A PERUSAL of the methods of the Montessori schools and of the philosophy underlying them may lead the reader to question if under this new system the child is regarded as a creature with muscular and intellectual activities only, and without a soul. While the sternest sort of moral training is given to the parent or teacher who attempts to use the Montessori system, apparently very little is addressed directly to the child.

Nothing could more horrify the founder of the system than such an idea. No modern thinker could possibly be more penetrated with reverence for the higher life of the spirit than she, or could bear its needs more constantly in mind.

Critics of the method who claim that it makes no direct appeal to the child’s moral nature, and tends to make of him a little egotist bent on self-development only, have misapprehended the spirit of the whole system.

One answer to such a criticism is that conscious moral existence, the voluntary following of spiritual law, being by far the rarest, highest, and most difficult achievement in human life, is the one which develops latest, requires the longest and most careful preparation and the most mature powers of the individual. It is not only unreasonable to expect in a little child much of this conscious struggle toward the good, but it is utterly futile to attempt to force it prematurely into existence. It cannot be done, any more than a six-months baby can be forced to an intellectual undertaking of even the smallest dimension.

As a matter of fact, a normal child under six is mostly a little egotist bent on self-development, and to develop himself is the best thing he can do, both for himself and others, just as the natural business of a healthy child under a year of age is to extract all the physical profit possible out of the food, rest, care, and exercise given him. And yet even here, the line between the varieties of growth—physical, intellectual, and moral—is by no means hard and fast. The six-months baby, although living an almost exclusively physical life, in struggling to co-ordinate the muscles of his two arms so that he can seize a rattle with both hands, is battling for the mastery of his brain-centers, just as the three-year-old, who leads a life composed almost entirely of physical and intellectual interests, still, in the instinct which leads him to pity and water a thirsty plant, is struggling away from that exclusive imprisonment in his own interests and needs which is the Old Enemy of us all. The fact that this altruistic interest is not an overmastering passion which moves him to continuous responsible care for the plant, and the other fact that, even while he is giving it a drink, he has very likely forgotten his original purpose in the fascinations of the antics of water poured out of a sprinkling-pot, should not in the least modify our recognition of the sincerely moral character of his first impulse.

Now, sincerity in moral impulse is a prerequisite to healthy moral life, the importance of which cannot be overstated by the most swelling devices of rhetoric. It is an essential in moral life as air is in physical life; in other words moral life of any kind is entirely impossible without it. Hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, is a far worse enemy than ignorance, since it poisons the very springs of spiritual life, and yet few things are harder to avoid than unconscious hypocrisy. A realization of this truth is perhaps the explanation of a recent tendency in America for fairly intelligent, fairly conscientious parents utterly to despair of seeing any light on this problem, and to attempt to solve it by running away from it, to throw up the whole business in dismay at its difficulty, to attempt no moral training at all because so much that is given is bad, and to “let the children go, until they are old enough to choose for themselves.”

It is possible that this method, chosen in desperation, bad though it obviously is, is better than the older one of attempting to explain to little children the mysteries of the ordering of the universe before which our own mature spirits pause in bewildered uncertainty. The children of six who conceive of God as a policeman with a long white beard, oddly enough placed in the sky, lying on the clouds, and looking down through a peephole to spy upon the actions of little girls and boys, have undoubtedly been cruelly wronged by the creation of this grotesque and ignoble figure in their little brains, a figure which, so permanent are the impressions of childhood, will undoubtedly, in years to come, unconsciously render much more difficult a reverent and spiritual attitude towards the Ultimate Cause. But because this attempt at spiritual instruction is as bad as it can be, it does not follow that the moral nature of the little child does not need training fitted to its capacities, limited though these undoubtedly are in early childhood. There is no more reason for leaving a child to grow up morally unaided by a life definitely designed to develop his moral nature, than for leaving him to grow up physically unaided by good food, to expect that he will select this instinctively by his own unaided browsings in the pantry among the different dishes prepared for the varying needs of his elders.

