessori results. As a record of results, I hope they may contribute to the world’s greater faith in the discovery of Montessori—the spirit of the child.
CAROLYN SHERWIN BAILEY.
NEW YORK, 1915.
CONTENTS
PAGE
DR. MONTESSORI, THE WOMAN 3
WITH MARGHERITA IN THE CHILDREN’S HOUSE 13
_Showing the Unconscious Influence of the True Montessori Environment._
VALIA 26
_The Physical Education of the System._
THE FREEING OF OTELLO, THE TERRIBLE 39
_Montessori Awakening of Conscience Through Directed Will._
THE CHRIST IN BRUNO 54
_About the New Spiritual Sense._
MARIO’S FINGER EYES 67
_Montessori Sense-Training._
RAFFAELO’S HUNGER 81
_Color Teaching. Its Value._
THE GOING AWAY OF ANTONIO 94
_Directing the Child Will._
ANDREA’S LILY 108
_The Nature-Training of the Method._
THE MIRACLE OF OLGA 119
_Reading and Writing as Natural for Your Child as Speech._
CLARA—LITTLE MOTHER 135
_The Social Development of the Montessori Child._
PICCOLA—LITTLE HOME MAKER 148
_The Helpfulness of the Montessori Child._
MARIO’S PLAYS 163
_Montessori and the Child’s Imagination._
THE GREAT SILENCE 176
_Montessori Development of Repose._
ILLUSTRATIONS
Patient Waiting for the Earth to Bloom Develops a Little Child Spiritually _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Back-yard Apparatus for the Physical Development of Children Is Valuable 28
An Important Physical Exercise of Montessori 30
Hand and Eye Work in Connection in Exercises of Practical Life 32
Walking upon a Line Gives Poise and Muscular Control 34
The Kind of Toy Dr. Montessori Recommends for Physical Development 36
Replacing the Solid Insets by the Sense of Touch Alone 70
Building the Tower and the Broad Stair 70
A Fineness of Perception Is Developed by Discriminating Different Textiles Blindfolded 74
Perfecting the Sense of Touch with the Geometric Insets 76
To Match the Colors Two by Two Is the First Exercise 84
Grading Each Standard Color and Its Related Colors in Chromatic Order 88
All the Colors of Nature May be Found 88
Every Child Should Have a Pet 110
The Loving Care of a Dumb Animal Results in Child Sympathy 114
To Feel that Something Is Dependent upon Him for Care and Food Helps a Child to Reverence Life 116
Building Words with the Movable Alphabet 122
Learning the Form of Letters by the Sense of Touch 126
Filling in Outlines with Color to Gain the Muscular Control Necessary for Writing 126
MONTESSORI CHILDREN
DR. MONTESSORI, THE WOMAN
A holiday in Rome, the Eternally Old, the Eternally Young. A long, sun-dried street that flanks the Tiber is gay with fruit venders who push along their carts of gold oranges, strings of dates, and amber lemons. Italians of the wealthy class mingle in friendly fashion with the native-costumed peasants. Someone starts a snatch of song; a dozen passersby take up the strain. Where the chariots of the Cæsars rattled by in yesterday’s centuries, there rises a stately row of stucco apartment mansions with terraced gardens where pink roses and purple heliotrope run riot over the hedges and silver-toned fountains sing, all day long, their tinkling tunes.
Leaving the gay, bright street, you ring the electric bell at number 5 Principessa Clotilde.
“Is the Dottoressa at home, or is she keeping holiday, too?” you ask of the porter. He laughs, motioning you to an almost human elevator that lifts itself and will stop at whichever floor you ask it.
“Yes, La Dottoressa Montessori is in—in fact, she is nearly always in because of the many people, mainly Americans, who come to see her. And the children come daily to see her as well.” The porter shrugs his shoulders, uncomprehendingly, as you enter the elevator and stop at the fourth floor. The popularity of this tenant of his is a matter of wonder to the porter.
As a low-voiced maid opens a great carved door and you find yourself in Dr. Montessori’s apartment, you hold your breath at the modernism of it. Plain white woodwork, fine old rugs covering the stone floors, the soft tan walls covered with a few beautiful tapestries; French furniture and electric lights. The reception room in which you wait might be that of an American home, but a glance out of the open window unfolds to you the heart of the tenant. While her home is in one of the most beautiful and cultured centers of Rome, Dr. Montessori sees daily a tiny, narrow Roman alleyway where the “people” live like bees in a hive and the doorsills throng with little children and their voices rise to her every hour of the day.
