WITH MARGHERITA IN THE CHILDREN'S HOUSE Showing the Unconscious Influence of the True Montessori Environment

It is so early in the sweet, perfume-laden Italian morning that the dew is still hanging in diamond drops on the iris and roses in the garden of the Casa dei Bambini of the Via Giusti, Rome. The great white room, with its flooding sunlight and host of tiny, waiting chairs and tables, is empty, quiet, calm.

Margherita stands a happy second in the wide-arched doorway that makes room and garden melt into one fragrant, peaceful whole. A wee four-year-old girlie is Margherita, big-eyed, radiant with smiles, and tugging a huge wicker basket of lunch that is almost as large as she. She is the first baby to arrive at the Children’s House. Ah, but that does not ruffle her composure. She is already alone in her newly-found freedom of spirit. She needs no teacher.

She places the lunch basket on a waiting bench, crosses to a wall space where rows of diminutive pink and blue aprons hang at comfortable reaching distances for little arms. She finds her own apron, wriggles into it, buttons it at the back. She is ready for the day.

What shall come first in Margherita’s day? So much is in store for her, waiting for her eager finger tips, her electric-charged soul. As her great brown eyes slowly trail the room and the colorful garden outside, it is as if she were making a soul search for that “good thing” which will be her first silent teacher. Her glance lingers on the terraced rows of flowers, the tinkling fountain in the center. She has found the object of her search. She runs—no, she floats, for such complete physical control of her limbs has this four-year-old baby—to the garden, and kneels there, looking up at a redolent, yellow rose that has opened in the night. She does not touch it; she only looks and breathes and wonders. She has watched for this unfolding daily, waiting with sweet patience for the branch to burst into bud and the bud to unfold into bloom. She has tugged a vase of water each morning to offer drink to the roots. Now her patience and her service are rewarded. As she kneels there looking up into the petals of the gold flower, her small hands clasped over her breast with devotional ecstasy, Nature opens her heart to the heart of a little child.

Many rapturous minutes the baby kneels. Then she flies back to the room again and glances at it with the critical eye of a housekeeper. Here she flicks away a speck of dust, there she picks up a scrap of paper from the stone floor. She peeps into the wall cabinets that hold the Montessori didactic materials to see if the gay buttoning, lacing, and bow-tying frames, the fascinating pink blocks of the tower, the frames of form insets are all in their places. In the meantime the Signorina directress comes. Bruno, of five, arrives, bringing with him his two-and-a-half-year-old brother. More toddlers trail in, two and a half, three, four, four and a half years old, and button themselves into their pink and blue aprons. Independent, polite, joyous little children of the CÆsars they are, each with his or her own special happy task in mind in coming to the Children’s House this blue day.

The wee-est toddlers drag out soft-colored rugs, orange, dull green, deep crimson, and spread them on the wide white spaces of the sun-flecked stone floor. Here they build and rebuild the enchanting intricacies of the tower of blocks, the broad stair of blocks, and the red and white rods of the long stair, chanting to themselves as they unconsciously measure distances and make mental comparisons: “big, little; thick, thin; long, short.”

Children of three and a half and four take from the cabinets boxes of many-colored, silk-wound spools, which they sort and lay upon the little tables in chromatic order until a rainbow-tinted mass lies before their pigment-loving eyes. From the bright scarlet of poppies to the faint blush of pale pink coral, from the royal purple of the tall, spiked Roman iris to the amethyst tint of a wild orchid, they make no mistake in the intermediate color gradations. Other children of four and over finger with intelligent, trained skill the geometric forms; circles, triangles, squares that they are learning to recognize through the “eyes in their fingers,” and which will help them to see with the mind’s eye the form that makes the beauty of our world. Small Joanina, in her corner, runs her forefinger with the greatest delicacy of touch a dozen times around a circle. Then she fits it in its place in the form board, takes it out and fits it in again. Then she looks up, a new light in her eyes, darts out into the garden and walks slowly about the fountain, running her finger around its deep basin.

