Chapter II: Part 2

The Montessori directress at the Trionfale Children’s House, first of all, patiently observed Otello. At the end of a week’s time she knew more about him than his mother did, for she had recorded his height, weight, chest, and cranial development and had discovered that he needed physical exercise to help his mental development. We will watch _our_ children’s bodily growth more carefully than we have in the past if we are to be Montessori mothers.

She never commanded the little fellow whose ears were so deafened with the many commands of his mother that he found it a psychological impossibility to obey. Instead she had faith that his new environment, her careful pointing out of right and wrong, and the ordered activities brought about by the Montessori didactic materials would loose his spirit, which had been like a butterfly stabbed by the pin of a scientist.

So we will be patient with our babies and watch them and wait expectantly for the unfolding of their minds and souls which will surely come if we supply the opportunity.

Dr. Montessori gives us a new word for the home and she blots out an old one.

“Why?” is our new word. We will observe the minutest activity of the home child from its first month to the time when it leaves the home for school, asking ourselves the reason for each activity.

“Don’t!” is our blotted-out word. No activity of a child should be inhibited unless it is morally _wrong_.

From babyhood to the age of six years almost every free movement, every free thought of the child has a meaning in relation to its bodily and mental growth. If we suffocate children’s activities, we suffocate their lives. The good child is not the quiet, inactive child. The perfect child is not the child who is nearest like man.

The only way to keep a child still is to teach him orderly movement. The only way to keep him from handling our things is to give him educational things of his own to handle.

It is a more fascinating home occupation than any which you ever attempted, this Montessori way of observing your child. He is your own life flower, a bud, now, but with the power of sure, beautiful unfolding into bloom. Your part is to watch the process of this unfolding, and to surround the child plant with light and nourishment and _freedom_ for growth.

You thoughtlessly say, “Don’t sit on the floor and play; you will soil your clothes.”

“Walk faster and keep up with my footsteps or I will not take you out with me to-morrow.”

Dr. Montessori tells us that the limbs of the little child are very short in comparison with his torso and tire quickly from holding up his body weight. If his legs are to grow straight and strong he must follow his own inclination and sit and lie on the floor when he plays; he must not be required to keep up with our longer stride in walking. We were thoughtless when we commanded _don’t_. Dr. Montessori shows us the _why_. These actions of the child were wrong only from our standpoint. We have to cleanse soiled clothes; we think that we have no time to walk slowly. But in the Children’s Houses no child is ever required to stay in his small white chair or to keep his work on his low table. He is free to work on the floor in any position which makes him physically comfortable and soft rugs are provided for this purpose. No Montessori child is commanded to stay in line and “keep up” when the piano gives the signal for a march or one of the gay Italian dance steps. Otello and Mario and Piccola, the babies, drop out for a few seconds, seating themselves for a space of rest, and when their fat legs are ready for more muscular exertion, they again join the other children.

But this freedom will make my child fickle, lacking in concentration, you say.

On the contrary, it leads to concentration. The Montessori-trained child who has never been prevented from doing a thing unless it was wrong and who has been allowed to carry on any activity which it chooses; free play with outdoor toys, the Montessori physical exercises, sense-training, drawing, suddenly arrives, at five or six years at a most unusual amount of concentration. From a free choice of occupations that lead to the exercise of the muscles and the senses, the minds of these little children order themselves, and the children are able to concentrate on one line of thought for long periods.

In the Children’s House of one of the Model Tenements in Rome, I saw a little girl come quietly in at nine o’clock, button on her apron, and seat herself with a book. She read, happily, for three-quarters of an hour, hardly lifting her eyes from the pages, although twenty-five other little ones were carrying on almost as many different occupations all about her. At the end of this time, she closed her book, crossed to the blackboard, looked out of the window a moment, and wrote in a clear hand the following childish idyl to the day:

“The sun shines,” it began. “I smell the orange flowers and the sky is blue and I hear birds singing. I am happy because it is a pleasant day.”