But you hear a step. You turn. You are face to face with Maria Montessori.
At first you have no words. You have seen her picture in America, but it gave you no conception of the fine, chiseled beauty of the woman who stands before you dressed in severe black that accentuates the marble of the classic features, the depth of the far-seeing, dark eyes. Poise, grace, self-control, sympathy, love of humanity are written on the face. It is as if all the Madonnas of the imagination of the old Italian painters had come to life in La Dottoressa. Overpowering the first glance of courteous welcome, though, that accompanied her outstretched hand is a look of stern query.
Why have you come? Are you another of the curious visitors who have besieged her from almost every nation the past year to try and grasp in a day her method of teaching that she gained only through twenty years of patient, tireless scientific study of the child mind, she seems to ask. But your words come like a torrent now. You assure her that you have made this pilgrimage to Rome, not as an individual, but as the voice of thousands of mothers who have children to be educated. They ask Dr. Montessori, through you, for her message to the American people. As you linger over the words, _madre_, mother, and _bambino_, baby, Dr. Montessori smiles. You have set her doubts at rest. She talks fast, eloquently, in her musical Italian, and you listen, thrilled, fascinated. Often you are interrupted, but always by children. Lovely, dark-eyed, courteous little Roman boys and girls they are. They come from you know not where, are admitted to Dr. Montessori’s apartment quite as if they were adult visitors, and after they have greeted her in their graceful, polite fashion, they quietly run about the room or sit in groups talking together as if the apartment were the popular meeting place for all the children of the neighborhood. You find their interruption and their presence a help instead of a hindrance to your interview. They illustrate by their loving friendship for La Dottoressa and each other, and by their complete self-control, the message that Dr. Montessori gives you to carry back to the American people.
_She would liberate the children._
_The American people are free, but American children are not._
We have lost sight of the Republic of Childhood, she says. Through forcing our adult standards of conduct and teaching upon children, we have closed the gateways of their souls. We must believe that every child, well-born into the world, is going to be good and happy and intelligent if we as parents and teachers give him a fair chance. We must stop _commanding_ our children. Instead, we will _lead_ them.
Dr. Montessori tells us that we are undergoing a slow but certain change in the social structure of society. Woman is being emancipated from her domestic slavery of yesterday. We are creating a new and more healthful environment for the laboring man. But the American child is still a slave to the capricious commands of his parents, which claim his soul and prevent his free, natural development to his best manhood. In school, too, children are still bound.
The vertebral column, Dr. Montessori tells us, which is biologically the most fundamental part of the human skeleton; which survived the desperate struggles of primitive man against the beasts of the desert, helped him to quarry out a shelter for himself from the solid rock and bend iron to his uses, cannot resist the bondages of the present-day _school desk_. Curvature of the spine is alarmingly prevalent among children and is increasing. Instead of resorting to surgical methods, corsets, braces, and orthopædic means for straightening child bodies, we should try to bring about some more rational method of teaching that children shall no longer be obliged to remain for the greater part of the day in such a pathologically dangerous position.
Not only do we hurt child bodies by the confinement of the school desk, but we wound their souls by ever offering rewards and punishments, by insisting upon such long periods of absolute silence as are demanded in our schools, and by imposing upon children a program of instruction that is built, often by law, to be followed by large groups of children. The normal child is he who finds it impossible to follow a program of school work or to obey, unquestioningly, the arbitrary commands of his parents. He must follow his own bent, providing he does not interfere with the freedom of others, if he is to dig out his own life path. The abnormal child is the one who _never resists_; he is the child who, without dissent, obeys all adult commands.
So Dr. Montessori, who has discovered a method of free teaching by means of which children from two and a half to five develop naturally and happily along lines that culminate in a spontaneous “explosion” into self-taught reading and writing at four and five years, speaks to the American parent.
She begs us to give our children the freedom that is the American nation’s boast. Not the freedom that would lead to disordered acts, but that liberty which means the untrammeled exercise of all the moral and intellectual powers that are born with the individual.
