Part 5

Little Raffaelo trudged across the court one morning to the Children’s House in the Scuola Famagosta, near which he lived, and there found a kind welcome and a happy, busy community of children like himself. Neat, in his clean apron, and with big, questioning eyes, he sat apart from the others in one corner of the room, watching. Certain of the children were writing big, plain script on the blackboard; others sat quietly reading to themselves from big picture books. Raffaelo’s glance shifted from these to a child who stood near him, working at a low table. What had he brought from the white shelves in that big wooden box? Raffaelo wondered. Why was he turning the box over? But the table was suddenly covered with a mass of color, such as only the Romans know how to dye. From the box came reel upon reel of ravishingly colored silks, every color that tints sky and field and garden—crimson, orange, lemon, the deep green of the grass, and the gray green of the olive leaf; the blue that makes wild iris and children’s eyes, the purple of grapes when the sun shines on the vineyards. If Raffaelo could have counted, he would have known that there were sixty-four of these flat, white wooden spools, wound with eight colors and eight of each color, showing almost all the grading of color that makes this old earth of ours so lovely.

The colors trickled like a life-giving stream into Raffaelo’s starved senses. He reached for the color spools, snatching a great fistful away from the other child.

“_Mio; mio!_ Me; me!” he cried.

They _were_ his. Some of us steal bread when we are hungry. Some of us steal love when we are famished for it. Children steal because we or the world have starved them of something which they crave for their natural, best development of body, mind, or soul. The habitual public school teacher, the average mother of to-day, would have said:

“Give those colors back. It’s wicked to take something that is not yours!”

The directress of this Montessori school, in which teaching and mothering are practiced in new ways, watched Raffaelo for a moment, asking herself:

“Why does this child steal? Is he blind to law because his need is so great?”

Then she crossed to Raffaelo, bringing with her a handful of color spools—two red, two blue, two yellow.

“These are yours,” she said. “Will you give your little neighbor’s colors back to him, because it was not right to take them? When you have carried to him every one of the spools, return to me and I will tell you about _your_ colors.”

Happily, Raffaelo did as he was told, receiving his first lesson in ethics before he had his first color lesson. Returning, he stood, wide-eyed and fascinated, beside the directress as she held out to him two of the color spools.

“This is _red_,” she explained, laying the red spool on the white table in front of him, and waiting a moment or two, that he might make the mental association between the name of the color and the color itself. Then she showed him a blue wound spool.

“This is _blue_,” she said, laying his spool at the opposite side of the table from the red one, and again waiting for Raffaelo to make the association of name and color. Taking the next step in this Montessori teaching, she pointed to the red wound spool, and asked:

“What is this, Raffaelo?”

“Red,” he laughed back.

“And this?” pointing to the other one.

“Blue!” Raffaelo almost shouted in his delight at acquiring knowledge.

Then came the last step in Raffaelo’s lesson. Holding out the remaining tablets in the palm of her hand, the directress said:

“Show me red, Raffaelo. And show me blue.”

With no mistake, the little color lover selected the red, the blue, and placed each on his table, matching them to the corresponding spools.

“These are yellow,” the directress explained to him, giving him the two remaining spools. Then she left him, having given him the food for clear, colorful thought for which two generations of thwarted painters had made him long.

All the morning Raffaelo played with his six color spools, gathering them together into a pile, handling them, holding them up to the light, that he might watch the play of sunshine and shade upon their beauty, pairing them upon his table, repeating to himself: “Red, blue, yellow!” Sometimes he watched his small neighbor, who had grown very expert in color lore and could name all the colors and lay the spools in chromatic order on his table, eight rows headed, severally, by black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and brown, and each row containing eight gradations of its color.

When this child completed his series of orderly color scales he went to the window and looked out at the Roman hill rising back of the school. To the child who had not received Montessori color teaching, the hill would have been a shapeless, colorless bit of earth. To this child, who could see color in its finest gradation, it was a landscape where one could trace the gold outline of orange and lemon, the red tiling of a vine-tender’s house near the top and back of it a sky that was violet—not blue. He looked at the hill for a long time. Then he selected an outlined picture of a tree, and looking intently at a box of colored pencils, selected one that was just the color of a cedar and proceeded to fill in the outline.

To Raffaelo, the child was a spellworker. Watching this fascination, the directress gave Raffaelo a box of color spools, emptying them out and allowing him to try and differentiate the colors, putting each back in its right compartment in the box. She did not burden his mind with names. He was feeding his senses by just handling and feeling the colors, and he was unspeakably happy. When the noon hour came, he did not want to go home. When his bedtime came, that night, he escaped from his mother and ran to the window, looking out. The night before, he had looked down at the soiled, unbeautiful street; to-night he looked up. The sun was just setting, a ruby ball in a sea of amber.