Do we find such concentration in our children whom we teach according to rule and in masses? We have thought that to educate was to formulate a great many rules and make our little ones follow them, but our new Montessori ideal is a very different matter—that of leaving Life free to develop and to unfold.

The American child has the strongest will, his gift from a vital heredity, of any child in the world. His father and his mother have, also, this splendidly forceful inherited will. Parent and child tilt and bout in a daily fight, and if the parent comes out triumphant and succeeds in breaking the child’s will there is a deadly wrong done. That is why our reform schools and prisons are so full of strong wills, beyond bending.

We must let our little ones blaze their own trails, provided, of course, that they are trails which lead in the right direction. We must, also, let them make their own decisions, and if occasionally they prove to have been wrong, the experience will have helped them to decide wisely the next time. We will, also, put into their hands the self-corrective didactic apparatus of Montessori, which has a distinct ethical value in the training of the human will.

Education to be vivid and permanent in the child’s life should be worked out along lines of experience. To say to a child, “Don’t do that; it isn’t right,” is to make a very inadequate appeal to one, only, of his senses, that of hearing. To put into the child’s hands the blocks of the Montessori tower so carefully graded in dimension that it takes exquisite differentiation to pile them is to give him a chance to learn through experience the difference between right and wrong by means of three senses. He hears a possible direction as to their use, he touches them, he sees the perfectly completed tower. In like manner the broad and long stair, the solid and geometric insets, all contribute their quota to the sum of the child’s perfectly directed will control.

The average home is full of mediums for helping a little child to develop along lines of willed control. To concentrate upon a bit of constructive play until it is finished, to learn orderliness in putting away playthings, or to do some simple home duty that will be carried over from day to day, all are important willed activities. To do whatever is in hand, building or drawing or picking up toys, or bathing or caring for a doll or a pet, or helping mother as well as possible, is, also, very vital will-training.

Dr. Montessori helps us to a hopeful outlook on the subject of child will. Our Otellos are not, after all, terrible. The child who is most difficult to manage is, with Montessori training, the child who turns out to be best able to manage himself.

THE CHRIST IN BRUNO

_About the New Spiritual Sense_

When Bruno was a little fellow, his mother and father were killed in the Messina earthquake.

Because he was one of so many left-behind babies, he was quite neglected, and he grew up to four years as a weed grows. Sometimes one _madre_ of the tenement mothered him, sometimes not. At times he was fed, at other times he starved. Because of the great fear that came to him with the blinding smoke and the twisting red river of molten lava and the death cry of his girl mother that day of the earthquake, Bruno’s mind seemed a bit dulled. He was often confused by the commands of people who tried to take care of him and so could not obey. Then they would strike him. And he heard very vile language spoken and he saw very evil things done during his babyhood in the tenement.

When Bruno wandered across the threshold of the Via Giusti Children’s House in Rome, he seemed like a little alien among the other happy little ones who were so carefully watched over, so gently led. For days he sat in silence, his great, frightened blue eyes watching to help him dodge the blow that he expected but never felt; his lips ready to imitate the vile speech that he had known before, but which he never heard here. His timid fingers fumbled with the big pink and blue letters that the other children used in making long sentences on the floor; they tried to button, to lace, to match colors, but not very effectually. It was as if the great fear of his babyhood had shadowed his whole mental life and left him powerless.

One morning Bruno’s dulled blue eyes glimpsed an unusual stir among the children. A new little one had come and, full of disorderly impulses, had snatched at the varicolored carpet of carefully arranged color spools Piccola had placed on her table, scattering them to the floor. Red, green, orange, yellow, Piccola’s painstaking work of an hour lay in a great, colored, mixed-up heap. Piccola’s eyes, still pools that reflected all the hazel tints of fall woods, grew blurred with tears. She dropped her curly head in her arms and sobbed, big, gulping sobs that wouldn’t stop, that strangled her. Bruno, watching her, found his muscles. He ran to her, putting one kind little arm around her waist, and with the other drew her head down to the shoulder of his little ragged blue blouse and smoothed her hair, talking sweet, liquid nonsense all the time that made Piccola’s sobs grow less and less, and comforted her. When she smiled and drew away to watch the group of children who had hurried to pick up her colors for her, Bruno slipped back to his corner and the old, dull look settled back in his face.

