In other ways Andrea proved his patience. A bit of drawing that he had finished, hastily, a month before and with crooked lines, now held him concentrated for an hour, and was completed with exquisite neatness and exact contour of line. At the midday meal of the children Andrea did not, as formerly, beg to be served first, nor did he open his little green basket of luncheon before the other children. It was as if the slow-growing bulb which was working its sure way up through the bare ground to the sun had its counterpart in the unfolding root of patience it had planted in the heart of a little child.

After a little, the winter melted into a spring of yellow lilies and long sunny noons and laughter at all the gray street corners. Andrea came earlier than the other little ones to the Children’s House each morning, that he might spend a half hour with his little green watering pot in the garden. He met Bruno and Piccola with an air of assurance that set him apart from them. He held his head very high in those days because of realized hope which he had made his own.

“Andrea is our little gardener,” the children said to each other, watching his triumph.

Then came a visitor’s morning at the Children’s House of the Via Giusti Convent. The children’s greatest happiness was to welcome these grown-up friends who came to learn of the little ones the truths of life. Among the throng of students, tourists, curiosity seekers, earnest thinkers, a woman whom the children knew entered and slipped into a waiting chair. She had been during the winter a frequent visitor, quiet, sympathetic, with deep, smiling eyes. Then she had not come to the Children’s House for many days.

But they remembered her still. As flowers turn to meet the sun, they twined about her, feeling her soft, strong hands, touching with eager finger tips the dull, clinging garment that draped her. Ah, they drew back, consulting together in little questioning groups.

“She wears now a black dress.”

“Her eyes are full of sorrow,” they said.

“The Signorina tells us that, now, she has no madre.”

Andrea, apart from the others, listened, sympathetic, wondering. Sorrow should be replaced by happiness, of this he was quite sure. Was not the most unhappy child in the Children’s House the one most loved, most helped by his Signorina? Had he anything to offer this friend that would give her joy? He ran to her, grasped her hand in his; dragged her from her chair, across the threshold, into a luring little green path dented with many child footprints.

“See!” he exclaimed. “I waited.”

Where Andrea had laid away his hope, a tall, straight stalk of heavily odorous lily bloom pointed skyward. The earth that it had scattered in its bulb-bursting still surrounded the strong, green stalk. It was a chalice of the spring, a symbol of life that is eternal.

“I planted it and I waited,” Andrea repeated. “All the children waited with me.

“It blooms,” he finished, laughing up into the joyful eyes that smiled back, comforted, into his.

Life is a phenomenon in which no force is wasted and out of whose apparent death there continually confronts us the wonder of new life. Some of us are blind to the lessons Nature teaches, but little children may be led to feel nature facts that spell for them faith and hope and sympathy for all time.

Dr. Montessori tells us the place of nature in education. We will put the planting and tending of little gardens, which are the child’s own, above the place which such work has held, formerly, as a part of manual education. We will make gardening a means of leading our little ones to observe the phenomena of life, to be patient in waiting for that life to manifest itself, and to be very sure in the hope that fruition will come.

Does your little Andrea, your child who has come to you with such a divine curiosity about life and so quick a sense to feel it, have a chance to be, himself, a part of the miracle by helping something to grow? To plant a seed, to surround it with all the best conditions for growth, to tend it, to wait for its flowerings—this is Montessori development possible for any child.

Many of us feel that we are bringing our little ones into a nearness with nature when we show them beautiful pictures of flowers, lead them to exquisite gardens in which they must not pick the flowers, or take them to walk in our parks. This is not making nature a force in the life of a child as Dr. Montessori would have us. Children must touch and feel and act to know. The flower that is too beautiful for little fingers to gracefully pick and give to a friend as an offering of love should have no place in our gardens. The grass that is too soft to bear the prints of little feet is not the right kind of grass for an American park.

To plant a bean in a clay pot that stands on a city window sill; to tend the plant that grows from the seed, saying with surety, “Some day there will be beans on this plant,” means more to a child than to be told the life story of an orchid. It is the difference between thinking and feeling.

A rake, a shovel, a little basket, a cart, a watering pot—these are all Montessori didactic materials that any child in any home may have. A flower pot in a window, a window box, a tiny plot of earth in which to plant, one of these is possible for each of our children, and the flowers and fruits that result from the nurture of child hands mean, for the child, flowers and fruits of the spirit.

The world of every day is full of gardens for our children to plant, and helpless, dumb animals to be fed and cared for by child hands. It has been so easy for us to do these things ourselves that we have not stopped to think what it means in the life of a child to have helped something to live.

There is the bare seed, without shape or body or hint of promise. There is the green, groping plant that appears. Then comes the sure blooming that rewards child patience. Some plants are more slow to sprout than others; there is the fruit tree that did not sprout in the child’s life but whose pink blooms he now sees. So it may be that the good hope planted in his own heart while he is still a little fellow may not fructify for a long time, but he will wait, with patience and faith.

Caring for plants and dumb animals has further life application for children. We continually serve our little ones. Because we love them, we do too much for children; we take from their eager hands all works of service for others which would do much to develop the latent sympathy that buds in every child’s heart, only waiting for the slightest stimulus which will make it expand and develop.

Your child needs one plant that is dependent for life upon his care. He needs one pet that demands his daily forethought and vigilance to safeguard its life. As he waters the plant, watching it and providing for it the best conditions of light and freedom; as he feeds his pet, your child feels and is able to image the watchfulness of his father and mother who feed and care for him, who gave him life. He will form a habit of feeling and helping, and will grow up loving, sympathetic, and with a reverence for the phenomena of life.