“See!” Raffaelo shouted, pointing to the sunset. “Red; yellow!”

As his mother picked him up and carried him away from the window, he looked deep down into her eyes. “Blue,” he said, seeing them for the first time in all their beauty. The hunger of Raffaelo was fed.

Every child is color hungry. Your child may be a painter in the making, heir to a century-old talent that somebody had to bury, but which would not die and rose and haunted. Or he may be an average child who will be happier and better all his life if he can see each fine gradation of color that tints the sunset and can feed his soul on a beautiful Titian or a Fra Angelico.

We have thought that we were teaching our children color when we called their attention to a colored object. A child is much more apt to associate taste with the apple which we show him when we try to give him a color lesson, and quite possibly we make a false statement when we say that the apple is red. Very few apples are _red_; they are dark red, light red, orange, or yellow in tint. Why not begin the other way round, as Dr. Montessori does, and teach pure _color_, giving the child the joy that comes from discovering for himself just what pigment nature used in painting the apple.

In teaching children color, we will use, if possible, Dr. Montessori’s own box of sixty-four color spools that include almost all the tints and shades of the prismatic colors, black to gray, and the scale of browns. If we are not so fortunate as to be able to use this apparatus, which is a most careful and scientific analysis of color, we can try to study color ourselves, and point it out to children as it is found in the home in textiles, silk and worsted, papers, flowers, and colored crayons and paints.

In teaching color at home we may all follow Dr. Montessori’s own simple method. The Montessori directress might have tried to teach Raffaelo color as we, in America, teach our children, saying:

“See the ball; it is red. The forget-me-not is blue. See the pretty robin redbreast,” and in making these statements confusing in the child’s mind the concepts of toy, flowers, birds, and colors when all he needs is _color_. Every child wants to make his own application of knowledge. Instead, the girl who had been trained under Dr. Montessori had followed the only true method of teaching any fact, the method that lies at the basis of Montessori education miracles. Dr. Montessori says that teaching must be _simple_ and _objective_. There hasn’t been enough of “calling a spade a _spade_” in our American schools and homes.

Show your child red, or the letter A, or a moral fact—it doesn’t matter much which—and name it _red_, or _A_, or _right_.

Ask him to tell _you_ just what you told him about it.

Ask him to pick out red from other colors, or A from other letters, or a moral act from immoral acts. This is Montessori teaching reduced to A B C, but it is teaching that is successful.

Our homes may be made as full of color and beauty for little children as are the Children’s Houses. The use of the prism, the Montessori color spools, the color top, our beautifully graded colored crayons and water colors for filling in outlined pictures, a study of the colored papers to be had for paper dolls’ clothes, the daily watching of the color changes in sunrise and sunset—all these open the spirit eyes of the child. Then we will lead children to notice and appreciate harmonious blending of tints and shades in our walls, our rugs, our gardens, our picture galleries.

Of what value is it that the child’s chromatic sense be trained by learning to know and discriminate between red, blue, and yellow, and from this to acquire a facility in knowing the scale of grays and browns? It means more for the child than just the soul-satisfaction that comes from learning how to use the eyes. It means _starting_ the brain machine and then looking out for the switch.

The first morning that I met little Mario, one of my child Montessori friends in Rome, he looked me over from head to foot, ran to a color box, selected a color spool of the exact shade of gray blue of my suit and showed it to me joyfully. In almost the same second that he made this mental decision, he saw that the quick movements of little Valia were threatening the safety of a glass vase that stood, holding flowers, on a table at the opposite end of the room. Like a flash, Mario ran, held the vase, and prevented the catastrophe.

To be able to think down the color scale from blue to a blue that is mixed with gray; to be able to think in another kind of mental scale from cause to effect—these are both _chromatic_ mind operations.

To know color means satisfying your child’s beauty hunger. It means, also, starting him on the road to logical thinking.

THE GOING AWAY OF ANTONIO

_Directing the Child Will_

Antonio had a longing to _do_.

Since babyhood, he had watched the _madre_ _doing_ about the house, the _padre_ who left each morning and returned each night after a day of _doing_ somewhere.

All of Antonio’s most interesting world of little things revolved about a circle of persistent activity. The earth in the garden moved with its life of roots and bulbs, the very small ant creatures crept about from sunrise to sunset with their sand burdens, the gray branches of the olive opened to show their hidden treasures of leaves; the birds built; Luigi, the old farmer beyond the garden, continually loaded and unloaded his creaking yellow cart. Antonio absorbed this life energy with as much hunger as he ate his soup and figs.

