the possibility of american adaptations of, or additions to, the montessori apparatus
holding firmly in mind the guiding principle formulated in the paragraph preceding, it may not be presumptuous for us, in addition to exercising our children with the apparatus devised by dr. montessori, to attempt to apply her main principles in ways which she has not happened to hit upon. she herself would be the first to urge us to do this, since she constantly reiterates that she has but begun the practical application of her theories, and she calls for the co-operation of the world in the task of working out complete applications suitable for different conditions.
it is my conviction that, as soon as her theories are widely known and fairly well assimilated, she will find, all over the world, a multitude of ingenious co-partners in her enterprise, people who, quite unconscious of her existence, have been for years approximating her system, although never doing so systematically and thoroughly. is it not said that each new religion finds a congregation ready-made, of those who have been instinctively practising the as yet unformulated doctrines?
[106]an incident in my own life which happened years ago, is an example of this. one of the children of the family, an adored, delicate little boy of five, fell ill while we were all in the country. we sent at once in the greatest haste to the city for a trained nurse, and while awaiting her arrival, devoted ourselves to the task of keeping the child amused and quiet in his little bed. the hours of heart-sickening difficulty and anxiety which followed can be imagined by anyone who has, without experience, embarked on that undertaking. we performed our wildest antics before that pale, listless little spectator, we offered up our choicest possessions for his restless little hands, we set in motion the most complicated of his mechanical toys; and we quite failed either to please or to quiet him.
the nurse arrived, cast one glance at the situation, and swept us out with a gesture. we crept away, exhausted, beaten, wondering by what possible miraculous tour de force she meant single-handed to accomplish what had baffled us all, and holding ourselves ready to secure for her anything she thought necessary, were it the horns of the new moon. in a few moments she thrust her head out of the door and asked pleasantly for a basket of clothes-pins, just common wooden clothes-pins.
when we were permitted to enter the room an hour or so later, our little patient scarcely glanced at us, so absorbed was he in the fascinatingly various angles at which clothes-pins may be thrust into each other’s[107] clefts. when he felt tired, he shut his eyes and rested quietly, and when returning strength brought with it a wave of interest in his own cleverness, he returned to the queer agglomeration of knobby wood which grew magically under his hands. now dr. montessori could not possibly have used that “sensory exercise,” as they have no clothes-pins in italy, fastening their washed garments to wires, with knotted strings; and the nurse was probably married with children of her own before dr. montessori opened the first casa dei bambini; but that was a true montessori device, and she was a real “natural-born” montessori teacher. and i am sure that everyone must have in his circle of acquaintances several persons who have such an intuitive understanding of children that dr. montessori’s arguments and theories will seem to them perfectly natural and axiomatic. one of my neighbors, the wife of a farmer, a plain yankee woman who would be not altogether pleased to hear that she is bringing up her children according to the theories of an inhabitant of italy, has, by the instinctive action of her own wits, hit upon several inventions which might, without surprising the directress, be transferred bodily to any casa dei bambini. all of her children have gone through what she calls the “folding-up fever,” and she has laid away in the garret, waiting for the newest baby to grow up to it, the apparatus which has so enchanted and instructed all the older ones. this “apparatus,” to use the unfortunately mouth-filling and inflated name[108] which has become attached to dr. montessori’s simple expedients, is a set of cloths of all shapes and sizes, ranging from a small washcloth to an old bedspread.
when the first of my neighbor’s children was a little over three, his mother found him, one hot tuesday, busily employed in “folding up,” that is, crumpling and crushing the fresh shirtwaists which she had just laboriously ironed smooth. she snatched them away from him, as any one of us would have done, but she was nimble-witted enough to view the situation from an impersonal point of view which few of us would have adopted. she really “observed” the child, to use the montessori phrase; she put out of her mind with a conscious effort her natural, extreme irritation at having the work of hours destroyed in minutes, and she turned her quick mind to an analysis of the child’s action, as acute and sound as any the roman psychologist has ever made. not that she was in the least conscious of going through this elaborate mental process. her own simple narration of what followed, runs: “i snatched ’em away from him and i was as mad as a hornit for a minit or two. and then i got to thinkin’ about it. i says to myself, ‘he’s so little that ’tain’t nothin’ to him whether shirtwaists are smooth or wrinkled, so he couldn’t have taken no satisfaction in bein’ mischievous. seems ’s though he was wantin’ to fold up things, without really sensin’ what he was doin’ it with. he’s seen me fold things up. there’s other things than shirtwaists he could fold, that ’twouldn’t[109] do no harm for him to fuss with.’ and i set th’ iron down and took a dish-towel out’n the basket and says to him, where he set cryin’, ‘here, buddy, here’s somethin’ you can fold up.’ and he set there for an hour by the clock, foldin’ and unfoldin’ that thing.”
