MARIO’S PLAYS
Montessori and the Child’s Imagination

Mario played a great deal, and I noticed, as I watched him critically, that his play was of a very strongly imaginative kind.

He was one of the youngest of the little ones at the Trionfale Children’s House, and it had taken him a rather longer time than it had the other children to gain control of his impulsive hands, his little truant feet, his vagrant-tending mind. During this first period of his Montessori schooling, when his attention was scattering and he found difficulty in making muscular co-ordination and differentiating form and color clearly, he seemed also to have difficulty in amusing himself. His play impulses at this time seemed to be very primitive; he took pleasure in idling in some sunny spot, kitten-like, or he arranged and rearranged the pieces of wicker furniture which filled the salon corner of the schoolroom, or he found entertainment in interfering with the work of the other little ones. There seemed to be no element of creativeness or originality in his play.

Presently, however, Mario began to show a steady intellectual development in his work. Through the physical exercises of Montessori, through the rhythmic exercises carried on with music and through exercises of usefulness in keeping himself and the room neat and waiting upon others, he learned an important lesson of muscular co-ordination.

He learned to make his body respond to the command of his brain.

Through the sense exercises in recognizing fine differentiations of color and form and weight and sound and texture, Mario found a clear mental vision. A month before, the hill back of the school had been a blur to his mental vision. Now it was, for him, a clear percept made up of various component parts. He saw it tall, broad, steep, colored in varying tints of green and brown; its outlines were broken for him by the sunshine, the gardens, the red and yellow tiled houses; he could almost smell the sweet perfume from its orchards and vineyards.

The sense-training of the Montessori system had quickened and clarified the little boy’s perceptive faculties.

Following side by side with Mario’s new mental development came as marked a development in his play. His play impulses were no longer scattering but had objectivity. He was, in fancy, a steam engine puffing along or the little father of a group of other children.

As he swung himself over the parallel bars in the school yard he felt that he was a famous acrobat entertaining an applauding audience. In a second he slipped into another path of fancy; as he piled stones into a pyramid, he was a great builder. More than this, Mario’s newly-found play impulses carried him into a unique plane of idealism. Crouched in a sunny corner of the playground, he was a sleeping seed; slowly and with spontaneous grace the little body rose, arms upstretched, as Mario felt in dreams the growth of root and branch and flower. No one had taught four-year-old Mario the skill of making real these fantasies. How had he taken his way alone into the fertile fields of the imagination?

It has been suggested that the Montessori system does not take into account the stimulating of the child’s imagination. Daily instances of very original, undirected imaginative play on the part of Montessori children show a subtle force at work in the method which results in a spontaneous unfolding of the imagination. The games and plays which we teach our children in kindergarten and primary school are carried on by the Montessori-trained children without adult supervision. Leaving their work, they run to the garden or playground, imitating with great freedom and beauty of imagination the activities of the gardener, the baker, the artisan, the street vender, and the traveling musician. They even impersonate in a more idealistic way, playing, as did little Mario, that they are birds and flowers.

This natural expression of imagination in very young children is an important development of the method, and a suggestive one.

We are all familiar with the timid, shrinking little child in the center of a game circle who doesn’t want to be a chickadee, but who is urged by the teacher in charge of the circle. The child persists in her disinclination; she is overawed by so large a ring of spectators; it is possible that she has never seen a chickadee. The teacher, also, persists. She goes to the child and tries to teach her the motions of bird flight, but the child sees only an adult running about and waving her arms in an unusual way. She does not connect the spectacle in any way with the free flight of a bird, and when she does take courage and tries to follow the directions of her teacher, the little one is not giving expression to her own mental image, but is endeavoring to imitate a rather ungainly adult.

Is this play of the imaginative type?

It would seem as if we have lost sight of the real character of this elusive, subtle, unexplainable fruition of the mental faculties, the imagination. It is the unforeseen mind power which makes poets and painters and sculptors and conquerors. It is a mind vision which sees success beyond defeat, worth hidden in rags, and good blossoming out of evil. It makes us hear the piping of Pan as the wind blows the reeds beside the river; it promises us a pot of gold if we can build ourselves a rainbow bridge across every cloud of despair; it shows us the lineaments of God in the guise of sorrow and poverty.

Imagination in the child finds varied expressions. There are a great many instances where a child who is lonely and longs for companionship sees and holds daily intercourse with an invisible playmate whom he can describe with great accuracy of detail. In the majority of cases this invisible playmate in disposition, appearance, and tastes is unlike any member of the family or any friend of the child’s. Where did the child find this fancy?