About twenty years ago Maria Montessori, a beautiful young society girl of Rome, startled Italy by receiving with honors her degree as Doctor of Medicine. The Italian girl of the cultured classes is essentially a home girl. She studies at home, she embroiders, she plays with flowers, she is introduced to society—then she marries. That Maria Montessori should desert the quiet, rose-strewn paths of Roman débutantes and, after taking her degree, act as assistant doctor in the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rome, startled all Italy.
Her work at the clinic led her to visit the general insane asylums, and she became deeply interested in the deficient children who were housed there, with no attempts being made to educate them. As she studied these helpless little ones, the idea came to her that it might be possible, by putting them into better surroundings, and giving them opportunity for free gymnastic activities and free use of the senses, to educate them. She gave up medicine for teaching and again startled Italy—and the world. Her deficient children learned to read and write, easily and naturally, and took their places beside normal children in the municipal schools.
Then Dr. Montessori carried her method of physical and sense education a lap farther. If this method stimulated to action the sleeping mind of a deficient child, might it not save time and energy in the teaching of normal children, she asked herself. At that time, the Good Building Association of Rome was tearing down the squalid, disease-filled houses of the poor of the San Lorenzo Quarter and putting up in their places hygienic model tenements. Dr. Montessori arranged to have the children of each tenement gathered in one room of the basement, where large, free spaces, didactic apparatus, hot meals, and gardens would make it a Children’s House. She applied her method in numerous of these Children’s Houses and in the beautiful convent of the Franciscan nuns on the Via Giusti.
Again the miracle happened. Children of four began to read and write, having taught themselves. There were other wonders, too. These Montessori-trained children were self-controlled, free, happy, good. To-day there are Montessori mothers all over the world.
To furnish the right environment for the expanding of the child soul, Dr. Montessori urges that every home be transformed into a House of Childhood. It will not consist alone of walls, she tells us, although these walls will be the bulwarks of the sacred intimacy of the family. The home will be more than this. It will have a soul, and will embrace its inmates with the consoling arms of love. The new mother will be liberated, like the butterfly bursting its winter cocoon of imprisonment and darkness, from those drudgeries that the home has demanded of her in the past, leaving her better able to bear strong children, study those children, teach them, and be a social force in the world.
The new father will cultivate his health, guard his virtue, that he may better the species and make his children better, more perfect, and stronger than any which have been created before.
The ideal home of to-morrow will be the home of those men and women who wish to improve the human species and send the race on its triumphant way into eternity.
So Dr. Montessori, physician, psychologist, teacher, lover of children, and womanly woman, speaks to us.
As one says _addio_ and leaves her and goes down into the blue, star-filled evening of the Eternal City, the night seems to be charged with a new mystery. Rome, who holds in her beautiful hands such good gifts for us—art, sculpture, history, painting—now offers to us another. Stretching farther than the moss-grown stones that line the Appian Way, she shows us a new road—the way that leads to the soul of a little child.
WITH MARGHERITA IN THE CHILDREN’S HOUSE
_Showing the Unconscious Influence of the True Montessori Environment_
It is so early in the sweet, perfume-laden Italian morning that the dew is still hanging in diamond drops on the iris and roses in the garden of the Casa dei Bambini of the Via Giusti, Rome. The great white room, with its flooding sunlight and host of tiny, waiting chairs and tables, is empty, quiet, calm.
Margherita stands a happy second in the wide-arched doorway that makes room and garden melt into one fragrant, peaceful whole. A wee four-year-old girlie is Margherita, big-eyed, radiant with smiles, and tugging a huge wicker basket of lunch that is almost as large as she. She is the first baby to arrive at the Children’s House. Ah, but that does not ruffle her composure. She is already alone in her newly-found freedom of spirit. She needs no teacher.
She places the lunch basket on a waiting bench, crosses to a wall space where rows of diminutive pink and blue aprons hang at comfortable reaching distances for little arms. She finds her own apron, wriggles into it, _buttons_ it at the back. She is ready for the day.