There are also the rewards that nature gives children, coming as marvelous surprises, unexplainable mysteries, beyond the work of hands. The little ones at the Via Giusti Children’s House in Rome may be often seen clustered about a blossom that has unfolded while they were at home and waits to greet them in the morning—so different, so vastly more beautiful than the tiny seed which they sowed. These children would not care for a crude toy, given them as a reward for their labors. The toy can be explained; it is made of wood, or iron; it has no connection with the child’s work for which it is given as a prize.

But here is a lily, the reward of their work, but unexplainable; the product of a force that is miracle working. Its petals are like wax. With their sensitized little fingers the children touch them; no, they are not wax. No one can tell of what texture these petals are made. The flower has its own perfume, haunting, individual. Andrea did not plant those petals, he did not smell that perfume when he buried his hope. It found its own body.

So with the greatest simplicity, Dr. Montessori brings to children the truths learned from the cultivation of life.

THE MIRACLE OF OLGA
Reading and Writing as Natural for Your Child as Speech

“I have something strange in my pocket,” Olga exclaimed to the group of little ones who clustered about her, twittering, poised in excitement like a flock of baby birds.

It was just after the luncheon hour in the Children’s House, and the babies filled the sunshiny paths of the garden or loitered in happy groups in the cool stone cloister of the Convent.

“My mother told me the story of Pinocchio, the wooden marionette, who had so many adventures with a cricket for his friend, and also a fairy with blue hair. It is too wonderful a story to have been born in the mind of my mother. She found it. I have it now, with me!”

There was a breathless hush among the little ones. Pairs of blue and hazel eyes fixed every motion of the little brown maid in the bright pink apron. With slow dignity and an effect of great mystery Olga thrust one chubby hand into the depths of her pocket. The fingers fumbled a bit, then pulled out a crumpled, printed page torn from a book. Dropping, cross-legged, to the stone floor of the cloister, Olga unfolded and spread out the page in her lap. The others bent over her with all the curiosity and reverence that would be stimulated by a conjurer.

“Here is the mystery,” Olga announced, indicating the printed words. “I have discovered that this is the hiding place of Pinocchio. I have torn it out of the book that I may carry it, always, in my pocket.”

“Olga will carry Pinocchio in her pocket,” the others exclaimed in hushed whispers, scattering to talk over the matter. “Is it possible that we, too, could find Pinocchio, as Olga has, and carry him in our pockets?”

So it happened that the mothers of the children of the Via Giusti School began to miss pages from their newspapers, their magazines, their books.

“We have very bad, destructive children,” they decided, not stopping to question the reason for their little ones’ sudden interest in written language.

So it happened, also, that the directress of the school, always alert to watch the mind phenomena of her children, noticed that many children in the school had torn bits of printed pages hidden in their apron pockets, in the soles of their shoes, in their caps. In the midst of their most fascinating work, they would stop, take out these scraps of print, smooth them, and trace the letters with baby fingers.

“We have stories with us all the time; Pinocchio is ours,” they said.

“My little discoverers!” the far-seeing directress exclaimed. “They are not wilfully destructive. They are ready, now, to create a new language that will carry them farther than spoken words can. Their longings shall be satisfied.”

One morning the directress gave Olga new materials with which to work. There was a big, white wood box divided into twenty-six compartments, and in each compartment there was a huge letter of the alphabet cut from pink or blue cardboard. The blue letters were consonants; the pink letters were vowels. Seated on a soft green rug on the floor, Olga spent hours taking the letters out of their places, piling them in a colored heap of many fascinating curves and angles, then sorting them and putting each back in a compartment in the box.

Sometimes, as Olga worked, the slim girl directress dropped down on the rug beside her. Picking up one of the cardboard letters, she would say:

“This is A, Olga.”

“This is A,” Olga would repeat.

“Can you show me another A?” the directress would then ask. And Olga would, readily, pick out a similar letter.

“Where is A, Olga?” was the last question in this teaching as Olga selected from the twenty-six letters another A. So the little maid of four years soon knew all the letters by name and sound. And presently she was combining them to make words and short sentences.

As she laid together the letters that made up each word, the words that combined to make sentences, the directress analyzed each word for her, phonetically. Soon, by hearing a word, distinctly pronounced, Olga could select from her box of pink and blue symbols which represented sounds to her now those letters which were necessary to spell the word.

The directress presented to her smooth white cards, on which were mounted large black letters cut from coarse black emery cloth, as rough as sandpaper. These letter cards Olga held in one hand, tracing the outline of the letters with the fingers of her other hand and saturating her senses with the feeling of the letter shapes. Soon, she could name any letter, her eyes closed, by the sense of touch.

At the same time that Olga was learning to see and feel letters, she was being helped to the muscular control involved in writing. Upon a sheet of white paper she laid one of the Montessori geometric insets, a square, and selecting a brightly colored pencil, she drew the outline of the square upon the paper. Then, with the slanting lines used in writing, Olga filled in the outline of the square. At first, the lines were crooked, extending beyond the boundary lines of the square; but as she repeated the exercise, filling in with color other forms, outlined triangles, rectangles, circles, leaves, flowers, trees, and figures of children and animals, her muscles strengthened and she could control her pencil with the utmost precision.