A child has the power of a seer to develop the unknown potentialities in apparently dead things. This dry brown leaf, frost-killed of the sap of life, is, in the child’s fancy, a gnome, jumping along in the path in front of him to warn the birds of the coming of winter. An acorn is a golden goblet brimming with fairy nectar; a hollow tree is a magic place in which to set up a domicile. No one schooled the child in these tricks of thought. How did he find them?

Dr. Montessori explains the growth of child imagination.

The child is born with a certain defined mental equipment. He has instincts, inherited memories they might be called, and he struggles to feed these instincts. He has capacities for acquiring good or bad habits very early. He has a race-old longing to gain knowledge by means of his senses. Our part in the education of the child is to study his instinctive activities, giving them opportunities for free expression where they are important for the child’s best mental development. A child likes to play in the dirt because his ancestors lived in caves and tilled the soil; it is necessary for the child’s best development that he play in sand and model in clay and plant little gardens. A child instinctively fights because his ancestors survived only by warfare; this child instinct we must inhibit.

We must establish good habits in a child early. We must help him, through various sense exercises, to gain clear percepts of his environment. We must try not to force our adult view-point upon the child, but endeavor to establish in him a habit of independent self-active thought.

Then, after we have strengthened the general intellectual processes of the child mind, Dr. Montessori points to us a miracle. Dovetailing instinct and habit and perception, the child intellect begins to build. Clear percepts become concepts; mental images become ideals, imagination appears, building from the clay of everyday-mind stuff a golden castle of dreams.

Imagination cannot be taught. It can scarcely be defined. It can never be prescribed and trained. It is that flowering of the mind processes by means of which a bit of brown sod appears tinted with light and color to the artist, full of potentialities of growth to the gardener, smells of home to the wanderer. If the three types of minds, as children, had been told that a similar piece of sod was a blanket for the sleeping seeds, one questions if it would have been gilded for them in adult life with this glow of individual fancy. On the contrary, the painter has been trained to see color, the gardener has experienced the cultivation of life in the earth, the home lover’s hungry senses grasped the memory of former sense stimuli.

Dr. Montessori tells us that the imagination develops variously in different individuals. There may be a child who will never be able to pierce the veil of reality and find his way into the court of fantasy. There will be also the child who develops a seerlike quality of idealism. He moves in a world of blissful unrealities; he sees angels’ wings in the clouds and angels’ eyes in the stars. Our part in the education of little children is to build the tower for a possible poising of the child’s wings of fancy. Then we will wait hopefully for the wonder flight.

The various parts of the didactic apparatus of Montessori presented to a child in their proper relation to his stage of mental growth have a definite place in strengthening the mental processes which lie at the basis of imagination.

We are so unaccustomed to offering any sort of mind food to the child of two and a half or three that we have allowed the little child to go mind hungry. At this early stage of a child’s development the right kind of mental training will lay a foundation for the constructive and intellectual processes of imagination and reasoning.

The child of two and three years of age is at the sensory-motor stage of mind development. He longs for experiences which he can turn into action; his mind craves ideas which will express themselves in useful muscular co-ordination and the ability to adjust himself to his environment. To put into a child’s hands the materials for this sensory-motor education early is not to overtax his mind; instead, it satisfies his very important mind hunger.

The didactic materials of Montessori that supply this sensory-motor need of the very young child and should be presented early include the various dressing frames, the solid insets, the sound boxes, the blocks of the tower, the broad stair and the long stair, the latter without the use of the sandpaper numerals. As soon as the little one has made his own the muscular co-ordination and ideas of form in relation to size involved in this material and has begun to find the will power to correct his own mistakes, other home activities involving these mental faculties should be added to the use of the Montessori apparatus. The child may dress, undress, bathe himself, dress and undress a doll, build with large blocks, sort various objects of different shapes and sizes, as seeds, nuts, spools, button molds; handle and learn the uses of the furnishings and equipment of the home: toilet utensils, brush, broom, duster, dustpan, kitchen appliances, and the like; he should receive simple ear-training in discriminating different bell tones, high and low, loud and soft notes played on the piano, and hear good models of speech, both in diction and modulation.