What shall come first in Margherita’s day? So much is in store for her, waiting for her eager finger tips, her electric-charged soul. As her great brown eyes slowly trail the room and the colorful garden outside, it is as if she were making a soul search for that “good thing” which will be her first silent teacher. Her glance lingers on the terraced rows of flowers, the tinkling fountain in the center. She has found the object of her search. She runs—no, she _floats_, for such complete physical control of her limbs has this four-year-old baby—to the garden, and kneels there, looking up at a redolent, yellow rose that has opened in the night. She does not touch it; she only looks and breathes and wonders. She has watched for this unfolding daily, waiting with sweet patience for the branch to burst into bud and the bud to unfold into bloom. She has tugged a vase of water each morning to offer drink to the roots. Now her patience and her service are rewarded. As she kneels there looking up into the petals of the gold flower, her small hands clasped over her breast with devotional ecstasy, _Nature opens her heart to the heart of a little child_.
Many rapturous minutes the baby kneels. Then she flies back to the room again and glances at it with the critical eye of a housekeeper. Here she flicks away a speck of dust, there she picks up a scrap of paper from the stone floor. She peeps into the wall cabinets that hold the Montessori didactic materials to see if the gay buttoning, lacing, and bow-tying frames, the fascinating pink blocks of the tower, the frames of form insets are all in their places. In the meantime the Signorina directress comes. Bruno, of five, arrives, bringing with him his two-and-a-half-year-old brother. More toddlers trail in, two and a half, three, four, four and a half years old, and button themselves into their pink and blue aprons. Independent, polite, joyous little children of the Cæsars they are, each with his or her own special happy task in mind in coming to the Children’s House this blue day.
The wee-est toddlers drag out soft-colored rugs, orange, dull green, deep crimson, and spread them on the wide white spaces of the sun-flecked stone floor. Here they build and rebuild the enchanting intricacies of the tower of blocks, the broad stair of blocks, and the red and white rods of the long stair, chanting to themselves as they unconsciously measure distances and make mental comparisons: “big, little; thick, thin; long, short.”
Children of three and a half and four take from the cabinets boxes of many-colored, silk-wound spools, which they sort and lay upon the little tables in chromatic order until a rainbow-tinted mass lies before their pigment-loving eyes. From the bright scarlet of poppies to the faint blush of pale pink coral, from the royal purple of the tall, spiked Roman iris to the amethyst tint of a wild orchid, they make no mistake in the intermediate color gradations. Other children of four and over finger with intelligent, trained skill the geometric forms; circles, triangles, squares that they are learning to recognize through the “eyes in their fingers,” and which will help them to see with the mind’s eye the form that makes the beauty of our world. Small Joanina, in her corner, runs her forefinger with the greatest delicacy of touch a dozen times around a circle. Then she fits it in its place in the form board, takes it out and fits it in again. Then she looks up, a new light in her eyes, darts out into the garden and walks slowly about the fountain, running her finger around its deep basin.
“Signorina, Signorina!” she calls. “The fountain is a circle. I can see a pebble that is a circle, too. I see _many_ circles!”
So the children learn through the _exercise of the senses_.
But Margherita?
All this time she has flitted from one task to another. She found an outlined picture of clover leaves and colored it with dainty pencil strokes, making the leaves deep green and the background paler, and handling her pencil with careful skill. Then she took a box of white cards on which are mounted great black letters, cut from fine sandpaper. Holding each card in her left hand, she traced the form of the letter with her right forefinger, closed her eyes, traced its form again, repeated the letter’s name to herself in a whisper, sat silently a second.
As the Signorina directress moves from child to child, smiling encouragement, showing Bruno’s baby brother’s clumsy fingers how to slip a button through a buttonhole, helping Joanina to find a new form, the square, she watches Margherita.
“This may be a white day in the child’s mind growth,” she thinks, but she does not suggest, or hurry the miracle. She only waits, hopes, watches.
_Silence_ is written on the blackboard. Three hours have passed in which over thirty children, barely out of babyhood, have worked incessantly at many different occupations, have moved gracefully and with complete freedom about the room, have changed occupations as often as they wished, have not once quarreled. But now, out of the ordered disorder, comes a marvelous hush. No word is spoken, but one baby after another, glancing the written sign, drops back with closed eyes into a hushed silence in which the whir of bird wings in the garden, the fluttering of casement hangings, the far-away sound of a bell are audible. Even Bruno’s baby brother struggles not to make a clattering noise with his little chair. No one has said to this two-year-old, “Be still.” Rather, has he been inspired to _feel_ stillness.