Two months after her first interest in a printed page had shown itself, through no training save these sensory and muscle exercises, Olga made the miracle of graphic art her own. She went to the blackboard and wrote in clear, flowing script: “I read, I write.”

Your baby tears picture books and magazines; he leaves great, unbeautiful scrawls upon wall paper, woodwork, and sidewalk. He upsets the ink and breaks the pens in his father’s study. He wishes to handle all the books upon the library shelves. We punish him for these acts because we think them wanton. Dr. Montessori tells us that these child activities indicate an instinctive interest in the symbols of that new art, human speech, which he is making his own in the first years of his life. They tell us that we have made a mistake in not giving children an opportunity to teach themselves to read and write at the same time that they are mastering spoken language. The two interests present themselves simultaneously in our little ones. Children who tear books and scribble upon walls and interfere with the immaculate order of our home secretaries are not little mischief makers. Like Olga, and the other babies in the Children’s House, they are trying to make their own the story that you read them. Even the tools of writing for little children are gilded with the same air of mystery that touches the untranslatable black print.

The wonder teaching of Montessori, by means of which, after two or three months of preliminary exercises, little ones “explode” into reading and writing, may begin at home. Any watchful mother may lay the foundations for this educational marvel.

Have you watched the process by means of which the little Stranger who came to you from the unknown masters the strange speech of the home in which he found himself?

Are you helping or hindering him in his struggles to make language his own?

The beginnings of speech in the baby consist in repetition of syllabic sounds which he hears in his home environment. His vocal cords and tongue educate themselves through pronouncing articulate sounds. First come the labials. Then the little one combines consonants and sounds, saying: “Ma-Ma. Pa-Pa.” The mechanism by means of which the sense of hearing combines with the vocal cords in helping the two-year-old to speak makes it possible for a child to learn several foreign languages in the first five years of his life.

The child is making his own dictionary in babyhood and at a phenomenal rate of speed.

Dr. Montessori says that we may help a child to beautifully phonetic speech and a large vocabulary if we will eliminate all baby talk from our nurseries, and see that the little one hears only good models of speech. Clear-cut, carefully pronounced words, well-planned and euphonious sentences, rhythmic poems and classic stories read to our children, these will train the sense of hearing and lead to a large vocabulary and beautiful pronunciation. Suppose you were learning a foreign language, wouldn’t it discourage you to have your interpreter mispronounce, baby talk French or German or Italian to you? Our babies find themselves in a land more strange to them than any foreign country we have ever visited. We are their interpreters; let us not put stumbling blocks in their road to language.

Then, sometimes at three years, four, or five comes the tearing and scribbling stage. Every mother knows it, but Dr. Montessori helps us to a new recognition of its meaning. It isn’t a development of the old Adam in your child. It’s a guide signal for every mother. It tells you that the intricate human mechanism that makes up the child spirit is ready to learn written language naturally, without undue nerve strain, if only the right stimulus be offered.

It is because we have waited until the instinctive interest in spoken language grows dull and because we have depended upon only one sense, the sense of vision, that teaching a child to read and write has not been the natural, quick process nature means it to be.

If the nursery equipment includes the movable alphabet and the sandpaper letters of the Montessori didactic materials, your little one, instead of tearing letters, may feel them, his sense of touch carrying to his mind a telegraphic message of letter form that is registered permanently on his brain. After handling these large, stiff, pink and blue letters for a month or two, after tracing with his sensitized finger tips the rough black letters mounted on the smooth white cards, they are so indelible a part of his mental life that they must burst forth into writing without previous training. Don’t you remember how your baby by fingering his raised letters on his alphabet-bordered bread-and-milk bowl, by feeling of the raised letters on his alphabet blocks, by building words with the cut-out wooden letters of his letter game, learned without effort on your part how to print? So, by touching the beautiful script letters of Montessori, a child teaches himself to write.

But there is another process involved in the Montessori method of helping very little children to an early mastery of reading and writing. In the public schools a pencil is put into the child’s untrained fingers and we expect him to use it in writing with no preliminary help in handling it. We couldn’t use a needle in fine embroidery if we had not learned, first, how to thread it. We are not able to paint a picture of a landscape until we learn how to use a brush in outlining perspective. So we make a mistake when we expect that to hold a pencil means to be able to write. We must help children to the muscular control of this tool of writing first. Dr. Montessori tells us that drawing precedes writing.

The Montessori didactic materials for developing in children the muscular control necessary for writing include small wooden tables; flat metal forms cut in various shapes, squares, rectangles, circles, and triangles; plenty of white drawing paper, and good colored pencils of the standard colors and brown and black. Laying a form on a piece of paper, the children draw its outline. Removing the form, they fill in the outline, using long, vertical, parallel lines of any color they like, keeping within the contour of the outline. So the child educates his muscles for writing without actually writing.

The little ones at Rome soon experiment with combining these forms to make colored borders and flat designs, which they fill in with their colored pencils in very harmonious color combinations. Later, they fill in outlined pictures, using the same free, regular pencil strokes.

The Montessori method of starting reading and writing saves time in most instances. Whether or not, however, it is at four years or five years or five and one-half that the “explosion” into written expression of thought occurs, the process by means of which it is brought about is sure to give the child a firm perceptive basis for reading and writing.

Our ordinary method of teaching reading and writing is a utilization of the sense of sight, alone. In some instances the children in the primary grades of our schools begin writing by a system of tracing letters and words offered them in large script. This is purely a muscular process and rarely absolutely successful, because it involves fine muscular co-ordination for which the child of five or even six years is not ready.

