Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

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.

Replacing the solid insets by the sense of touch alone.

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.