Part 2

Out of the restful calm of the room comes the whispered call of the Signorina: “Bruno, Piccola, Maria, Joanina, Margherita!” Lightly, noiselessly, joyously the children come and huddle in a hushed group about the directress. She has called to the soul of each child, she has commended them for their self-taught lesson in control.

As the work with the didactic materials is taken up again, Margherita sits in a little chair for a space, quiet, reflective. Her lips move, her fingers trace signs in the air and on the table before her. The Game of Silence has helped this four-year-old with her spirit unfolding. Now, with a sudden impulse, she darts to the blackboard, seizes a piece of chalk, _writes_.

“Ma-ma! Ma-ma!”

Margherita writes it a dozen times in clear, flowing script with breathless, eager strokes.

“Signorina, Signorina, I write—I write about my mother. I _write_!” she joyously interpolates.

The other children look up with sympathetic interest, some leaving their work to crowd about the victorious Margherita. All of them voice their sympathy.

“Margherita writes,” they say. With the older ones who have already reached this wonder lap in their education there is a note of _nonchalance_.

“We also write,” they seem to say. With the tiny ones there is a note of hopeful promise.

“Some day we, too, will find that we can write,” they seem to say.

Margherita covers the blackboard with clear, big script. She erases it all for the sheer joy of assuring herself that she is able to write it all over again. When the luncheon hour comes, she looks back longingly at the blackboard as she lays plates on the little tables with dainty precision, places knife, fork, and spoon deftly, carries five tumblers at a time on a tray without dropping one, and passes a tureen of hot soup that is so large as to almost hide her small self. Even the happiness of being one of such a happy “party,” of eating one’s lunch of peas and sweet wheat bread and soup in the Children’s House, does not wholly satisfy Margherita to-day. Her big brown eyes are raised continually to her first written word.

Luncheon over, the children, with balls, hoops, and toys, romp out for an hour’s play in the garden.

“Margherita,” Bruno calls. “Come, we will have The Little One for a donkey, and I will harness him with you, who may be the horse!”

But the little girl, usually the first to start a game, does not hear. She is seated under the rosebush as if she were telling _her_ rose the wonder that has come to her to-day. She and the rose have unfolded together. So it is with all Montessori children. They open their souls as flowers do, naturally, freely, surely.

Margherita is your child as well as the precious _bambino_ of her Roman mother. Children the world over, from sun to sun, from pole to pole, are the same in these plastic first years of mind growth. They have the same insatiable desire to _do_, to _touch_, to be _free in activity_. Not always understanding the little child’s hereditary way of grasping knowledge, we wound his spirit by crushing these natural instincts. We say, “_don’t touch_,” “_be still_,” because the activities of our small Margheritas and Brunos interfere with our adult standards of living.

Dr. Montessori has discovered that to say, “_don’t touch_,” “_be still_,” to a child is a crime. Such commands are the keen-edged daggers that kill the child soul.

It is possible that some time will elapse before Dr. Montessori’s system of setting the clockwork of the little child’s mind running automatically, of opening the floodgates of the child soul can be adopted in their entirety in our American school. We are so used to thinking of a school as a crowded place of many desks, where children must remain, bound physically and mentally by the will of the teacher and the relentless course of study, that a Montessori schoolroom where, as Dr. Montessori herself expresses it, children may move about usefully, intelligently, and freely, without committing a rough or rude act, seems to us impossible. We even prescribe and teach imaginative _plays_ to our children—as if it were possible for any outside force to mold that wonderful mind force by means of which the mind creates the _new_ out of its triumphant conquest of the world through the senses.

Ideal Montessori schools may be our hope of to-morrow, but to make of a home a Children’s House is the fact of to-day.

To bring about Montessori development in the home is not alone a matter of buying the didactic materials and then offering them to your Margherita and looking for their future miracle working. This would mean stimulating lawlessness instead of freedom. Many of our children already play with squares and circles without seeing how squares and circles make beauty in the architecture of our cities. Many of our children grow up side by side with opening roses without unfolding with them. We would most of us rather button on our babies’ aprons, tie their bibs, feed them, than lead them into the physical independence that comes from doing these things themselves. We wish children to be obedient, but instead of establishing principles of good in their minds which they will follow freely, if we only give them a chance, we _command_, and expect unreasoning obedience to our injustice.

A Children’s House in every home will be a place where the mother is imbued with the spirit of the investigator. She watches her children, asking herself why they act along certain lines. She leads instead of ruling. She will teach her children physical independence as soon as they can toddle. To know how to dress and undress, to bathe, to look quickly over a room to see if it is in order, to open and close doors and move little chairs, tables, and toys quietly, to care for plants and pets—these are simple physical exercises which help to keep children free and good. She will provide her Children’s House with materials for sense-training. She will lead her children by simple, logical steps into preparation for early mastery of reading and writing.