that historic dish-towel is still among the “apparatus” in her garret. five children have learned deftness and exactitude of muscular action by means if it, and the sixth is getting to the age when his mother’s experienced eye detects in him signs of the “fever.”
now, of course, the real difference between that woman and dr. montessori, and the real reason why dr. montessori’s work comes in the nature of a revelation of new forces, although hundreds of “natural mothers” long have been using devices strongly resembling hers, is that my neighbor hasn’t the slightest idea of what she is doing and she has a very erroneous idea of why she is doing it, inasmuch as she regards the fervor of her children for that fascinating sense exercise, as merely a providential means to enable her to do her housework untroubled by them. she could not possibly convince any other mother of any good reason for following her examples because she is quite ignorant of the good reason.
dr. montessori, on the other hand, with the keen self-consciousness of its own processes which characterizes the trained mind, is perfectly aware not not only of what she is doing, but of a broadly[110] fundamental and wholly convincing philosophical reason for doing it; namely, that the child’s body is a machine which he will have to use all his life in whatever he does, and the sooner he learns the accurate and masterful handling of every cog of this machine the better for him.
now, whenever frontier conditions exist, people generally are forced to learn to employ their senses and muscles much more competently than is possible under the usual modern conditions of specialized labor performed almost entirely away from the home; and though for most of us the old-fashioned conditions of farm-life so ideal for children, the free roaming of field and wood, the care and responsibility for animals, the knowledge of plant-life, the intimate acquaintance with the beauties of the seasons, the enforced self-dependence in crises, are impossibly out of reach, we can give our children some of the benefits to be had from them by analyzing them and seeing exactly which are the elements in them so tonic and invigorating to child-life, and by adapting them to our own changed conditions. there are even a few items which we might take over bodily. a number of families in my acquaintance have inherited from their ancestors odd “games” for children, which follow perfectly the montessori ideas. one of them is called the “hearth-side seed-game” and is played as the family sits about the hearth in the evening,—though it might just as well be played about a table in the dining-room with the light turned low. each child[111] is given a cup of mixed grains, corn, wheat, oats, and buckwheat. the game is a competition to see who can the soonest, by the sense of touch only, separate them into separate piles, and it has an endless fascination for every child who tries it—if he is of the right age, for it is far too fatiguing for the very little ones. another family makes a competitive game of the daily task of peeling the potatoes and apples needed for the family meals. once the general principle of the “montessori method” is grasped, there is no reason why we should not apply it to every activity of our children. indeed dr. montessori is as impatient as any other philosopher, of a slavishly close and unelastic interpretation of her ideas. furthermore, it is to be remembered that the set of montessori apparatus was not intended by its inventor to represent all the possible practical applications of her theories. for instance, there are in it none of the devices for gymnastic exercises of the whole body which she recommends so highly, but which as yet she has been able to introduce but little into her schools. here, too, what she would wish us to do is to make an effort to comprehend intelligently what her general ideas are and then to use our own invention to adapt them to our own conditions.
a good example of this is the enlightenment which comes to most of us, after reading her statement about the relative weakness of little children’s legs. she calls our attention to the fact that the legs of the new-born baby are the most negligible members he possesses,[112] small and weak out of all proportion to his body and arms. then with an imposing scientific array of carefully gathered statistics, she proves that this disproportion of strength and of size continues during early childhood, up to six or seven. in other words, that a little child’s legs are weaker and tire more quickly than the rest of him, and hence he craves not only those exercises which he takes in running about in his usual active play, but others which he can take without bearing all his weight on his still rather boneless lower extremities.
this fact, although doubtless it has been common property among doctors for many years, was entirely new to me; and probably will be to many of the mothers who read this book, but an ingenious person has only to hear it to think at once of a number of exercises based on it. dr. montessori herself suggests a little fence on which the children can walk along sideways, supporting part of their weight with their arms. she also describes a swing with a seat so long that the child’s legs stretched out in front of him are entirely supported by it, and which is hung before a wall or board against which the child presses his feet as he swings up to it, thus keeping himself in motion. these devices are both so simple that almost any child might have the benefit of them, but even without them it is possible to profit by the above bit of physiological information, if it is only by restraining ourselves from forbidding a child the instinctive gesture we must all have seen, when he[113] throws himself on his stomach across a chair and kicks his hanging legs. if all the chairs in the house are too good to allow this exercise, or if it shocks too much the adult ideas of propriety, a bench or kitchen-chair out under the trees will serve the same purpose.