At the age of three to four years, the sensory element in the child’s mental life is even more prominent, but it is separated a little from motor activities. If the child has had adequate training, he has obtained a large degree of muscular control; he can handle objects without breaking them, he can run without falling down, he can minister to his own bodily needs. Now his mind is hungry for sense images. He wishes to study his environment with the aim of securing a series of definite mind pictures. Ideas are to be stored in the workshop of the child mind for future use in building the power of constructive imagination.

The Montessori didactic apparatus suited to this ideo-sensory stage of the child’s development includes the color spools, the geometric insets, the baric sense tablets, the sandpaper boards, and the textiles. The sense-training involved in the child’s use of these should be applied in various ways: finding and matching home and outdoor colors, noting the size, shape, and form of various everyday objects, block building with an idea of form, cutting form to line with blunt-pointed scissors, clay-modeling, and constructive sand-play.

The child from four years to five shows a dawning of the constructive imagination. The spool with which he played like a kitten in baby days has new potentialities in his eyes. Having learned that it is wooden, round, and will roll, and having made a mental comparison of it with the wheel of his toy cart, which is also wooden, round, and will roll, he calls the spool a wheel. This is a very important break in the child’s mental life. It demonstrates to us that the child now has ideas in the abstract. Dr. Montessori meets this with those of her didactic appliances, which will lead a child by natural, easy steps from objective to abstract thinking. She strengthens the sensory life of the child and guides him toward a grasp of the symbols of thought. Those parts of the didactic apparatus which should be presented at this point to the child are the long stair, with the sandpaper letters, and the various arithmetic exercises to be had with the rods; the counting boxes and frame, the sandpaper letters, the movable alphabet, and the drawing tablets.

Now, the child shows individualistic thinking. The direct mental training of Montessori has built a solid foundation for the growth and unfolding of the imagination. Our place is to watch for the special trend of his mind development and help this as far as lies in our power.

Does the child show special interest in the symbols and combinations of number? We should help him to play store, provide him with numerical games, give him a chance to spend and account for a weekly allowance, do home errands, use a tool box, construct cardboard toys, and learn any other possible application of number in its relation to life. Does he make a quick mastery of the symbols of language? We should transfer him as quickly as possible into simple reading books, offering him a great variety of these, that he may feed his imagination with good stories.

It has been said that the average American child exhausts the possibilities of the Montessori apparatus at the age of five years. Of course he does. Dr. Montessori planned it as a means of lighting the flame, touching the torch, opening the switch.

With a marvelous completeness it does this. Our part lies in keeping the flame burning, guiding the express train of the child mind into the higher places of reason, imagination, and personal achievement.

THE GREAT SILENCE
Montessori Development of Repose

It was an amazing fact, but a significant one, that four-year-old Joanina had never been allowed to feel herself.

As she lay in her carved-wood cradle, a bundle of cooing, pink delight, she felt for her toes, that she might assure herself of her own identity as represented in those wriggling lumps of flesh. But Joanina’s mother bound the little limbs in swaddling bands and the bambino lost her toes temporarily. When she was a bit older, and was allowed to bask, kitten-like, on a rug in the garden path, she was charmed to hold her flower-like baby hands up to the light, watching the Roman sunshine trickle through outstretched fingers as she tried to count them. But, always, her emotional, kindly intentioned madre would toss a bright-colored ball into the reaching hands or, bending over the baby, would play pat-a-cake with her, or she would suggest a romp up and down the garden. Her self-imposed quiet was always interrupted by her mother’s unrest.

As Joanina grew to a slim little girl of Italy, whose great, wistful brown eyes reflected a large curiosity and awe at the surprises of the world in which she found herself, she was daily surrounded by forces that drew her away from herself. Her home was full of glaring colored pictures hung on vividly dyed wall paper. Her mother and father talked together in high-pitched, shrill voices, and through the wide casement windows came the harsh sounds of traveling street musicians and brawling venders. Always, as a treat on Sunday or a festa, Joanina was taken to see a procession or to a band concert in one of the parks. The crowded, hot stone streets, the noisy cracking of the cab-drivers’ whips, the struggle to make her own short legs keep up with the longer steps of the madre, wearied and excited the little maid.

But she grew accustomed to noise and boisterousness in her days; she grew to expect them as well. Then she came to depend upon outside forces for keeping the motor of her baby spirit going. She begged for new toys, exhausting quickly the pleasure to be found in old playthings. She asked for new frocks, aping the vanity of her mother and the other women she saw on the Corso on feast days. She allowed her child playmates to plan her games. She cried to be taken into the turbid streets. From a placid, reposeful baby, Joanina developed into a restless, passionate, distraction-seeking little girl. Germs of discontent, disquiet, hysteria were planted in her child soul.