The first step, however, in giving the American child a chance to develop along the self-active, natural lines of Margherita is to fill our homes with the spirit of Montessori. We will have unlimited patience with the mistakes and idiosyncrasies of childhood, remembering that we do not aim to develop little men and women but only as nearly perfect children as we can. We will endeavor to surround ourselves with those influences of love and charity and beauty and simplicity which it will be good for our children to feel as well. We will offer the children the best food, the greatest amount of air, the brightest sunshine, the least breakable belongings, the most encouragement, the minimum of coercion.

Our attitude toward the child will be that of the physician to whom the slightest variation of a symptom is a signal for a change of treatment, to whom a fraction of progress measures a span. A careful home record of the child’s mental, moral, and physical gain should be kept, and it will be radiantly discovered that the removal of the burden of force and coercion from the shoulders of the little child will give him an impetus, not only to mind growth, but to the attaining of greater bodily strength.

Much misunderstanding of the system of Montessori has come about through our too lavish interpretation of the word _freedom_ as lawlessness. It should be interpreted, rather, as _self-direction_. The home in which the children are provided with good living conditions, in which it is made possible for them to grow naturally, where their longing to see and touch and weigh and smell and taste is satisfied as far as can be arranged, and where they are led to be as independent of adult help as possible, is laying the foundation for the education of Montessori.

VALIA

_The Physical Education of the System_

Valia was her mother’s little stranger. Although the mother had borne and fondled and bathed and clothed and undressed the pink flesh that held the baby soul, she did not know that flesh. And Valia grew to be three years old, fat and good, but with little bent limbs and a tired-out spine and clumsy, fumbling fingers.

“Sit in your chair, Valia. That is what chairs are made for,” Valia’s mother admonished at home when the baby joyfully pranced across the floor on “all fours” or lay prone at play with her toys.

“Walk in the garden path like a little lady,” she urged, when Valia, taken out for a walk, climbed to the lowest railing of an adjacent fence and walked along it, sideways, or hung from the top, her fat legs swinging in the air.

“Do not jump; to jump is noisy and unbecoming in little girls,” the mother commanded, as Valia, brought to the Trionfale Children’s House in Rome, hopped gayly up and down the wide stone steps.

But the directress of the school had no word of reproof for baby Valia. She looked at the bent legs that could hardly hold the weight of the plump body, she glanced at the powerless baby hands that could not clutch with any force the handles of a toy wheelbarrow which another child offered Valia for her play.

“You have not noticed the baby’s limbs,” the directress suggested.

The mother’s eyes trailed the school yard where Valia struggled to keep up with the other sturdy little men and women who trundled their toy wheelbarrows up and down in long happy lines. She shrugged her shoulders.

“Perhaps they are crooked, but what can one do to the body of a _bambino_ but feed and cover it?” she asked in discouraged query.

“Ah, La Dottoressa tells us,” the directress replied simply.

“We can _know the body_ of the little child.”

The education of Valia’s muscles was begun that very day, that instant.

In the school garden the little maid found her way with the other children to an immediately fascinating bit of gymnastic apparatus; a section of a low fence it looked, its posts sunk deeply into the ground so as to make it strong and durable. It was the right height for small arms to reach the top rail, which was round, smooth, and easily grasped by small hands. Here Valia hung, her limbs suspended and at rest, for long periods. Sometimes she pulled her body up so that her waist was level with the upper railing. It was a new game, one could climb a fence without being chided for it. Valia did not know, but Dr. Montessori did, that little children climb fences, pull back when we lead them, and try to draw themselves up by clinging to furniture because they need this form of physical exercise to bring about harmonious muscular development. Valia’s body was developing at an enormously greater rate than her limbs. The height of your baby’s torso at one year is about sixty-five per cent. of its total stature, at two years is sixty-three per cent., at three years is sixty-two per cent. But the limbs of the baby, ah, these develop much more slowly. To hang from the top railing of a fence straightens the spine, rests the short limbs by removing the weight of the torso, and helps the hands to prehensive grasping. So Dr. Montessori invented and uses this bar apparatus with the children at Rome and recommends its use in American nurseries and playrooms.

The next Montessori exercise for Valia was a simple, rhythmic one—walking on a line to secure bodily poise and limb control.