The Montessori sandpaper letters and movable alphabet offer the child a chance to utilize his sense of touch in learning the symbols of thought. Formerly we showed him a word or a letter as a means for gaining so vivid a mental image of that letter that he would be able to recognize it and write it. The method of Montessori sends a telegraphic message by two wires to the child mind, a visual and a tactile impression. The tactile message is peculiarly valuable in strengthening the mental image of the word or letter because of the fact that the child is in a strong sensory motor stage of his mental development. To touch gives him stronger mental images than to see. To feel gives him, also, an impulse to imitate and to express. This is why, after touching and naming and differentiating and recognizing blindfold and building words and sentences with letters, the Montessori child spontaneously writes.

Because we are so anxious for immediate educational results with our little ones, the spontaneous reading and writing of the Montessori method has seemed to parents one of its most important developments. If, in our home Montessori experiments, children do not read and write very early, we are disappointed. We wonder if the system has the value we attached to it. We must change this state of mind.

There is the toddler of three who evinces an instinctive longing to read and write. He experiments with pencil and paper; he shows an interest in the home books, newspapers, and periodicals; he asks what the signs in the street cars and on the billboards say. There is also the child, no less promising, but more interested in objects than in symbols, who does not show these manifestations until the age of five and five and a half years.

We must recognize these signs according to the child’s age and take advantage of them. The part of the mother is to watch for the dawning of the interest in reading and writing and to give the child an opportunity to perfect the physical and mental mechanism for it.

Our homes and the educational helps to be bought for children now furnish accessory material for the Montessori process of teaching the graphic art.

The first tracing of the sandpaper letters should be preceded by exercises whose object will be the refining of the tactile sense; dipping the fingers into cold, hot, cool, and lukewarm water; differentiating blindfolded rough, smooth, hard, soft substances; recognizing with the finger tips alone many different materials, paper, iron, wood, velvet, cotton, silk, linen, satin, lace, needlework, and possible combinations of these textiles. These exercises form a most fascinating game for the child, and, through them, he brings to the exercise of tracing the sandpaper letters an exquisitely sensitized touch which results in a clear impression of their form.

As the child uses the movable alphabet upon his play table or builds words and sentences upon a bright rug spread out on the nursery floor, all the activities of the home in which he has a part and all his play life may be used as the basis of his first reading. His favorite toys may be placed about him as he constructs their names and little word stories about them. Large colored pictures of simple design may be laid on the floor as the child combines letters to spell the objects contained in them. The mother may write in large script simple instructions which the child may read and follow:

“Run to me.”

“Bring me your ball.”

“Close the door.”

Innumerable helps are to be procured for the drawing by means of which Montessori establishes the muscular control preliminary to writing. Our art stores and kindergarten supply shops offer beautifully colored crayons and drawing paper at nominal cost. Blocks, the tin utensils of the kitchen, and box covers offer geometric surfaces about which the child may draw, if the drawing board and forms of Montessori are not included in the home equipment. These outlines the child will delight in filling with color, using the diagonal strokes that form a direct preparation for the muscular control involved in writing. Following this coloring of geometric forms is the filling in, similarly, of simple outlined pictures. We find such outlined pictures in large variety in the school and kindergarten supply shops. The toy dealers supply books of really beautiful designs and pictures for coloring. It is also possible to procure sets of cardboard figures, animals, paper dolls, and soldiers which the home child may draw around and color.

One day, after having made his own, through the sense of touch, the form of letters, and after having learned muscular control in drawing form, your child will write. How can he help it? You will have established artificial conditions, muscle and sense, similar to the conditions through which he learns to talk.

The baby hears speech, and because heredity perfected his vocal cords for reacting upon mental stimulus of the sound—he talks. In the Montessori method, he feels letters, and through the perfecting of the muscles involved in reproducing those letters which he has made his own by feeling—he writes.

CLARA—LITTLE MOTHER
The Social Development of the Montessori Child

Clara always saw me before I caught the outline of her cherubic chubby person. She had constituted herself the little four-year-old hostess of the Trionfale Children’s House. Her limpid brown eyes shone with welcome to a friend or stranger. Her lips were overflowing with sweetly liquid words of greeting. Her fat arms reached out, her fat legs were winged with her friendliness.

She was the motherly, hen type of child, never so full of joy as when she was greeting someone or organizing a game or taking care of a child younger than herself. An intensely feminine little person was Clara, who would grow up into a kindly, gracious woman, forceful in her own tactful, woman way if she were surrounded by the right influences in childhood or——

I very curiously watched the social development of the chubby little girl in the bright pink frock.

Little Roman babies have the most fascinating play fancies, I believe, of any in the world. Given a cart and a faded flower or so, and Otello was transformed in a second’s space into a busy flower vender calling his posies up and down the school yard, offering imaginary bunches and twining imaginary wreaths. A pile of stones left by the architects in a corner of the playground; Mario was suddenly fired with the building zeal of his Roman ancestors. Gathering a group of boys to help him carry and lift the stones, he would construct small models of the immortal walls of the Cæsars and a possible arch of Titus.

Clara played, too, but not so much with things, as with groups. Her play had the social quality so important in the all-round development of the individual.

She would gather together a group of little ones for a festival procession or a folk dance, apportioning strong partners for the weaker ones and older ones for the babies. She played house daily, but in a different, lavish kind of way. She had, always, eight or ten make-believe children; found room in her house of sticks and stones for the fruit seller, the cheese man, the porter, and a stray musician or two. Her strongest instinct seemed to be a collective one. She wanted to brood. She wanted to be, also, a leader.