When Joanina found herself one morning in the Trionfale Children’s House, she experienced an unconscious feeling of peace. The very wide spaces of the two rooms where the little ones busily and happily worked; the cool gray walls unbroken in their sweep save by a blue and white terra-cotta bas-relief here and there; the plain brown linen curtains that softened and toned the yellow sunlight and rippled with a flower-scented breeze—these helped to make Joanina’s peace. Dropping into one of the little white chairs, she looked about her with eyes that again melted into the calm wonder of her babyhood. She could not have explained it, but there was already at home in her life a new, quiet repose.

Surrounding her was a child republic that opened its heart to her. Some of the children, in groups, were sorting and grading with quiet skill scores of the silk-wound color spools. Others, alone, were testing their knowledge of dimension and form with the solid and geometric insets. In a corner, a determined baby was trying to button the apron of another baby. All were entertained, yet no one was entertaining them. They were making their own content.

Without warning, the directress turned from the child whom she had been giving a lesson in numbers with the counting case, moved to the front of the room, and wrote upon the blackboard one word, Silence. Then she waited, herself silent and facing the little ones. Joanina, too, waited. She did not understand; she was curious.

The children, recognizing the written word, one by one laid down their work, dropped into positions of quiet repose, their eyes closed. Some laid their heads upon their folded arms. The room became so hushed that such faint sounds as the low ticking of the clock, the hum of a buzzing fly, the gentle rise and fall of breathing, became vibrant. The children’s faces were full of calm joy, their bodies were completely motionless. They had gone away from their small republic of work and play for a space. Who could tell where they were? Each child was feeling himself; for the time being he was listening to the call of his own personality.

Joanina, interested in the game of silence, closed her eyes. She folded her restless fingers. She waited, rapt, immobile as a little chiseled cherub. It was perhaps the first time in her four years’ apprenticeship to Life that she had been given an opportunity to listen to her own heart throbs, feel the grip of her own personality. The experience was satisfying to her. She heard and felt a great many inner voices and mental forces that she had never listened to or obeyed before. She heard the voices of happiness in her new, peaceful environment and love for the other children and joy at the complete freedom that surrounded her. She felt the impulse to do and learn as she had seen the other children doing and learning.

For several minutes, the silence held the children in its spell. Then, out of the stillness the whispered voice of the directress floated. As a singing wind of a far-away forest, a mountain echo, or the low voice of a mother as it first makes itself audible to a new-born babe, came the voice: “Joanina.”

The little girl opened her eyes, meeting the smiling ones of the directress, who made a gesture indicating that Joanina should go to her quietly. Poised on tiptoe, Joanina crossed the room noiselessly, threw herself into the outstretched arms of the directress.

“Mario, Otello,” softly the other children were called until all had, as silently as Joanina, left their places and surrounded the directress. Their eyes shone, their faces glowed as if they had been refreshed by an elixir bath. Yet the Montessori silence game which had brought about this inspiration and refreshing in the life of soul-starved little Joanina might have been a part of her home life.

Your child needs it; you need it.

There is, perhaps, no more significant phase of the Montessori system of education than the calm, quiet habit of self-contemplation aroused by the game of silence. The self-control, the poise, the power of long concentration that one sees in the Montessori children at Rome amazes the world. They are completely lacking in self-consciousness; they ask for help in their work only when it is absolutely necessary; they are sure of themselves.

In writing about the game of silence, it has been suggested that the game has an hypnotic quality; that the calm, beautifully poised directress imposes her own personality upon the children, controls them as the hypnotist controls his subject. This is not true. As the didactic materials furnish the right means for the child’s mental development, so the opportunity given by the game of silence makes possible the child’s moral and spiritual development. It gives him a chance to listen to the “still, small voice” that is a speaking voice in childhood but which is drowned by the babel of world tongues that we allow to make our song of life in adult years.

The story of Joanina, the little Roman girl, is retold in almost every American home. As we, ourselves, depend upon public opinion, outside amusements, entertaining friends, the judgment of the press, the fashions of the day for filling our lives, so we make our children, also, dependent upon similar forces for forming their characters. We surround children with gossip, we teach them to depend upon excitement for their pleasure; we build their ideals of conduct upon what the world will think instead of what their conscience dictates. We make of our little ones modern Babes in the Woods who lose themselves in a forest of bewildering, overgrown paths. We give them no chance to blaze their own trails.