“The little man has the conscience sense. He shall have a chance to use it,” thought the Montessori directress who had been watching the scene.

And because she wanted his soul to grow strong, even if his timid fingers couldn’t, she often stopped by Bruno’s chair to hold his hand, kindly, for a minute in hers, or just bent over him, smiling straight down into his face.

“No one will hurt this little man of ours. He loves us and we love him,” she assured Bruno over and over, until one day her patience reaped the prize of Bruno’s answering smile and she felt his two hungry little arms clasping her.

She strengthened his beginning friendship with Piccola, the color-loving, reckless, daring little maid, whom all the children loved to love and loved to fight. When Piccola brought an unusual treat in her luncheon basket, a leaf-wrapped packet of dried grapes or two luscious figs instead of one, the directress suggested that she share with Bruno, who had no one to tuck a surprise in his basket. As the two child faces drew close above the feast and the little hands fluttered together over this friendly breaking of bread, Bruno’s eyes sparkled. He was reading his first lines in the primer of love; he was finding his sight. And in return Bruno helped Piccola to rake leaves in the garden, he unrolled and carefully spread upon the floor the rug upon which Piccola wished to curl herself and sort letters; he hastened to add his strength to hers when the drawer that held the letters stuck; he fought Piccola’s street battles for her.

Soon Bruno’s loving busy-ness so increased that he found things to do almost every second of his happy days in the Children’s House. No longer the little cowering, cringing, inactive child of a few weeks past, he was an alert little man whom I instantly watched, because his activity was so unusual. When the line of children, two by two and clasping hands, in their pretty custom of welcoming visitors to the Via Giusti Children’s House, tumbled in each morning, Bruno always headed the line. He held by the hand the smallest, newest, or the most timid child, dragging it in his eagerness to teach it to shake hands and say good-day. He would “hold up” the line because he had so much to say in his welcome to the strangers who had come to spend the morning with the little ones.

“See our Signorina; is she not _kind_?

“This is our room; do you like it?

“There is Margherita; she _writes_!

“This is Piccola, who reads!”

In breathless sentences, Bruno’s heart interest worded itself. Then, as the others settled themselves for the day’s work, Bruno began his day of service. He was the Loving One, the Helping One, the Comforting One of the Via Giusti Children’s House. Was any child left without a glass of water at the luncheon hour, Bruno fetched it. Did the little girl waitress for the day forget to fill a soup plate from her tureen, Bruno reminded her. If the three-year-old started home with his cloak unbuttoned, Bruno, feeling in his tender little heart the chill wind of the Roman hills, buttoned the cloak for the baby. If a toddler tumbled down, Bruno picked it up and examined it for bumps, and started it safely on its way again. He fetched and carried, watched for chances to help, to champion the weak, to wipe away anybody’s tears with the hem of his apron.

The seat he most often chose was under a cast of the Madonna. Sometimes he sat quiet for long spaces, looking at it. “Bruno calls the Madonna his _madre_,” whispered Piccola one day.

“Who is that big, homely child?” asked a visitor, pointing to Bruno putting fresh water in a bowl of roses that stood under the cast. “Isn’t he older than the other children?”

“Older—yes, in spirit,” answered the far-seeing directress. “He is our little Christ-child.”

So he is _our_ little Christ-child. Wherever there is a child in a home, Dr. Montessori tells us, there Christ is. She discovers for us a new sense, the “conscience sense,” only waiting for an opportunity to exercise itself and, in the exercising, unfold and bloom and ripen into the fruits of the spirit. If being an orphan and hungry and beaten and knowing vile things couldn’t hurt the soul of Bruno, think of the possibility of Christ in _your_ baby.