The usual method by which bountiful Nature, striving to make up for our deficiencies, provides for this, is by the action of children upon each other. This factor is, of course, notably present in the Casa dei Bambini in the all-day life in common of twenty children. In families it is especially to be seen in the care and self-sacrifice which older children are obliged to show towards younger ones. But in our usual small prosperous American families, this element of enforced moral effort is often wanting. Either there are but one or two children, or if more, the younger ones are cared for by a nurse, or by the mother sufficiently free from pressing material care to give considerable time to the baby of the family. And on the whole it must be admitted that Nature’s expedient is at best a rough-and-ready one. Though the older children may miss an opportunity for spiritual discipline, it is manifestly better for the baby to be tended by an adult.

But there are other organisms besides babies which are weaker than children, and the care for plants and animals seems to be the natural door through which the little child may first go forth to his lifelong battle with his own egotism. It is always to be borne in mind that the Case dei Bambini now actually existing are by no means ideal embodiments of Dr. Montessori’s ideas (see page 227). She has not had a perfectly free hand with any one of them and herself says constantly that many phases of her central principle have never been developed in practice. Hence the absence of any special morally educative element in the present Casa dei Bambini does not in the least indicate that Dr. Montessori has deliberately omitted it, any more than the perhaps too dryly practical character of life in the original Casa dei Bambini means anything but that the principle was being applied to very poor children who were in need, first of all, of practical help. For instance, music and art were left out of the life there, simply because, at that time, there seemed no way of introducing them. It is hard for us to realize that the whole movement is so extremely recent that there has not been time to overcome many merely material obstacles. In the same way, although circumstances have prevented Dr. Montessori from developing practically the Casa dei Bambini as far in the direction of the care of plants and animals as she would like, she is very strongly in favor of making this an integral and important part of the daily life of little children.

In this she is again, as in so many of the features of her system, only using the weight of her scientific reputation to force upon our serious and respectful attention means of education for little children which have all along lain close at hand, which have been mentioned by other educators (Froebel has, of course, his elder boys undertake gardening), but of which, as far as very young children go, our recognition has been fitful and imperfect. She is the modern doctor who proclaims with all the awe-compelling paraphernalia of the pathological laboratory back of him, that it is not medicine, but fresh air which is the cure for tuberculosis. Most parents already make some effort to provide pets (if they are not too much trouble for the rest of the family) with a vague, instinctive idea that they are somehow “good for children,” but with no conscious notion of how this “good” is transferred or how to facilitate the process; and child-gardens are not only a feature of some very advanced and modern schools and kindergartens, but are provided once in a while by a family, although nearly always, as in Froebel’s system, for older children. But as those institutions are now conducted in the average family economy, the little child gets about as casual and irregular an opportunity to benefit by them as the consumptive of twenty years ago by the occasional whiffs of fresh air which the protecting care of his nurses could not prevent from reaching him. The four-year-old, as he and his pets are usually treated, does not feel real responsibility for his kitten or his potted plant and, missing that, he misses most of the good he might extract from his relations with his little sisters of the vegetable and animal world.

Our part, therefore, in this connection, is to catch up the hint which the great Italian teacher has let fall and use our own Yankee ingenuity in developing it, always bearing religiously in mind the fundamental principle of self-education which must underlie any attempt of ours to adapt her ideas to our conditions. For, of course, there is nothing new in the idea of associating children with animals and plants—an idea common to nearly all educators since the first child played with a puppy. What is new is our more conscious, sharpened, more definite idea, awakened by Dr. Montessori’s penetrating analysis, of just how these natural elements of child-life can be used to stimulate a righteous sense of responsibility. Our tolerant indifference towards the children’s dogs and cats and guinea-pigs, our fatigued complaint that it is more bother than it is worth to prepare and oversee the handling of garden-plots for the four- and five-year-olds, would be transformed into the most genuine and ardent interest in these matters, if we were penetrated with the realization that their purposeful use is the key to open painlessly and naturally to our children the great kingdom of self-abnegation. There is not, as is apt to be the case with dolls, a more or less acknowledged element of artificiality, even though it be the sweet “pretend” mother-love for a baby doll. The children who really care for plants and animals are in a sane world of reality, as much as we are in caring for children. Their services are of real value to another real life. The four-year-old youngster who rushes as soon as he is awake to water a plant he had forgotten the day before, is acting on as genuine and purifying an impulse of remorse and desire to make amends as any we feel for a duty neglected in adult life. The motives which underlie that most valuable moral asset, responsibility, have been awakened, exercised, strengthened far more vitally than by any number of those Sunday morning “serious talks” in which we may try fumblingly and futilely from the outside to touch the child’s barely nascent moral consciousness. The puppy who sprawls destructively about the house, and the cat who is always under our feet when we are in a hurry, should command respectful treatment from us, since they are rehearsing quaintly with the child a first rough sketch of the drama of his moral life. The more gentleness, thoughtfulness, care, and forbearance the little child learns to show to this creature, weaker than himself, dependent on him, the less difficult he will find the exercise of those virtues in other circumstances. He is forming spontaneously, urged thereto by a natural good impulse of his heart, a moral habit as valuable to him and to those who are to live with him, as the intellectual habits of precision formed by the use of the geometric insets.