The Montessori directress let Clara very much alone, smiling upon and encouraging her play, but not trying to mold her instincts. If Clara industriously swept out her domicile with a stick, the directress did not run to her, offering her a toy broom. When Clara was a little slow about going into the schoolroom when the out-of-door period was ended, the directress did not fret at the little maid. She realized that Clara had merged her own personality in the personalities of the group of children with whom she had been playing. She had been so busy preparing her imaginary family for going to school that she did not heed the call herself.

How would the social instinct so prominent in Clara and in several other of the children find vent inside the four walls of the Children’s House, I wondered? Would the Montessori system, which has for its basic principle auto-education, this system of perfecting the individual through self-direction, give Clara and the others a chance to develop group activities?

For some time the cool, white schoolroom was the scene of individual work and personal endeavor. Otello worked alone with the solid insets; Mario’s fascinated fingers sorted colors. Clara sat on the floor in the sunshine and constructed the tower, but her keen eyes followed almost every movement of the other children. Then, for the school was in its inception and the children were new, came a transition period, when the peace was broken by perfectly normal, healthy brawls. Someone overturned Otello’s cylinders and Otello kicked the offender. Several children wanted the same box of color spools at the same time. The directress kindly interfered and gave the colors to Clara, who had been first upon the scene. Clara motioned the crowd to follow her. Now had come her chance. She organized her group. She selected a red spool and spread out upon a white table its beautiful gradations from deepest crimson to palest rose pink. Then she offered the blue spools to Mario, showing him how to grade the varying shades. It was fascinating, Mario thought, to have Clara for his little teacher. He motioned to several of the other children to join them. Tables were drawn up; brown and golden heads bent close together as the little ones dabbled in the colors, advising, helping, learning from each other.

The directress hovered outside of the group, suggesting but not forcing herself upon the children. They turned to her when they needed her, but their greatest interest lay in the joy and power of working and learning together.

As one watched the phenomenon of this natural unfolding of the social instinct in the method, there were daily examples of its spontaneity. The children, from a collection of units, had been transformed into a small community in which there were groups of workers, some large, some small, but all co-operative. The children carried on the sense exercises and took bold adventures into the fields of reading and writing together. The Montessori directress was always their captain and guide, but the grouping and working with some other child or children was the result of childish initiative.

It developed in this way.

The children learned to live together. They found that the integrity of Clara’s group, of Mario’s, or Otello’s, was preserved only if the individuals in it gave themselves up to the good of the whole. It was pleasanter to move tables and chairs softly, to wait one’s turn, and to avoid jostling one’s neighbor. So kindness and neighborliness and gentleness were learned by the children through their own endeavor.

The children learned together. There were groups of various grades of age and mental ability. Here the children of three and four emptied out an entire box of color spools and, each choosing a color, helped each other grade. There, a trio of energetic babies slopped in their basins, endeavoring to wash each other to a common cleanliness. In a quiet corner an older child taught less advanced children to spell with the movable alphabet or to work out arithmetic calculations with the rods. This group learning was carefully watched and safeguarded by the directress, but she never forced her personality upon the children. The children, left to their own efforts, found a stimulus to a wholesome kind of competition. They tried to outstrip each other in learning, and put forth more effort than if they had been urged by the teacher.

And, best of all, the children were good together.

If one child did anything that interfered with the rights of the others he was kindly but effectually isolated. He was denied nothing save his privilege of being an active, happy member of the child republic. To be allowed to go back to it was his ultimate joy.

The Montessori House of the Children is a place of more unusual development of group activities among little children than we have realized. There is a larger opportunity for making children into little citizens than in almost any other scheme of education.

We have thought that the present practice of the kindergarten, in which group activities are organized and directed by the kindergartner, gives little children the opportunity for the development of the social instinct which they so much need. At a signal, they rise and carry chairs, or march in step, or play a game, but the signal was given by the teacher. She directs the game. We have wandered so far from the leading of the gentle Froebel whose guiding star was the natural impulses of individual children in his garden of little ones.

It is vastly more difficult to lead a number of children safely through a first transition period, when all their self-activity turns into channels of disorder, than to check that disorder by force of adult will. This is the task Dr. Montessori sets for us, however, and she shows us, as the result of our patient leading of the children into habits of self-directed order, her peaceful, industrious Houses of the Children. Like a hive of bees, the little ones swarm in the flowering of their interests. They are intent upon community welfare.

The problem of helping a child to be a perfect social unit is as pressing a problem for the home as for the school. We are following the letter and not the spirit of Montessori when we offer a home child the intellectual stimulus of her didactic apparatus and deny him companionship in the use of it. It is eye-opening for a child to so learn form that he can detect slight variation of outline and is able to perceive the beautiful combination of lines which make a cathedral or an arch. It is soul-opening for this same child to help another child to a perception of this beauty.

The three periods of the spontaneous developing of the Montessori children into collective activity, as I observed them, have an even more direct bearing upon the home. Left alone, offered the scientific apparatus for mental, moral, and physical growth, the Montessori children make these important social adjustments.

They learn to live together.

They learn together.

They are good together.

A great deal is involved in the development of each of these adjustments. We must study the method of Montessori by means of which success in group activity is made spontaneous.