Children grow, mentally, through the right exercise of the senses. To see and to be able to distinguish between beautiful colors and beautiful forms; to discriminate between sounds that are discordant and sounds that are harmonious; to know rough things and smooth things, round things and square things, velvet things and linen things, by touching them with the finger tips, this we know is a starting point on the road of the three R’s of everyday education. Dr. Montessori guides us a lap farther in the new education. She sees, born with every child, eyes of the spirit and slender, groping fingers of the soul that look and reach for the good. To help a child to use his spirit eyes and his soul fingers means to give him a chance to exercise his conscience. It is a new sort of sense-training that means his finding the three R’s of the life of the spirit: faith, hope, and charity.

How shall we help a child to exercise and train his _conscience sense_?

Dr. Montessori tells us that if we but watch a little child’s free, spontaneous use of his soul fingers, his daily loves and hopes and faith, these will shine for us as a Bethlehem star-path leading us to the manger-throne of a King-in-the-making. As we are turning a child’s tendency to _handle_ into mind-training, we will turn his manifestations of inner sensibility into morality.

It is quite ineffectual to say to a child:

“You must love your neighbor.”

Of course he will try to do the thing that we ask of him because he is a very kind little person, ready to put up with the inconsistencies of his elders and willing to try to obey; but it will be a makeshift sort of love, not free and a flowering of the child’s own heart, but built upon what we tell him about love. This makes of children little puppets.

Dr. Montessori says: “Watch _how_ children love and _what_ they love.”

You know _how_ your child loves—with the thoughtless abandon of pure passion. That he interferes with your important occupation, crumples your immaculateness, has a soiled face and sticky fingers when he kisses you, do not enter into his thoughts. That anything should interfere with his caresses would wound his heart. If you were disfigured or maimed, he would still vision you as the beautiful mother whom baby eyes see only with the eyes of adoration.

Is this a love that we can teach?

You know _what_ your child loves. There was the ugly yellow puppy with muddy feet that stained your new rug; don’t you remember how the Little Chap sobbed so long, and then woke up in the night crying, the day you sent away the yellow puppy? He loved, too, the dirty rag doll that you burned and the broken toy that you threw away, and that little street gamin of a newsboy who stands at the corner in all kinds of weather. He doesn’t love ceremony and money and the opinions of other people as we do. The Little Chap goes out into the highways and byways for his stuff of love. And he doesn’t care if the thing he loves is ugly, or old, or halt, or lame, because he sees, with his soul eyes, behind the veil of appearances to the _real of it_.

Your child is born with faith and hope, too. If you tell him that the moon is made of green cheese and that a stork dropped him down the chimney, he believes you, and when he grows up and catches you in the lies, he has one less peg in his moral inner room to pin his faith in the divine to. If you tell him that you will take him to the circus, and then let your bridge party interfere with that promise, the Little Chap is going to be less hopeful that God will keep His promises, for you stand for the divine in the Little Chap’s beginnings of spirituality.

Dr. Montessori says that we often crush the child’s conscience sense by not giving him an opportunity to exercise it as he is led to, instinctively. We must let our children, in their baby days, love _as_ they wish and _what_ they wish. We must be quite careful to give them true conceptions of the strange world in which they find themselves, and we must make only good promises to children and use much vigilance in keeping those promises.

Dr. Montessori sets another guidepost for us in the star-path by which our children will travel across the desert of unbelief to the manger where God, incarnate, lies. She tells us that, as the Ten Commandments were a very simple set of laws for the Israelites, and John, in his preaching of simplicity, paved the way for Christ, so the first religious teaching of the little child should have this same quality of directness.

_The child’s first religious training will consist in a discrimination between good and evil._

“It was good of you to share your sweets with sister. When you ate your chocolate, alone, yesterday, I was sorry, because it was selfish.”

“It was thoughtful of you to fetch grandfather’s cane for him. Some little boys would not have been so kind.”

“You must not scream and kick when you are angry. It is wrong!”

We might say in contrast; we do, ordinarily, say:

“You must share because I wish you to.”

“You must be kind because the world likes gentlemen.”

“You mustn’t scream and kick, because you give me a headache and mar my furniture.”