“Signorina, Signorina!” she calls. “The fountain is a circle. I can see a pebble that is a circle, too. I see many circles!”

So the children learn through the exercise of the senses.

But Margherita?

All this time she has flitted from one task to another. She found an outlined picture of clover leaves and colored it with dainty pencil strokes, making the leaves deep green and the background paler, and handling her pencil with careful skill. Then she took a box of white cards on which are mounted great black letters, cut from fine sandpaper. Holding each card in her left hand, she traced the form of the letter with her right forefinger, closed her eyes, traced its form again, repeated the letter’s name to herself in a whisper, sat silently a second.

As the Signorina directress moves from child to child, smiling encouragement, showing Bruno’s baby brother’s clumsy fingers how to slip a button through a buttonhole, helping Joanina to find a new form, the square, she watches Margherita.

“This may be a white day in the child’s mind growth,” she thinks, but she does not suggest, or hurry the miracle. She only waits, hopes, watches.

Silence is written on the blackboard. Three hours have passed in which over thirty children, barely out of babyhood, have worked incessantly at many different occupations, have moved gracefully and with complete freedom about the room, have changed occupations as often as they wished, have not once quarreled. But now, out of the ordered disorder, comes a marvelous hush. No word is spoken, but one baby after another, glancing the written sign, drops back with closed eyes into a hushed silence in which the whir of bird wings in the garden, the fluttering of casement hangings, the far-away sound of a bell are audible. Even Bruno’s baby brother struggles not to make a clattering noise with his little chair. No one has said to this two-year-old, “Be still.” Rather, has he been inspired to feel stillness.

Out of the restful calm of the room comes the whispered call of the Signorina: “Bruno, Piccola, Maria, Joanina, Margherita!” Lightly, noiselessly, joyously the children come and huddle in a hushed group about the directress. She has called to the soul of each child, she has commended them for their self-taught lesson in control.

As the work with the didactic materials is taken up again, Margherita sits in a little chair for a space, quiet, reflective. Her lips move, her fingers trace signs in the air and on the table before her. The Game of Silence has helped this four-year-old with her spirit unfolding. Now, with a sudden impulse, she darts to the blackboard, seizes a piece of chalk, writes.

“Ma-ma! Ma-ma!”

Margherita writes it a dozen times in clear, flowing script with breathless, eager strokes.

“Signorina, Signorina, I write—I write about my mother. I write!” she joyously interpolates.

The other children look up with sympathetic interest, some leaving their work to crowd about the victorious Margherita. All of them voice their sympathy.

“Margherita writes,” they say. With the older ones who have already reached this wonder lap in their education there is a note of nonchalance.

“We also write,” they seem to say. With the tiny ones there is a note of hopeful promise.

“Some day we, too, will find that we can write,” they seem to say.

Margherita covers the blackboard with clear, big script. She erases it all for the sheer joy of assuring herself that she is able to write it all over again. When the luncheon hour comes, she looks back longingly at the blackboard as she lays plates on the little tables with dainty precision, places knife, fork, and spoon deftly, carries five tumblers at a time on a tray without dropping one, and passes a tureen of hot soup that is so large as to almost hide her small self. Even the happiness of being one of such a happy “party,” of eating one’s lunch of peas and sweet wheat bread and soup in the Children’s House, does not wholly satisfy Margherita to-day. Her big brown eyes are raised continually to her first written word.

Luncheon over, the children, with balls, hoops, and toys, romp out for an hour’s play in the garden.

“Margherita,” Bruno calls. “Come, we will have The Little One for a donkey, and I will harness him with you, who may be the horse!”

But the little girl, usually the first to start a game, does not hear. She is seated under the rosebush as if she were telling her rose the wonder that has come to her to-day. She and the rose have unfolded together. So it is with all Montessori children. They open their souls as flowers do, naturally, freely, surely.