It was just another game for a child, full of happy surprise, too, for she never knew when the sweet notes of the piano in the big rooms of the Children’s House would tinkle out their call to the march. But when the pianist played a tune that was simple and repeated its melody over and over again and was marked in its rhythm, Valia and Otello and Mario and all the other babies put away their work and fluttered like wind-blown butterflies over to the place where a big circle was outlined in white paint on the floor. To march upon this line, now fast, now slowly, sometimes with the lightness of a fairy and then with the joyously loud tramp of a work horse, oh, how delightful! Sometimes the music changed to the rhythm of running or a folk-dance step, and this gave further delight to the little ones.

At first, Valia could not find the white circle of delight. Her fat feet refused to obey the impulse of her eagerly musical soul. But with the days she found poise and grace and erectness and the crooked limbs began to straighten themselves.

She sat, for hours at a time, in a patch of sunlight on the floor, using her incompetent little fingers in some of the practical exercises of everyday living. The directress gave her a stout wooden frame, to which were fastened two soft pieces of gay woolen stuff, one of which was pierced with buttonholes and the other having large bone buttons. Valia worked all one morning before she was able to fit each button in its corresponding buttonhole, but when she did accomplish this, the triumph was a bit of wonder-working in Valia’s control of herself. It started her on the road to physical freedom.

Happy in her new accomplishment, she mastered all the other dressing frames; the soft linen with pearl buttons that was like her underlinen, the leather through which one thrust shoe buttons with one’s own button hook, or laced from one eyelet to another, the lacing on cloth like her mother’s Sunday bodice of green velvet, the frames of linen with large and small hooks and eyes, the frame upon which were broad strands of bright-colored ribbon to be tied in a row of smart little bows.

Daily, simple physical exercises such as these; hand and eye co-ordination, exercises in poise, stretching, rest for the limbs and freedom for the spine and torso slowly transformed Valia from a lump of disorganized, putty-like flesh to an erect, graceful, self-controlled little woman.

“What have you done to my Valia?” asked the mother as she waited at the school door for her little one a few months later. “She dresses the young _bambino_ at home and buttons her own shoes. She no longer stumbles all day long but stands well on her feet. She helps me to lay the evening meal and carries a dish of soup, full, to the place of her father. I do not understand it. Did you punish her for climbing and being clumsy?”

“No.” The directress of the Children’s House lays a kind hand on Valia’s curly head as she explains. “We did not punish Valia. We gave her a fence upon which to climb and we let her tumble about on the floor when she was tired, and we helped her to find her feet and her fingers.”

Dr. Montessori tells us that there is a little Valia in every home. The child from one to three and four years of age is in need of definite physical exercises that will tend to the normal development of physiological movements. We ordinarily give the little child’s body slight thought. Then, in the schools, we gather older children into large classes, and by a series of collective gymnastics in which the commands of the teacher check all spontaneity, we try to secure poise and self-control and grace for the child body.

Gymnastics for the home will accomplish this result, Dr. Montessori tells us, and these include simple exercises such as one sees in the Children’s Houses. They are planned taking into account the biology of the body of the child from birth to six years of age—the child who has a torso greatly developed in comparison with his lower limbs. They have for their basis these goals:

Helping the child to limb development and control.

Helping the child to proper breathing and articulate speech.

Helping the child to achieving the practical acts of life; dressing, carrying objects without dropping, and the resulting co-ordination of hand and eye.

To bring about this physical development, Dr. Montessori has planned and put into the Children’s Houses in Rome certain very simple physical exercises, so simple as to seem to us almost obvious, but the results in child poise, control, and grace have drawn the attention of the entire world. These exercises include:

Swinging and “chinning” on a play fence, modeled after a real fence or gate.

Climbing and jumping from broad steps, a flight of wooden steps being built for the purpose. Ascending and descending a short flight of circular steps, these steps built for the exercise at slight expense. Climbing up and down a very short ladder. Stepping through the rungs of the ladder as it is laid upon the ground or the floor.

Rhythmic exercises carried out upon a line; walking slowly or fast, softly and heavily, on tiptoe, running, skipping, and dancing in time to music. These exercises may be done by utilizing the long, straight cracks in a hardwood floor, the seams in a carpet, by strewing grain or making a snow line out of doors.

Exercises in practical life, the most important of these being brought about by the use of the dressing frames included in the Montessori didactic materials, and including: buttoning on scarlet flannel, linen, and leather, lacing on cloth and leather, fastening hooks and eyes and patent snaps, and tying bow-knots. Other materials used in these exercises are: brooms and fascinating little scrubbing brushes and white enamel basins with which the children help to make the schoolroom tidy in the morning. And the children are taught to open and close doors and gates softly and gracefully and to greet their friends politely and with courtesy.