Such commands are quite ineffectual, because they call the child’s attention to us and not to his own acts. But patiently and effectually to see that the Little Chap knows the difference between good and evil and practices good instead of evil—this gives him a chance to train and strengthen his conscience sense and forms the beginnings of his moral life.

“But how shall I give my child an idea of God?” thousands of thinking parents object.

It isn’t necessary to give the idea of God to your child. Dr. Montessori tells us that _every child has it_.

We think that we must do so much teaching in order to educate the little child’s mind, or his soul. In fact we need to do less teaching than watching, less pruning than watering. After observing our little ones’ spontaneous manifestations of love and giving these a chance to increase, and meeting them with encouragement after conscientiously pointing out to them the good and the evil of life and insisting that they choose the good and reject the evil—we discover a miracle. God comes to the little ones.

Bruno, starved in his mind and starved in his heart, and never having heard of things of the spirit except in terms of the vilest blasphemy, found God as naturally as he would find the first gold blossom of the broom braving winter’s frosts on the Appian Way.

Our own Helen Keller, deaf and dumb and blind, knew God before anything that her teacher could tell her about Him had pierced the dark wall of her sleeping senses.

Dr. Montessori asks us to prepare the way for this miracle in our homes. She says that she would like to suggest to mothers a new beatitude, “Blessed are those who _feel_;” and we add,

For they find God.

MARIO’S FINGER EYES

_Montessori Sense-Training_

Your little one, Mario, might have been, big eyes instantly glancing a bit of color, something that moved, something that could be handled or broken. All his four years he had been fighting his mother, his home, the world—a one-sided fight, too, for everybody and everything always triumphed over him in the end. He was so little and so ineffectual to do battle.

And the times when he had been punished for breaking his mother’s cherished plates with the pattern of raised roses—plump and red—for clutching in loving, chubby, grimy hands the soft silk window curtains or the bright velvet table-cover could not be counted. Yet Mario was cheerful and uncowed and continued the struggle, the impulse for which had been born with him, to use his fingers in learning about the world of _things_.

To check this impulse was the object of everyone who had anything to do with little Mario. There was his grandmother in a wonderful silk headdress and a yellow wool shawl, fringed; she would not let Mario clutch the cap and then feel of the shawl, as his fingers itched to. There was the old fruit man at the corner near Mario’s house; he shook a stick at children who handled his round and square measures, his fruits, and vegetables of so many different shapes. There was always his _madre_, who pursued Mario from waking to sleeping time, interfering with his activities.

“Mario, don’t run your fingers along the window ledge; don’t handle the door latch. You will soil them. You must not play with copper bowls and pots; they are for cooking, not for little boys.”

As the warfare continued, Mario grew bolder. To be stopped when one is playing with a fruit measure or a door latch or a bright, red copper bowl with no malicious designs upon these but only to satisfy a sense of hunger for knowledge of form, hurt his spirit.

“I _will_,” he announced one day, when his grandmother tried to rescue her cap from his deft fingering, and he pulled off one of the long, silken streamers.

“I will _not_,” he further asserted when his mother wished the copper pot to cook her beans, and when she tried to take it from him forcibly, Mario stamped and shrieked and struck his _madre_.

The habit of saying “I will” or “I won’t” in situations that demand the will to decide, “I won’t” or “I will” is an easy habit for a little child to form and a most dangerous one, morally. It is seldom a self-formed but a parent-stimulated habit. When his mother put Mario, for reformation and “to get rid of him,” in The House of the Children at the Trionfale School in Rome, it was with the assurance:

“He’s a bad little boy. He never does what he ought to; he’s always in mischief.”

“What should be a little child’s ‘oughts’ the first years of life? Isn’t what we call getting into mischief, perhaps, the big business of childhood?” we asked ourselves as we watched Mario in his Montessori development. So, at least, Mario’s teacher decided.

“Go as you please, do as you wish, play with whatever you like—only be careful not to hurt the work or the body of any other little one,” were the words that turned Mario’s struggles to educate himself into a joy instead of a fight.

Sitting in the light of the Roman sunshine and the smiles of the other children of the Children’s House, Mario began to do the thing he was born for in babyhood—he began to _see with his fingers_.