To say to a child, “You must be polite. You mustn’t be rude. It is ugly to be clumsy. It isn’t nice to be selfish,” was the part of the older decalogue in child-training. To teach a child by careful physical and rhythmic exercise and through simple acts of home helpfulness, so that he is naturally graceful and courteous, is the Montessori way. To provide him with play or educational materials which have greater possibilities of interest if shared—blocks, games, handicraft materials—accomplishes unselfishness. Such community play as is found in imitating the activities of the childhood of the race—digging, cooking, collecting, all kinds of building, trade, plays, weaving, gardening in groups, and camping—is valuable because it helps children to merge their personalities in the interests and life of a group. The center of these child activities is child interest, not adult pressure.

Dr. Montessori makes it possible for little children to learn together, not according to schedule, but in line with child interest.

A mother wrote me at great length and anxiously in regard to what seemed to her a little son’s lack of adaptability to the home use of the Montessori didactic apparatus. The boy had toys, books, colored pencils, blocks; he was endowed with a vital interest in the world about him and an alert mind, but he refused to play alone. He preferred playing in the street with a group of other children, their only play material being pebbles, sand, or bricks, to playing at home with his own beautiful equipment.

“How can I persuade Harold to work alone with the Montessori apparatus?” his mother queried.

It was important for this child and for all children not to work alone. Any child will make greater educational strides if the stimulus of other child minds helps his intellectual growth.

To set a group of children of different heredity, different mental and emotional development, and different interests the same task is not only futile but dangerous. It is apt to mold their plastic minds to one line of thinking, is bound to make them slaves of authority instead of free personalities. But to offer a group of children the tools of knowledge as exemplified in the Montessori didactic materials and give them the opportunity to gather in selected, interested groups for competitive research and for helping where help is needed is the most fruitful kind of learning.

This may be brought about in any home where a few children from three to four or five years of age meet regularly under the same conditions for intellectual development that exist in the Children’s Houses. Older children may be formed into a neighborhood home study club. Released from the bondage of the iron curriculum, they may find in this club an opportunity for original research along those intellectual lines which interest them most; nature, the practical application of mathematics in measuring and constructing toys, further study of history and literature through story-telling, making and dressing dolls to illustrate historical characters, and the writing and dramatizing of simple plays.

As a further development of the Montessori group activities we see, in imagination, in every community a municipal Children’s House. Here, children of all classes, ages, and degrees of intellectual growth might meet, freely selecting from a large variety of materials for mental and constructive development those which they most need. Also, we see them selecting their own social plane, finding help and inspiration in collective work with other children. In this municipal Children’s House we would find groups of child artisans, fashioning boards and molding bricks to make the buildings for a toy village. There would be little sculptors and painters, and perhaps a child poet or dramatist. We would see small modistes and milliners learning, through designing doll costumes, the finger deftness and artistic sense which come from combining beautiful colors and textiles. Such a Children’s House would have its own kitchen, where the children could study foodstuffs and cook and serve simple meals. Music would be a development of the group activities. This would constitute a laboratory for the most fruitful kind of child study on the part of physicians, psychologists, teachers, and parents, because child growth under these conditions would be quite spontaneous and along natural interest lines.

The last phase of Montessori collective work is seen as a kind of flowering. After children learn how to live together, after they have worked out intellectual problems together, they are suddenly discovered as being very kindly disposed toward each other. It is as if the ultimate development of co-operation were the elimination of war.

It is not necessary to say to a group of Montessori children, “Be good.” They could not be otherwise than good.

PICCOLA—LITTLE HOME MAKER
The Helpfulness of the Montessori Child

The visitor to a Montessori school in Rome is faced by an anomaly.

Piccola, the emotional, eager little Italian girl of five years, who is more difficult to control at home than even the average American child, is seen to be a self-controlled, useful member of a child republic. Piccola’s first work of the morning is to find her own pink apron that hangs on a peg on the wall, and button herself into it with patient perseverance. If the younger children have difficulty putting on their aprons, Piccola will patiently help them. Her next activity is, also, along lines of helpfulness. She looks about the wide spaces of the big room, where low white tables and chairs, growing ivy plants, and plain gray wall make a beautiful color scheme, to determine if there is anything she,—wee Piccola,—may do to help this beauty. Ah, Piccola sees a speck of dust in one corner of the white stone floor. Darting to the outer room, where the children remove and hang their wraps and wash their hands before school, Piccola seizes a red broom that is just the right length for her chubby arms to handle easily and a shining little tin dustpan. Hastening back, she brushes up the dust. Then she waters the ivy with a small green watering pot, fetches a white basin and a little white scrubbing brush, and slops gayly in an energetic attempt to wash off the tables. Last, she takes some of the soft green and gray rugs that the children use for working on when they sit on the floor, and beats them in the garden with much energy.

The other children have come, now, and having selected their materials from the white cupboards that line the wall, are busily at work. Piccola, too, is busy, piling pink blocks in orderly fashion, one upon the other. Her active mind is busy, though, along another line as well; she watches the other little ones furtively to see if there is anything which she can do to help them. Bruno drops his color spools; Piccola runs to help him gather them up in his apron. Little Brother tumbles down in a trip from his table to the material cupboard; Piccola helps him to balance himself again on his fat legs, and, winding two tender little brown arms about him, she steers him in safety on his way.

The hour for the midday luncheon comes. Piccola daintily helps to spread the white luncheon cloths, to lay the spoons in regular order at each child’s place, to sort and place the bright baskets in which the children have brought their sandwiches and fruit. Not until all the others are served does Piccola slip into her own empty place and partake of her own luncheon.