Margherita is your child as well as the precious bambino of her Roman mother. Children the world over, from sun to sun, from pole to pole, are the same in these plastic first years of mind growth. They have the same insatiable desire to do, to touch, to be free in activity. Not always understanding the little child’s hereditary way of grasping knowledge, we wound his spirit by crushing these natural instincts. We say, “don’t touch,” “be still,” because the activities of our small Margheritas and Brunos interfere with our adult standards of living.

Dr. Montessori has discovered that to say, “don’t touch,” “be still,” to a child is a crime. Such commands are the keen-edged daggers that kill the child soul.

It is possible that some time will elapse before Dr. Montessori’s system of setting the clockwork of the little child’s mind running automatically, of opening the floodgates of the child soul can be adopted in their entirety in our American school. We are so used to thinking of a school as a crowded place of many desks, where children must remain, bound physically and mentally by the will of the teacher and the relentless course of study, that a Montessori schoolroom where, as Dr. Montessori herself expresses it, children may move about usefully, intelligently, and freely, without committing a rough or rude act, seems to us impossible. We even prescribe and teach imaginative plays to our children—as if it were possible for any outside force to mold that wonderful mind force by means of which the mind creates the new out of its triumphant conquest of the world through the senses.

Ideal Montessori schools may be our hope of to-morrow, but to make of a home a Children’s House is the fact of to-day.

To bring about Montessori development in the home is not alone a matter of buying the didactic materials and then offering them to your Margherita and looking for their future miracle working. This would mean stimulating lawlessness instead of freedom. Many of our children already play with squares and circles without seeing how squares and circles make beauty in the architecture of our cities. Many of our children grow up side by side with opening roses without unfolding with them. We would most of us rather button on our babies’ aprons, tie their bibs, feed them, than lead them into the physical independence that comes from doing these things themselves. We wish children to be obedient, but instead of establishing principles of good in their minds which they will follow freely, if we only give them a chance, we command, and expect unreasoning obedience to our injustice.

A Children’s House in every home will be a place where the mother is imbued with the spirit of the investigator. She watches her children, asking herself why they act along certain lines. She leads instead of ruling. She will teach her children physical independence as soon as they can toddle. To know how to dress and undress, to bathe, to look quickly over a room to see if it is in order, to open and close doors and move little chairs, tables, and toys quietly, to care for plants and pets—these are simple physical exercises which help to keep children free and good. She will provide her Children’s House with materials for sense-training. She will lead her children by simple, logical steps into preparation for early mastery of reading and writing.

The first step, however, in giving the American child a chance to develop along the self-active, natural lines of Margherita is to fill our homes with the spirit of Montessori. We will have unlimited patience with the mistakes and idiosyncrasies of childhood, remembering that we do not aim to develop little men and women but only as nearly perfect children as we can. We will endeavor to surround ourselves with those influences of love and charity and beauty and simplicity which it will be good for our children to feel as well. We will offer the children the best food, the greatest amount of air, the brightest sunshine, the least breakable belongings, the most encouragement, the minimum of coercion.

Our attitude toward the child will be that of the physician to whom the slightest variation of a symptom is a signal for a change of treatment, to whom a fraction of progress measures a span. A careful home record of the child’s mental, moral, and physical gain should be kept, and it will be radiantly discovered that the removal of the burden of force and coercion from the shoulders of the little child will give him an impetus, not only to mind growth, but to the attaining of greater bodily strength.

Much misunderstanding of the system of Montessori has come about through our too lavish interpretation of the word freedom as lawlessness. It should be interpreted, rather, as self-direction. The home in which the children are provided with good living conditions, in which it is made possible for them to grow naturally, where their longing to see and touch and weigh and smell and taste is satisfied as far as can be arranged, and where they are led to be as independent of adult help as possible, is laying the foundation for the education of Montessori.

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