I watched him for days, such a blessedly good, chubby, curly-headed little man that my arms ached to hold him, instead of leaving him free to trot from one occupation to another, busy, concentrated, educating himself. Mario’s mother, his wise old grandmother, the canny fruit seller,—none of them had known how blurred the world looks to the eyes of a little child. Many mothers are not able to see with the eyes of a child. We grown-ups who comprehend a beautiful landscape, a lovely fresco, a piece of miracle machinery, a fragile porcelain vase, a statue, an immortal pile of architecture instantaneously, analyzing the form that makes the beauty, never stop to think how we grasp it, mentally. It is the color and curve of the landscape, the combination of lines in the fresco, the “feel” and contour of the statue, the “fit” of the machinery, the design of the vase, the combination of geometric figures in the building, that make the beauty. The artist, the inventor, the sculptor, the architect, saturated their finger tips, then their eyes, and last their brains with a knowledge of line and form before they saw Fame reaching out her hands to touch theirs. Every little child is born with a longing to _feel_ line and form, not perhaps for Fame’s, but for Knowledge’s sake, and we crush the longing when we say “don’t touch.”

Intent, engrossed Mario worked for days until he grew expert in piling, one upon the other, the graded, rose-colored blocks of the Montessori Tower. Soon he could erect the tower, blindfolded. Just a fascinating play it looked, as interesting as is the play of our babies with their nested picture blocks, but it was play with a purpose. It taught Mario to _feel_ and then to discriminate, mentally, between objects that differ in dimension, one from another.

Then came the fun of laying in order the graded blocks of the Montessori Broad Stair. Building steps, it was, as all home children instinctively struggle to build steps with their blocks, with dominoes, with pebbles and rocks of different sizes.

Why do children like to build steps; is it not because they live in a world of _high_ and _low_, and _higher_ and _lower_ things? We grown-ups say, “It is a beautiful sky-line, the tall and low buildings rubbing shoulders,” or “The clouds are banked in a red and gold mass.” How did we learn the beauty of gradation of form in a city, in nature? Once when we were as little as Mario we tried to build stairs, we jumped, happily, from one step to another; we climbed, we learned height and depth by _feeling_ them. So, Mario learned to see minute variations in the height of objects through the broad stair.

He spent hours fitting the little wooden cylinders in their places in their frames. How he had longed to play with the vases and jugs at home, some tall and some short, some thick and some thin. And how many times his mother had prevented his digging rows of little holes in the garden in which to fit, first, a fat thumb, then a slim forefinger; last, a tiny finger! With the Montessori geometric insets, he could enjoy this hole play, and, at the same time, learn, through _feeling_, to recognize very fine differences in height and breadth. One day Mario found a little set of drawers in the big white material cupboard at the Montessori School. It made him remember his grandmother’s great shelf of drawers with the polished brass knobs. In these were hidden fascinating, musty-smelling wool shawls, silk scarfs, soft embroideries, and stiff, bright ribbons. Mario’s secret happiness had been to climb upon a stool, clutch a brass knob, pull, and then delve pink fingers into the sense-feeding horde of stuffs. He would close his eyes and enjoy the _feel_ of them, but there was always the rude awakening.

“Naughty Mario—don’t touch.” But now he had these other drawers full of stuffs to open, to empty, to sort the contents, to crumple the stuffs in his hands, and then match velvet to velvet, silk to silk, wool to wool, blindfolded. It hadn’t been shawls and scarfs and embroideries and ribbons that the little man wanted, but a chance to use his fingers in learning to recognize the qualities of objects; rough, soft, smooth, stiff.

Otello brought a great, crimson poppy to the Children’s House one day. Poppies to the Roman baby are as dandelions to our children, so lavish a gift of the nature mother as to be of little value after the first bloom colors the grass. Otello’s impulse was to pull off the already dropping petals of the flower, but Mario rescued it from the ruthless baby fingers. Holding the fragile stem between forefinger and chubby thumb, he ran the other forefinger lightly over the surface of the velvet-soft petals of the poppy. Then he ran to baby Valia and touched her leaf-soft cheek with the finger that taught him how like a flower petal in softness is the flesh of a child.