Of course, he will in the first place form this habit of unvarying gentleness towards plants and animals, only as he forms so many other habits, in simian imitation of the actions of those about him. He must absorb from example, as well as precept, the idea that plants and animals, being dependent on us, have a moral right to our unfailing care—a conception which is otherwise not suggested to him until he is several years older and has back of him the habit of several years of indifference toward this duty of the strong.

And so here is our hard-working Montessori parent embarked upon the career of animal-rearing, as well as child-training, with the added difficulty that he must care for the animals through the children, and resist stoutly the almost invincible temptation to take over this, like all other activities which belong by right to the child, for the short-cut reason that it is less trouble. If this impulse of the parent be followed, the mere furry presence will be of no avail to the child, except casually. The kitten must be the little girl’s kitten if she is really to begin the long preparation which will lead her to the steady and resolute self-abnegations of maternity, the preparation which we hope will make her generation better mothers than we undisciplined and groping creatures are.

As for plant-life, the AntÆus-like character of humanity is too well known to need comment. We are all healthier and saner and happier if we have not entirely severed our connection with the earth, and it is surprising that, recognizing this element as consciously as we do, we have made so comparatively little systematic and regular use of it in the family to benefit our little children. It is not because it is very hard to manage. What has been lacking has been some definite, understandable motive to make us act in this way, beyond the sentimental notion that it is pretty to have flowers and children together. No one before has told us quite so plainly and forcibly that this observation of plants and imaginative sympathy with their needs is the easiest and most natural way for little minds to get a first general notion of the world’s economy, the struggle between helpful and hurtful forces, and of the duty of not remaining a passive onlooker at this strife, but of entering it instinctively, heartily throwing all one’s powers on the side of the good and useful.I know a child not yet quite three, who, by the maddeningly persistent interrogations characteristic of his age, has succeeded in extracting from a pair of gardening elders an explanation of the difference between weeds and flowers, and who has been so struck by this information that he has, entirely of his own volition, enlisted himself in the army of natural-born reformers. With the personal note of very little children, who find it so impossible to think in terms at all abstract, he has constructed in his baby mind an exciting drama in the garden, unfolding itself before his eyes; a drama in which he acts, by virtue of his comparatively huge size and giant strength, the generous rÔle of deus ex machina, constantly rescuing beauty beset by her foes. He throws himself upon a weed, uproots it, and casts it away with the righteously indignant exclamation, “Horrid old weed! Stop eating the flowers’ dinner!”

I do not think that it can be truthfully said that there are no moral elements in his life. He is a baby Sir Galahad, with roses for his maidens in distress. He has felt and exercised and strengthened the same impulse that drove Judge Lindsey to his battle for the children of Denver against the powers of graft. He has recognized spontaneously his duty to aid the good and useful against their enemies, the responsibility into which he was born when he opened his eyes upon the world of mingled good and evil.