Piccola’s mother marvels at the change that has been wrought in Piccola by a few months in the Montessori House of the Children. She reports her observations to the Montessori directress who has Piccola’s education in charge.

“Piccola dusts the home now, without my bidding.

“She picks up her dolls and her toys when she has finished playing with them.

“She helps me lay the table for the noon meal.

“How did you teach these things to my wayward little Piccola, Signorina?”

It is the query of the American mother who finds her little one who has spent a day in a good Montessori school more helpful in the home than before.

She also asks herself:

“How may I teach helpfulness to my child?”

Dr. Montessori has discovered for us the marvel that to bring helpfulness to a very little child is not so much a matter of teaching as of fostering. She shows us the instinct to help which manifests itself in the very little child which we must detect, watch, and foster until we form a habit of usefulness in children. After all, to be useful to oneself and to others is the greatest value of education for life. Dr. Montessori puts this education for utility on a very high plane.

The mother who carefully observes and analyzes all the acts of the child of two and a half or three years of age will discover that the baby has a great desire to be busy, continually, and in imitation of his mother’s busy-ness about the home. He handles with the greatest eagerness and interest his shoes, his father’s neckties, his mother’s brush and comb, the family silver, the kitchen utensils, the door latches and knobs, the window fastenings. He is more interested in the tools of grown-up housekeeping than he is in his toys. Why is this?

A baby of twenty months spent an entire morning collecting all the shoes he could find in his mother’s room and carrying them about from one room to another. He climbed up in a chair and pulled a button hook off a dressing table. His mother substituted his dolls, his rubber toys, a ball for these, but the baby refused them. Finally his mother snatched away the huge boot of his father’s, which he was lovingly tugging about from room to room and slapped his hands because he cried at giving it up. The little man cried again, and struggled against the brutal force of his mother, who held him tightly in her lap and changed his shoes for going out in the afternoon. Again his hands were slapped.

The baby had not been in the least naughty. He wanted to learn how to button his own shoes and his mother couldn’t understand this longing which he had to express in action, having no words with which to explain himself.

Nearly all the instincts of babyhood are right instincts, leading to good conduct. The child’s first longing is to be able to fit himself to his environment, and this means that he must learn to handle those objects and do those things which he sees his family doing. The average American child grows up rather helpless and useless when it comes to making social adjustments, because we continually interfere with his first attempts to be useful. We do for him those acts of utility which he should learn himself, very early, while he is still interested in them.

It is undoubtedly less time-taking to put on a small boy’s shoes, button and lace them for him, button his under and outer clothes, to tie his necktie, and put on his rubbers, than to slowly and patiently teach him to dress himself. To bathe a child and brush and comb his hair is simpler than to allow the baby to splash in water and revel in soapsuds, as he must in learning the intricate movements necessary for keeping himself tidy. We wish to preserve, also, the immaculate order of our neat bathrooms.

We like to open and close doors for the toddler; it is our privilege of service, we feel. We prefer to lay the table ourselves, and keep our spotless kitchens free of child finger marks. What about the baby, though, who finds his attempts to make himself useful thwarted at every turn until he forms the habit of being waited on? This is a wrecking habit for childhood; it is, also, a habit that leads to our present extravagantly high cost of adult living. The little child who expects to be continually waited on is going to grow up into a man or woman who will expect to be waited on through life. Service is what doubles the grocer’s, the butcher’s, the landlord’s, the shopkeeper’s bills.

The useful helpfulness of the Montessori-trained child is easily explained.

The Montessori schoolroom is so planned that there is nothing which a child can hurt and a good deal that he can help by his first clumsy, baby attempts to be useful to himself and to others with his hands. The children are free to move about as much as they like, changing the position of the light little chairs and tables, opening and closing the doors that lead into the garden, unrolling and then rolling up again the rugs, putting away the didactic materials in the cupboards after they are through with them, washing the tables and blackboards, caring for plants and animals, and carrying on countless other activities that bring about hand and eye training.

The children learn, also, all the intricate activities involved in the care of their bodies. They wash their faces and hands, brush their hair, clean their finger nails, black their shoes, put on and take off their aprons. The dressing frames that are included in the Montessori didactic materials include all the different fastenings of a child’s clothing; buttoning on red flannel, buttoning on leather, buttoning on drill with tapes, lacing on cloth and on leather, fastening hooks and eyes and snaps, and tying bow knots.

It is quite amazing to see the eagerness with which the Montessori children attack these very universal activities of everyday life. The skill they obtain in them proves the truth of Dr. Montessori’s words:

“We habitually serve children. This is not only an act of servility toward them, but it is dangerous because it tends to suffocate their useful, spontaneous activity. We are inclined to believe that children are like puppets, and we wash them and feed them as if they were dolls. We do not stop to think that the child who does not do, does not know how to do.

“Our duty toward children is, in every case, that of helping them to make a conquest of such useful acts as nature intended man to perform for himself. The mother who feeds her child without making the slightest effort to teach him to hold and use a spoon for himself is not a good mother. She offends the fundamental, human dignity of her son,—she treats him as if he were a doll. Instead, he is a man, confided for a time by nature to her care.”

