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.