What is the application to the American home of the Montessori game of silence?

It begins with the American mother who must cultivate a habit of quiet self-contemplation. She must be able to shut out the world as did the stoics, listening to the good voice of her own soul. It means, also, that she will be less dependent upon her environment for her daily thinking and happiness and more adept at creating her own joys. We are very restless, to-day, discontented unless we are surrounded by friends or obsessed by passion of some sort, or we must go somewhere. We will try to slip back into the simple living of our great-grandmothers, who had resources in themselves and could be radiantly happy, pottering over the lavender in their gardens or reading their Bibles in the candlelight of some long-ago evening—alone.

The mother who cultivates in herself a habit of repose will have reposeful children.

The game of silence, as it may be put into practice in the training of children, begins with ear-training. Shut out harsh sounds from the home where there are little children. To command a child in a loud voice often results in disobedience; it makes him mentally deaf for the time being. He does not hear what is said to him; it dulls his senses. We all know how the memory of some gentle voice that either sang or spoke to us in childhood comes back to us, now, as a forceful memory. It was the softness of that voice that made the lasting record in our minds.

Often a mother may whisper a sentence to a child, or call softly from different parts of the house, asking the little one to locate her by the sense of hearing. This will quicken and cultivate the child’s power to listen and concentrate upon the use of one sense. And we should eliminate all unnecessary noises from our homes; the slamming of doors, the crashing of dishes, harsh popular music, and crude songs.

As the children’s sense of hearing is refined, we will lead them to listen to the very small sounds in the world about them, the soft breathing of the sleeping baby, the far-away ticking of a clock, the hum of insects, distant footsteps, the patter of rain, the song of the wind.

Then when this fine power of listening has been cultivated, we may introduce the game of silence itself. The mother may show the child that she is able to sit quietly, immobile, relaxed for a short period of time—only thinking. Then the little ones may be encouraged to attempt the game, waiting in perfect silence, with closed eyes, until mother calls them in a soft whisper to “come back” to the world again. To darken the room a little during the game adds to its power. Gradually the periods of the silence may be lengthened, and results will show in the child’s life in greater control, quiet, and life balance. In this repose and silence, Dr. Montessori tells us, both adults and children gather strength and newness of life.

A little maid of three had been having her first birthday party. Light and music and romping games and many gifts had filled the afternoon with unexperienced delights for the child. She was trembling with delight, on tiptoe with excitement when the children marched out to the dining-room and were seated about the beautifully laid, rose-strewn table. At a signal the curtains were drawn and the children were told to be silent and close their eyes for a space. There was a vibrant hush, a space of time passed, then one child after another raised her head and opened her eyes. The room was still darkened, but in the center of the table had been placed the huge, white birthday cake surrounded by a wreath of flowers; the only light was the starry shining of three white candles on the top. The little birthday child looked in wonder. Then she drew a long breath and said in a whisper, “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”

No one quite understood the little one. It seemed to have been a vagary, a precocity on her part. It was an unusual manifestation, but quite explainable as we grew to realize the inspirational possibilities of the Montessori silence.

When it is not possible, because we are dealing with an isolated child, to put into practice the game of silence as it is used in the Children’s Houses, we can still lead the child to know and feel silence. A quiet hour in the twilight after the work and play of the daytime are over, a trip to some still, lovely spot in the woods, a few moments spent in the hushed interior of a church, will remain as reposeful memories in the life of the child. More than repose, even, they may be inspirational, as, shut away from the noise and activity of the world, the child is able to hear the call of his own spirit.

We all know and love Bastien-Lepage’s painting of the maid, Jeanne d’Arc, listening to the voices in her garden. The grass dotted with flowers, the bending apple tree, the other homely surroundings of the humble home that were all Jeanne had known, fade away as the voice of the prophetic soul speaks to her; as she sees the vision of herself, the saviour of France.

Jeanne d’Arc was only thirteen when she began to hear the voice of her spirit.

Millet, as a boy, saw nature with his spirit eyes. He showed his father colors playing over the rough sod of his home fields which no one else could see. Rousseau, in boyhood, declared that he was able to converse with his beloved trees and they told him the secrets of their beauty. Samuel was only a very little boy when he heard and interpreted his Master’s voice. The boy Christ heard a message that he was able to carry to the doctors.

May we not give our little ones an opportunity to step across the threshold of the present into that great silence which begins life and also ends it, and which is melodious for those who are trained to listen?

THE END

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