Physical training brought about through play with a few toys that stimulate healthful muscular exercises and deep breathing. These toys include rather heavy toy wheelbarrows, balls, hoops, bean bags, and kites.

Breathing exercises. For these, Dr. Montessori recommends the march, in which the little ones sing in time to the rhythmic movement of their feet, an exercise in which deep breathing brings about lung strength. She recommends also the singing circle games of Froebel. She leads the children to practice such simple respiratory exercises as, hands on hips, tongue lying flat in the mouth and the mouth open, to draw the breath in deeply with a quick lowering of the shoulders, after which it is slowly expelled, the shoulders returning slowly to their normal position.

Exercises for practice in enunciation, including careful phonic pronunciation of the sounds of the vowels and consonants and the first syllables of words. This practice in the co-ordination of lips, tongue, and teeth not only helps the child to clear speech but leads to a quicker grasp of reading.

Each of these physical exercises has its basis in child interest. _Your_ toddler instinctively pulls and climbs, stretches, and scrambles about on the floor, longs to dress his own fascinating, wee body, and play into the activities of the home. He loves marked, rhythmic music and longs to hear those jingles and nonsense ditties of childhood’s literature in which syllabic sounds are emphasized and repeat themselves.

“Not commands, but freedom; not teaching, but observation,” Dr. Montessori begs of mothers. So she has taken these instinctive activities of the little child and, using them as a basis, she has built upon them her system of physical training for the baby, a system that needs no bidding, “Do this,” because all children love to climb fences and play with buttons and stretch little limbs on the floor, and keep time to rhythmic music.

Every Thursday morning a crowd of thirty or forty eager tourists from all over the world wait with impatience to be admitted to the Montessori school on the Via Giusti, Rome. Silently, led by a white-robed sister, they enter the schoolroom and seat themselves in quiet expectant rows to watch the miracle of Montessori physical freedom. A hush, a tinkle of child laughter, and the babies flock in from the garden. Noiselessly, gracefully, with no rude jostling or crowding—and alone—they greet each visitor with outstretched hands. Then, like a bevy of little men and women, eager to work, eager to achieve, they hasten to the cabinets that hold the didactic materials, to choose their material for the day. Nothing drops, nothing is broken, no child hurts his neighbor in his haste, and they find their places, some stretched out on the floor, some seated at the white tables. When the hour for the midday meal comes, the materials are as carefully put back in their places in the cabinet and the little ones lay the tables for luncheon. To see a child balance a tray that holds five filled tumblers, to see another child bring in a huge bowl of warm soup and serve it with no mishaps, these interest curious sightseers as much as the Roman Colosseum or the Roman baths.

But isn’t, after all, the child who has come, by natural steps, to this control of his mind and body the normal child? Are not our children, whom we feed and dress and lead and fasten into high chairs, the abnormal ones? It is vastly easier to lace a child’s shoes, to hold his hand when he goes up and down steps, to fetch and carry for him, than to teach him this muscular co-ordination, but it is just this careful teaching of the simple things of life that makes the Montessori child a sight for tourists.

“What makes these children so good?” I heard a visitor ask her neighbor one morning as she watched the Via Giusti little ones.

A number of factors contribute to the goodness of the Montessori child, but one of the most important of these is that he “knows himself.” He knows his body, what it can do and what it must not do. This physical freedom leads naturally and surely to freedom of the spirit.

THE FREEING OF OTELLO, THE TERRIBLE

_Montessori Awakening of Conscience Through Directed Will_

He was so wee a _bambino_ to have absorbed so much brutality in his heart. Not quite three summers and winters old was Otello when his mother pushed him across the threshold of the big, cool, white room of the Trionfale Public School at Rome that houses a Montessori Children’s House. There she left him after a volley of guttural speech that told the little dark-eyed girl directress how uncontrolled and passionate was this baby of Rome, a quaint little “man” in stuff dress and bare legs and torn shoes who looked with stolid wonder into the happy eyes of the other babies.

At first it seemed as if the mother were right. In an awed whisper to Dr. Montessori the girl directress spoke of Otello as “the terrible.” He met love with apparent hate, kindness with malevolence, sociability with taciturn aloofness. Did little Mario with painstaking effort lay a carpet of beautifully tinted color spools in careful order on his table; then Otello swooped down from his watchful corner and with one sweep of his fat hand wrought confusion in the beauty. Did a stone lie, harmless, in the school garden; Otello found it and used it with dire results. Did Valia, the toddler, with much toil fill her small wheelbarrow with a precious load of sticks ready to trundle it across the playground; Otello intervened, overturned the barrow, and gloated over Valia’s tears.