It was so daily an application of newly-gained knowledge as to be unnoticed save by a wondering onlooker. It was the mind enrichment through sense-training denied Mario by his home and offered him by Montessori.

The frames for geometric insets enthralled Mario next. To take out of its place, fit in again, and refit a dozen, twenty times the different sizes of flat wooden circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, and other forms kept the little fingers busy and the opening mind concentrated for long spaces. The wooden insets are large, shining with polish, and easy to handle because of the brass knob attached to each. As Mario lifted one out of its place in the form board, he ran his fingers around the edge, then around the empty place in the board. Soon he could do this with closed eyes, fitting wooden figures of many different shapes and sizes correctly in the form board. He matched these forms to corresponding paper forms mounted on cards and then to outlined forms.

Here was a circle like the top of the red copper bowl, and a smaller circle like the top of the yellow majolica mug that held his milk in the morning. Here was a rectangle like the kitchen window at home and a triangle like the glittering one the band man struck to make music. Kitchen utensils and home furnishings and the street band are as vastly interesting to all children as they were to little Mario, interesting because they are things of color and texture and shape and sound.

One morning Mario showed his teacher one of the rectangular geometric insets. “The window in the church,” he explained. Then he picked up a rectangular inset. “This is like the flower-bed in the Gardens,” he announced.

Your child struggles to educate himself through his senses as did Mario. You, too, perhaps, not seeing the inspiration in the active little fingers, say, “He gets into mischief all the time.” It is our privilege to turn child mischief into education. Instead of taking away from children the objects which they select for handling, we must study those objects and substitute for them didactic materials for education of the tactile sense, the sense of weight, the sense of form and contour.

A little girl whose spirit is so sensitively attuned that a breath, almost, will snap the too-taut strings was allowed to be present at a dinner her mother was giving. Through a wearisome round of courses, the little one sat in her uncomfortable chair, quiet, good, and tracing with one finger the design of her cut-glass tumbler. Sometimes the blue eyes closed as she tried to retrace the design in the air or on the table linen. At last her mother saw what she was doing.

“Leave the table immediately!” she commanded. “You are a very impolite child.”

She thought that she was a good mother, but the tear-brimming eyes of the little one, disgraced, hurt, should have mirrored her cruelty. We can’t allow children to finger cut glass, but we ought to furnish them with a substitute for sense-training that will remove the necessity.

Our children are born into a world of which they know nothing. They are discoverers, travelers touching an unknown shore, and the first business of their new-found life is to adjust themselves to their environment. Like valiant explorers they plunge into the wilderness in which they find themselves. We furnish them with food and clothing for the journey, but we have quite neglected to offer them at the beginning any chart or compass.

Because of this, the way of a child of two and a half to four years is a stumbling way in our homes. He is hedged in by a wilderness of furnishings and bric-à-brac and household appliances and mechanical devices and different kinds of materials and strange forms and varied colors. It is the business of being a child to notice and handle and smell and test and use these different objects, but we continually thwart him in his attempts to make these social adjustments. In so doing we turn the child into a militant instead of a discoverer. He must conquer his wilderness. Prevented from learning through the medium of his senses, he fights to learn, and we say that he is destructive and wilful and lacking in thoughtfulness.

Dr. Montessori offers our children in the didactic material for sense-training a valuable guide for adjusting himself to his environment. The solid insets, the tower, the broad and long stair teach him through his own experiment and discovery the qualities which all the objects in his world possess; height, breadth, length, thickness in all their combinations and gradations. The color spools give him a chance to recognize and learn practically all the various tints and shades that surround him in his colorful world. The geometric insets bring to him, through his senses of touch and vision, the many and wonderful combinations of line with line and with curves which constitute the form of the world. By means of the Montessori textiles and other appliances for exercising the sense of touch, he learns to detect and discriminate the most minute gradations of softness and roughness, smoothness and coarseness. The Montessori sense-training apparatus guides the child on his spiritual trip through his environment.