There are certain phases of the Montessori method which a mother cannot apply in her home because she has not the preliminary training and the necessary teaching skill. There is not a single activity of the Montessori training for personal and community usefulness of the individual as carried out in the Montessori school that may not be practiced in any home. The Montessori schoolroom is a working duplicate of the best conditions which should exist in every home where there is a baby. It is significant that nations have been aroused by the education miracles wrought in the Roman Children’s Houses. What, pray, is the matter with the American children’s houses?

The home is a big workshop for turning out child cosmopolites, small world citizens who will grow up into useful men and women. In the home the child may learn how to care for his body, how to care for pets, plants, and all the things that combine to fill the tool box of everyday living. Here the child may learn that consideration for others which will help him to be kind, quiet, unselfish, and polite. Here, also, he may take a small part in the care of the big human family in preparing food, laying the table, learning household cleanliness and household order. The child instinct to fetch and carry, which shows itself very early in the life of the baby, may be turned into channels of usefulness if the child is taught to happily wait on himself and others.

Much emphasis has been laid upon the didactic apparatus of Montessori which has for its aim the development of the several intellectual processes. Considering these appliances for direct stimulation and perfection of mental activity only, the casual student of Montessori says that the system is barren, that it takes into account none of the emotional activities of the child, that it eliminates educational play from the life of the little one.

As a matter of fact, the play instincts of the child are so carefully met by Dr. Montessori that they blossom into usefulness. Dr. Montessori knows more about the spontaneous play of the child from two and a half years to six than we do. She sees that his play instincts are all, at first, a struggling to be like his elders, to do the same utilitarian things that he sees them do, to imitate on a child plane the work of his mother in the home or his father in the industrial world. With this understanding of the possibilities of child play for developing into future usefulness, Dr. Montessori supplies children with those tools of play which turn child play into exercises of helpfulness.

In the Trionfale School at Rome the free play of the children has been especially safeguarded. The toddlers utilize their instinct to fetch and carry objects by loading, trundling, and unloading the specially built, stout little wheelbarrows provided for them. Very soon this play blossoms into the desire to fetch and carry with some more useful object in view. The children begin to show great skill in removing and replacing their materials from the school cupboards and putting them back in an orderly fashion. They attain perfect muscular control in laying the tables for luncheon and serving the food daintily. In one corner of a sunlit room at Trionfale there is a fascinating little salon. Soft rugs of small size, diminutive green wicker easy-chairs, sofa, and round tea table, books of colored pictures and large dolls’ dishes make it possible for the children to “play house” under ideal conditions. They learn through their play a sweet kind of hospitality, and the little school “drawing-room” of Montessori stands for a necessary development of the social instinct in children which is important.

Dr. Montessori suggests to us those playthings and play activities which will lead our children into the art of being helpful and, which is much more vital, will start in them habits of wanting to be helpful. Her scheme of play is possible of adapting to almost any home, and it has for its basis the instinctive longing of every child to be useful through his play.

A playroom should be a place, as Dr. Montessori expresses it, where the children may amuse themselves with games, stories, possibly music, and the furnishing should be done with as much taste as in the sitting-room of the adult members of the family. Small tables, a sofa, and armchairs of child size, one or two casts, copies of masterpieces of art, and vases or bowls in which the children may arrange flowers should be included. There should be many picture books, blocks, dolls, and, if possible, a musical instrument of some kind in the nursery. Dr. Montessori suggests a piano or harp of small dimensions. An important playroom accessory is a low cupboard, with drawers in which the children may keep their completed drawings, paper dolls, scrap pictures, and any precious collection of outside material such as seeds, leaves, twigs, or pebbles which they long to keep and use in their play. Half of this cupboard should consist of shelves for bowls, plates, napkins, doilies, spoons, knives, forks, a tray and tumblers for the children to use in preparing and serving their luncheon or in entertaining their friends. Stout pottery of quaint shapes and exquisite gay coloring may be obtained now. It is much more attractive to the child of three and four years than inadequate, tiny sets of dolls’ dishes. At least the necessary bowl, plate, pitcher, and mug for serving the nursery supper should be supplied and the toddler taught to serve and feed himself at a very early age.

The child should have a little broom and dustpan and scrubbing brush. He should have a low, painted washstand with a basin, soap, and nail-brush. He should be taught how to turn on and off a water tap, filling a small pitcher, pail, or basin, and carrying it, full, without spilling. He should have low hooks for hanging his clothing for outdoor wear. Both small boys and girls should have bright little aprons, not so much for purposes of cleanliness, although this is important, as to inspire them to the feeling that work is dignified and needs to be set apart by a uniform of service.

Dr. Montessori urges that those toys which we buy be selected having in mind helping the child to be an actor in a little drama of home life. A plaything, she feels, should be a work thing, capable of bringing a life activity down to the primitive plane of the child’s thinking.

Our toy shops offer us now a very wide variety of such educational toys from which to choose. We may find large dolls, modeled from life, and wearing clothes similar to children and requiring the same muscular co-ordination in fastening and unfastening. There is large furniture for these dolls, built on good lines and teaching a little girl to make a bed neatly and keep the doll’s bureau drawers in order. There are good-sized washing sets, including tubs, basket, lines, clothespins, ironing board, and sad irons; we find very complete dolls’ houses, sewing materials with dolls’ patterns and small sewing machines, kitchens where the child can pretend to cook, complete sets of cooking utensils, and lifelike toy animals.

These toys Dr. Montessori urges us to use, realizing that the child’s deepest play impulse is to dramatize in the theater of the home playroom the everyday utilitarian occupations of the race.