“I will, also, _do_ all day,” he decided, ready to try the adventure.

“I will make a little garden,” he chose one morning.

The spade was too huge for baby fingers, the frost-hardened ground demanded force in digging. Some hyacinth stalks, just pushing their odorous, purple way up through the mold, were broken by Antonio’s eager effort. Still, the little boy persisted, endeavoring to accomplish the task that his imagination pictured—a little round flower-bed of his own, made by his hands, and in which flowers of all colors might raise their heads overnight. Now he smelled them; now he could feel their velvet-soft petals.

“Stop! Come here, naughty Antonio. You cannot make a garden; you are too small. And you dirty your clean apron.”

Antonio dropped the spade as the words of his _madre_ shrilled through the air. He sat down in a discouraged heap on the edge of the path. Always, his _madre_ could persist in tasks, but he was continually interfered with. Why?

But with the buoyancy of childhood, the little man suddenly jumped up. A rattle of tin bells and a strident shriek of protesting, ungreased wheels were the prelude to Luigi’s approach. In his cart of oranges and lemons, with bunches of poppy and wheat stuck in the chinks, Luigi rode down the lane. His smiling face was as russet and wrinkled as an old nut, bits of miracle-hiding clod stuck to his blue smock. As he passed, he tossed an orange to Antonio.

“I will be a farmer. How fine to earn money for my family, as Luigi does,” little Antonio decided. He ran to the house and, pulling out his little cart, loaded it with some of the vegetables that stood in baskets in the kitchen. He trundled it up and down, calling his wares as he had heard Luigi. At first his _madre_ laughed. Then, watching him, her smile furrowed itself into a frown.

“Why play that you are Luigi, who is only a farmer?” she expostulated. “Be a great general. Here are your toy soldiers.” She pulled his little cart away from Antonio and pushed into his arms a box of gaudy tin soldiers.

“Drill them; command them,” the _madre_ urged Antonio.

Antonio watched, sadly, the demolition of the little cart which stood for playing into breadwinning. His soldiers were painted manikins, not very steady on their legs and only slightly interesting. He tried to stand them in rows and they all tumbled down. He changed them for his ball, and his _madre_ suggested that a picture book would be a better plaything for the house, taking the ball away from him. When he was absorbed in the book, she tore him from it for a walk with her in the streets.

So it always happened with Antonio. No one allowed him to _persist_ in an occupation, no one allowed him to _choose_ what he should do, and each day’s activities were _decided for him_.

From a strong-willed baby whose impulses were all good, Antonio drifted into weak-willed little boyhood. It was as if he were daily followed by a spirit of indecision.

“Shall I concentrate on this play?” Antonio would ask himself, and in reply the spirit which had risen from his babyhood influences whispered in his ear, “No.”

Then came his manhood, and he asked himself the same question.

“Why persist? It is easier to shift, continually, from one occupation to another, not doing anything long, or well.

“Why trouble to choose? My mother made decisions for me when I was a little boy; the public school teachers chose my studies for me; now that I am a man, let other men think for me. I have no power to control my will.”

How simple a solution of the life question! The fingers of Antonio that had itched in babyhood to make the earth bloom and to earn bread closed quiescently about a dagger handed him by a man who said, “Come with me; do as I decide for you.” The crime Antonio did was not his fault, nor the fault of his accomplice. It was the fault of his _madre_.

Dr. Montessori tells the story of the child whose will is misdirected in babyhood. He is the child whom his mother and the public school system mold into a lump of putty by thinking for him.

The greatest problem of to-day in child-training is, how shall we help our little ones to strength of will? Civilization is being sapped by our weaklings. Home-training, the public schools do not develop character. Dr. Montessori tells us that this is because parents and teachers do not know what will, fundamentally, is.

Dr. Montessori says, “To will is to be _able_. The little child who persistently struggles to pile block upon block until a miniature tower or castle rises under his fingers, _persisting until he completes_ the labor, is taking his first step toward will-training.

“Family life, trade life are built up on this persistency. Whether it shows itself in loving, or giving or working, constancy makes the social will. Every motor activity is an act of will, and constancy in _right_ activities makes character.”

Other great teachers have said the study of mathematics and the dead languages, the military discipline of the army, mortification of the flesh, make character. To train a child’s will we feel we must crucify it upon the cross of our desires. A child must obey us, we say, follow our caprices and chisel himself into a likeness to us, because we wish him to be like us. Why should children be little men and women? Are we so sure of our own perfection that we have a right to force our personality upon that of our children?

Dr. Montessori gives us a new rule for developing character in children. She says:

“_Seek the child’s first longings_ if you would train his will. Give him the foundation of will by helping him to concentrate on something he instinctively craves to be busy about and so lay the foundation stones of his character.”