everyone who is familiar with the habits of natural children, or who remembers his own childish passions, knows how they are almost irresistibly fascinated by a ladder, and always greatly prefer it to a staircase. the reason is apparent. after early infancy they are not allowed to go upstairs on their hands and knees, but are taught, and rightly taught, to lift the whole weight of their bodies with their legs, the inherent weakness of which we have just learned. of course this very exercise in moderation is just what weak legs need; but why not furnish also a length of ladder out of doors, short enough so that a fall on the pile of hay or straw at the foot will not be serious? as a matter of fact, you will be astonished to see that even with a child as young as three, the hay or straw is only needed to calm your own mind. the child has no more need of it than you, nor so much, his little hands and feet clinging prehensilely to the rounds of the ladder as he delightedly ascends and descends this substitute for the original tree-home.
the single board about six inches wide and three or four inches from the ground (a length of joist or studding serves very well) along which the child walks and runs, is an exercise for equilibrium which is elsewhere described (page 149). this can be[114] varied, as he grows in strength and poise, by having him try some of the simpler rope-walking tricks of balance, walking on the board with one foot, or backward, or with his eyes shut. it is fairly safe to say, however, that having provided the board, you need exercise your own ingenuity no further in the matter. the variety and number of exercises of the sort which a group of active children can devise goes far beyond anything the adult brain could conceive. the exercises with water are described (page 151). these also can be varied to infinity, by the use of receptacles of different shapes, bottles with wide or narrow mouths, etc.
the folding-up exercises seem to me excellent, and the hearth-side seed-game is, in a modified form, already in use in the casa dei bambini. small, low see-saws, the right size for very young children, are of great help in aiding the little one to learn the trick of balancing himself under all conditions; and let us remember that the sooner he learns this all-important secret of equilibrium, the better for him, since he will not have the heavy handicap of the bad habit of uncertain, awkward, misdirected movements, and he will never know the disheartening mental distress of lack of confidence in his own ability deftly, strongly, and automatically to manage his own body under all ordinary circumstances.
a very tiny spring-board, ending over a heap of hay, is another expedient for teaching three- and four-year-olds that they need not necessarily fall in[115] a heap if their balance is quickly altered. if this simple device is too hard to secure, a substitute which any woman and even an older child can arrange for a little one, is a long thin board, with plenty of “give” to it, supported at each end by big stones, or by two or three bits of wood. the little child bouncing up and down on this and “jumping himself off” into soft sand, or into a pile of hay, learns unconsciously so many of the secrets of bodily poise that walking straight soon becomes a foregone conclusion.
one of the blindfold games in use in montessori schools is played with wooden solids of different shapes, cubes, cylinders, pyramids, etc. the blindfolded child picks these, one at a time, out of the pile before him and identifies each by his sense of touch. in our family this has become an after-dinner game, played in the leisure moments before we all push away from the table and go about our own affairs, and managed with a napkin for blindfold, and with the table-furnishings for apparatus.
the identification of different stuffs, velvet, cotton, satin, woolen, etc., can be managed in any house which possesses a rag-bag. i do not see why the possession of a doll, preferably a rag-doll, should not be as valuable as the montessori frames. most dolls are so small that the hooks and eyes and the buttons and buttonholes on their minute garments are too difficult for little fingers to manage, whereas a doll which could wear the child’s own clothes would certainly[116] teach him more about the geography of his raiment than any amount of precept. i can lay no claim to originality in this idea. it was suggested to my mind by the constant appearance in new costumes of the big teddy-bear of a three-year-old child, whose impassioned struggles with the buttons of her bear’s clothes forms the most admirable of self-imposed manual gymnastics.
lastly, it must not be forgotten that the “sets of montessori apparatus” must be supplemented by several articles of child-furniture. there is not in it the little light table, the small low chair so necessary for children’s comfort and for their acquiring correct, agreeable habits of bodily posture. such little chairs are easily to be secured but, alas! rarely found in even the most prosperous households. we must not forget the need for a low washstand with light and easily handled equipment; the hooks set low enough for little arms to reach up to them, so that later we shall not have to struggle with the habit fixed in the eight-year-old boy, of careless irresponsibility about those of his clothes which are not on his back; the small brooms and dust-pans so that tiny girls will take it as a matter of course that they are as much interested as their mothers in the cleanliness of a room; in short, all the devices possible to contrive to make a little child really at home in his father’s house.