It is the guide, however, for the very young child whose senses are hungry. We are so used to waiting on our one, two, and three-year-old babies; we are so busy taking out of their hands our own precious belongings and substituting for them a toy, that the Montessori idea of guiding children, mentally, from the cradle, is strange to us. The average five or six-year-old child completes the Montessori sense-training quickly. What next? we ask.

To be able to, blindfolded, fit a polished wood rectangle in a corresponding rectangular frame is, to the minds of some of us, the climax of a Montessori exercise. To Montessori herself it is only the beginning of education in form; we must help the child to see, feel, recognize form in various combinations; to draw, to love as pure form in the world about him as he has learned with this geometric inset. The Montessori sense-training appliances should be used as the genetic psychologist uses his various instruments and mental tests. They are to arouse and awake into activity habits of quick perception, keen appreciation, and constructive invention.

The greatest thing we can do for a child is to so educate it that it _knows its environment_ and can _adjust itself to social conditions_. We do this when we teach our children to see, to hear, to touch intelligently. The lure of the senses is a spiritual spell in childhood. If we catch it, then, and turn it into channels of knowledge, we may develop a Marconi, conqueror of space; a Rodin, conqueror of form; a Burbank, conqueror of life—a Carrel, conqueror of death. At least we will have developed an observer who knows how to use his senses in the practical living of life.

RAFFAELO’S HUNGER

_Color Teaching. Its Value_

Raffaelo’s grandfather had been a shepherd in the Roman hills, not so much because he liked to tend the dull, white creatures, but on account of the blue roof beneath which he sat all day and the carpet of green splashed with poppy crimson and primrose gold and lupin blue that lay at his feet, and the sunset that he waited for every night. It was never the same, that sunset; like a beautiful Roman ribbon it spread itself before his eyes, and he would rather see it than go home to eat.

Tucked under his long, wool cloak, he carried a pigment-daubed palette and a patch of canvas. As the lambs and their mothers grazed, he watched, hungrily, for picture stuff: a bright yellow cart taking its slow way along the white dust of the Via Appia, the flower girl walking in to Rome with her arms full of roses, the gold edges of a distant wheat field—these fed his soul and satisfied his hunger.

Because the State was blind and thought that to fight is more vital than to paint beautiful pictures, the grandfather of Raffaelo was forced into the Italian army. The day that they substituted a gun for his crook and threw away his palette, they killed his soul. The grandfather of Raffaelo made a very poor soldier, indeed. The little boy that he left at home on the Campagna grew up, and was a poor soldier, too; and when he had finished military service he married and went to live in a tenement in Rome, and in due time little Raffaelo was born.

It was all quite commonplace, and like the story of many other families. But it had, too, its element of the unusual. With those long-ago, shepherding days on the Roman Campagna, a gnawing hunger had begun. It wasn’t a body hunger, but a hunger of the spirit. It killed the body of the grandfather of Raffaelo—spirit hunger is more destructive than a hunger for bread. Down through the years it took its gnawing way. It killed the youth in the father of Raffaelo and it took possession of him in the gray streets of the city and stifled his manhood.

Then the hunger pierced the spirit of little Raffaelo, and that was where it stopped—a cruel, unsatiated thing. With the gathered strength of all those years, it starved the baby.

He couldn’t have explained in words just what he was hungry for. In fact he couldn’t explain anything very well, being not quite three years old. Only, he was continually unsatisfied when he looked at the ugliness of the dull walls of his home, and when his mother took him along the hard, gray streets of the city he tugged and pulled at her hand whenever he passed a corner flower stand, or a cart piled high with a mass of colored vegetables.

Raffaelo was beauty hungry, as his father had been and his grandfather. And no one knew it; and no one would have cared if they had known.

No one?

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

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

“_Mio; mio!_ Me; me!” he cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is this, Raffaelo?”

“Red,” he laughed back.

“And this?” pointing to the other one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE GOING AWAY OF ANTONIO

_Directing the Child Will_

Antonio had a longing to _do_.

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