All this is not a fanciful literary flight of the imagination. It is not sentimentality. It is calling things by their real names. Because the little child’s capacity for a genuine moral impulse is small and has, like all his other capacities, little continuity, is no reason why we should not think clearly about it and recognize it for what it is—the key to the future. Because he “makes a play” of his good action and is not priggishly aware of his virtue is all the more reason for us to be thankful, for that is a proof of its unforced existence in his spirit. Just as the child “makes a play” out of his geometric insets, and is not pedantically aware that he is acquiring knowledge, so, to take an instance from the Casa dei Bambini, the little girls who set the tables and bring in the soup are only vastly interested in the fun of “playing waitress.” It is their elders who perceive that they are unconsciously and painlessly acquiring the habit of willing and instinctive service to others, which will aid them in many a future conscious and painful struggle against their own natural selfishness and inertia.

This use of the sincerely common life in the Children’s Home to promote sincerely social feeling among the children has been mentioned in the preceding chapter. It is one of the most vitally important of the elements in the Montessori schools. The genuine, unforced acceptance by the children of the need for sacrifices by the individual for the good of all, is something which can only be brought about by genuinely social life with their equals, such as they have in the Children’s Home and not elsewhere. We must do the best we can in the family-life by seeing that the child shares as much as possible and as sincerely as possible in the life of the household. But at home he is inevitably living with his inferiors, plants, animals, and babies; or his superiors, older children and adults; whereas in the Children’s Home he is living as he will during the rest of his life, mostly with his equals. And it is in the spontaneous adjustments and compromises of this continuous life with his equals that he learns most naturally, most soundly, and most thoroughly, the rules governing social life.

As for moral life, it seems to me that we need neither make a vain attempt to subscribe to a too-rosy belief in the unmixed goodness of human nature, and blind ourselves to the saddening fact that the battle against one’s egotism is bound to be painful, nor, on the other hand, go back to the grim creed of our forefathers, that the sooner children are thrust into the thick of this unending war the better, since they must enter it sooner or later. The truth seems to lie in its usual position, between two extremes, and to be that children should be strengthened by proper moral food, care, and exercises suited to their strength, and allowed to grow slowly into adult endurance before they are forced to face adult moral problems; and that we may protect them from too great demands on their small fund of capacity for self-sacrifice by allowing them and even encouraging them to wreathe their imaginative “plays” about the self-sacrificing action, provided, of course, that we keep our heads clear to make sure that the “plays” do not interfere with the action.

It is well to make a plain statement to the child of five, that he is requested to wipe the silver-ware because it will be of service to his mother (if he is lucky enough to have a mother who ever does so obviously necessary and useful a thing as to wash the dishes herself), but it is not necessary to insist that this conception of service shall uncompromisingly occupy his mind during the whole process. It does no harm if, after this statement, it is suggested that the knives and forks and spoons are shipwrecked people in dire need of rescue, and that it would be fun to snatch them from their watery predicament and restore them safely to their expectant families in the silver-drawer. By so doing we are not really confusing the issue, or “fooling” the child into a good action, if clear thinking on the part of adults accompany the process. We are but suiting the burden to the childish shoulders, but inducing the child-feet to take a single step, which is all that any of us can take at one time, in the path leading to the service of others.

Most of this chapter has been drawn from Montessori ideas by inference only, by the development of hints, and it is probable that other mothers, meditating on the same problems, may see other ways of applying the principle of self-education and spontaneous activity to this field of moral life. It is apparent that the first element necessary, after a firm grasp on the fundamental idea that our children must do their own moral as well as physical growing, and after a vivid realization that the smallest amount of real moral life is better than much simulated and unreal feeling, is clear thinking on our part, a definite notion of what we really mean by moral life, a definition which will not be bounded and limited by the repetition of committed-to-memory prayers. This does not mean that simple nightly aspirations to be a good child the next day may not have a most beneficial effect on even a very young child and may satisfy the first stirrings to life of the religious instinct, as much as the constant daily kindnesses to plants and animals satisfy the ethical instinct. This latter, however, at his age, is apt to be vastly more developed and more important than the religious instinct.

Indeed the religious instinct, which apparently never develops in some natures, although so strong in others, is in all cases slow to show itself and, like other slowly germinating seeds, should not be pushed and prodded to hasten it, but should be left untouched until it shows signs of life. Our part is to prepare, cultivate, and enrich the nature in which it is to grow.