The little child’s first impulses to be active are good. He wants to be about his father’s business by taking part in the activities of the home. We make our children weak-willed by our own capriciousness in interfering with their attempts to be active. We dress them, we feed them, we wait on them, we drive them to play, we lead them; we put them in kindergartens where they flit from one occupation to another without an opportunity to concentrate on one; we put them in schools where their days are cut up into little bundles of study, tied with the iron chains of Schedule that make prisoners of children; we continually decide for our little ones and kill their characters with the sword of misdirected kindness.

Some children are born with the color of painters in their souls, and we punish them for soiling _our_ pictures and mussing _our_ tapestries and trampling upon _our_ gardens. May we not look beyond their impotent acts to the spirit-longing that prompted them and put into their hands the best in the way of color: paints, crayons, books, flowers that will satisfy their desires and give them an opportunity to concentrate on the activity they instinctively crave. So they gain will power.

Other children are born with a vision of the builder in their eyes, and we thwart them when they try to use the furnishings of the home in a process of reconstruction. May we not equip our little architects with materials for building, call their attention to the classic in architecture and art, give them a chance to build their own characters?

Most children are born little cosmopolites—small world citizens who explore with the greatest interest the strange, new environment in which they find themselves. These are the children whom our present system of coercion in home and school hurts most. We crush their wills by not giving them an opportunity to follow their instinctive interests in babyhood. The innate impulses of such children are good. They must explore and produce around themselves. They must be helped to wise choice and right decisions. So they grow to willed man and womanhood.

Is this following of personal impulse, as shown in Montessori-trained children, productive of better concentration than we find in our public schools to-day?

Part of the Montessori didactic material for teaching numbers consists of a cardboard case into which cards bearing big black figures may be slipped, giving the child an opportunity to work out number combinations. A little lad of five discovered one morning, when I was observing at the Via Giusti Montessori school in Rome, that he could slip into his case cards in regular succession that would count to one hundred by fives. He spread out his cards upon the sunny floor, provided himself with the polished counting sticks for verifying each operation; then kneeling in front of his counting frame, he went to work, alone, concentrated.

It was visiting day at the School. Tourists, teachers, students lined the room to the number of forty or fifty, leaving the children scant space to work, and as the little boy’s numerical adventure began, they crowded closer to watch him. An American public school child would have grown restive and self-conscious, but this little Montessori lad might have been alone in the Sahara, so quiet, so unheeding of anything but his own occupation was he. The number cards are large, and it took a good many to reach one hundred. The little fellow spread them out in the center of the floor, then carried the row under the chairs of the visitors, not seeming to notice the presence of the grown-ups.

The morning grew gold with noon, and the other children, quietly putting away their materials, spread the low tables for the midday meal. Little white bowls, snowy napkins, carefully laid spoons—then the steaming chicken broth. Still the little counter did not move. He had reached seventy-five, after verifying every number he had registered in the case. One of the wee waitresses for the day carried his red and green luncheon basket and set it down on the floor in front of him; he did not heed it.

“Why doesn’t somebody stop that child’s counting and _make_ him eat his lunch,” expostulated a nervous American school teacher, watching. “Children should be made to do certain things at certain times,” she explained.

Just then the boy slowly and with great pains fitted a figure one and two ciphers into the counting case. Like a little conqueror he stood up, folded his arms, and looked at the perfect result of two hours’ willed, concentrated work. A smile broke the baby face into dimples, and running out into the garden, he began to play like a little colt. He was not tired. He was not hungry. He was only joyful at this conquest of his will.

Montessori will-training proves itself in results.

The practical life and gymnastic exercises of the method have a peculiar value in relation to the strengthening of the child will. Once a child has learned to inhibit his scattering muscular disorder in such co-ordinations as are involved in dressing and undressing, feeding himself, bathing, taking part in the everyday work of the home as far as possible; in walking, running, marching, skipping, dancing to music, and the other rhythmic and gymnastic exercises involved in the Montessori system, he has fixed a permanent habit of muscular control which establishes, also, mental control. To be able to place dishes and silver in an orderly way on a table, to carry and balance a tray containing several filled cups or glasses, to be responsible for a certain drawer or cupboard shelf or case in which are contained play materials is to be able to control mind as well as body.

The muscular education of Montessori that has a direct bearing upon the direction and development of the child’s will is included in the primary activities of everyday life, in walking, greeting, rising, and handling objects gracefully; in the proper care of the person, in taking part in the management of the household, in gardening, in such handwork as clay modeling and drawing and in all properly co-ordinated gymnastic and rhythmic movements. This new and direct will-training is possible in any home.