An audience already thoroughly interested awaits this translation of a remarkable book. For years no educational document has been so eagerly expected by so large a public, and not many have better merited general anticipation. That this widespread interest exists is due to the enthusiastic and ingenious articles in McClure's Magazine for May and December, 1911, and January, 1912; but before the first of these articles appeared a number of English and American teachers had given careful study to Dr. Montessori's work, and had found it novel and important. The astonishing welcome accorded to the first popular expositions of the Montessori system may mean much or little for its future in England and America; it is rather the earlier approval of a few trained teachers and professional students that commends it to the educational workers who must ultimately decide upon its value, interpret its technicalities to the country at large, and adapt it to English and American conditions. To them as well as to the general public this brief critical Introduction is addressed.

It is wholly within the bounds of safe judgment to call Dr. Montessori's work remarkable, novel, and important. It is remarkable, if for no other reason, because it represents the constructive effort of a woman. We have no other example of an educational system—original at least in its systematic wholeness and in its practical application—worked out and inaugurated by the feminine mind and hand. It is remarkable, also, because it springs from a combination of womanly sympathy and intuition, broad social outlook, scientific training, intensive and long-continued study of educational problems, and, to crown all, varied and unusual experience as a teacher and educational leader. No other woman who has dealt with Dr. Montessori's problem—the education of young children—has brought to it personal resources so richly diverse as hers. These resources, furthermore, she has devoted to her work with an enthusiasm, an absolute abandon, like that of Pestalozzi and Froebel, and she presents her convictions with an apostolic ardour which commands attention. A system which embodies such a capital of human effort could not be unimportant. Then, too, certain aspects of the system are in themselves striking and significant: it adapts to the education of normal children methods and apparatus originally used for deficients; it is based on a radical conception of liberty for the pupil; it entails a highly formal training of separate sensory, motor, and mental capacities; and it leads to rapid, easy, and substantial mastery of the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic. All this will be apparent to the most casual reader of this book.

None of these things, to be sure, is absolutely new in the educational world. All have been proposed in theory; some have been put more or less completely into practice. It is not unjust, for instance, to point out that much of the material used by Dr. Walter S. Fernald, Superintendent of the Massachusetts Institution for the Feeble-Minded at Waverley, is almost identical with the Montessori material, and that Dr. Fernald has long maintained that it could be used to good effect in the education of normal children. (It may interest American readers to know that SÉguin, on whose work that of Dr. Montessori is based, was once head of the school at Waverley.) So, too, formal training in various psycho-physical processes has been much urged of late by a good many workers in experimental pedagogy, especially by Meumann. But before Montessori, no one had produced a system in which the elements named above were combined. She conceived it, elaborated it in practice, and established it in schools. It is indeed the final result, as Dr. Montessori proudly asserts, of years of experimental effort both on her own part and on the part of her great predecessors; but the crystallisation of these experiments in a programme of education for normal children is due to Dr. Montessori alone. The incidental features which she has frankly taken over from other modern educators she has chosen because they fit into the fundamental form of her own scheme, and she has unified them all in her general conception of method. The system is not original in the sense in which Froebel's system was original; but as a system it is the novel product of a single woman's creative genius.

As such, no student of elementary education ought to ignore it. The system doubtless fails to solve all the problems in the education of young children; possibly some of the solutions it proposes are partly or completely mistaken; some are probably unavailable in English and American schools; but a system of education does not have to attain perfection in order to merit study, investigation, and experimental use. Dr. Montessori is too large-minded to claim infallibility, and too thoroughly scientific in her attitude to object to careful scrutiny of her scheme and the thorough testing of its results. She expressly states that it is not yet complete. Practically, it is highly probable that the system ultimately adopted in our schools will combine elements of the Montessori programme with elements of the kindergarten programme, both "liberal" and "conservative." In its actual procedure school work must always be thus eclectic. An all-or-nothing policy for a single system inevitably courts defeat; for the public is not interested in systems as systems, and refuses in the end to believe that any one system contains every good thing. Nor can we doubt that this attitude is essentially sound. If we continue, despite the pragmatists, to believe in absolute principles, we may yet remain skeptical about the logic of their reduction to practice—at least in any fixed programme of education. We are not yet justified, at any rate, in adopting one programme to the exclusion of every other simply because it is based on the most intelligible or the most inspiring philosophy. The pragmatic test must also be applied, and rigorously. We must try out several combinations, watch and record the results, compare them, and proceed cautiously to new experiments. This procedure is desirable for every stage and grade of education, but especially for the earliest stage, because there it has been least attempted and is most difficult. Certainly a system so radical, so clearly defined, and so well developed as that of Dr. Montessori offers for the thoroughgoing comparative study of methods in early education new material of exceptional importance. Without accepting every detail of the system, without even accepting unqualifiedly its fundamental principles, one may welcome it, thus, as of great and immediate value. If early education is worth studying at all, the educator who devotes his attention to it will find it necessary to define the differences in principle between the Montessori programme and other programmes, and to carry out careful tests of the results obtainable from the various systems and their feasible combinations.

One such combination this Introduction will suggest, and it will discuss also the possible uses of the Montessori apparatus in the home; but it may be helpful first to present the outstanding characteristics of the Montessori system as compared with the modern kindergarten in its two main forms.

Certain similarities in principle are soon apparent. Dr. Montessori's views of childhood are in some respects identical with those of Froebel, although in general decidedly more radical. Both defend the child's right to be active, to explore his environment and develop his own inner resources through every form of investigation and creative effort. Education is to guide activity, not repress it. Environment cannot create human power, but only give it scope and material, direct it, or at most but call it forth; and the teacher's task is first to nourish and assist, to watch, encourage, guide, induce, rather than to interfere, prescribe, or restrict. To most American teachers and to all kindergartners this principle has long been familiar; they will but welcome now a new and eloquent statement of it from a modern viewpoint. In the practical interpretation of the principle, however, there is decided divergence between the Montessori school and the kindergarten. The Montessori "directress" does not teach children in groups, with the practical requirement, no matter how well "mediated," that each member of the group shall join in the exercise. The Montessori pupil does about as he pleases, so long as he does not do any harm.

Montessori and Froebel stand in agreement also on the need for training of the senses; but Montessori's scheme for this training is at once more elaborate and more direct than Froebel's. She has devised out of SÉguin's apparatus a comprehensive and scientific scheme for formal gymnastic of the senses; Froebel originated a series of objects designed for a much broader and more creative use by the children, but by no means so closely adapted to the training of sensory discrimination. The Montessori material carries out the fundamental principle of Pestalozzi, which he tried in vain to embody in a successful system of his own: it "develops piece by piece the pupil's mental capacities" by training separately, through repeated exercises, his several senses and his ability to distinguish, compare, and handle typical objects. In the kindergarten system, and particularly in the "liberal" modifications of it, sense training is incidental to constructive and imaginative activity in which the children are pursuing larger ends than the mere arrangement of forms or colours. Even in the most formal work in kindergarten design the children are "making a picture," and are encouraged to tell what it looks like—"a star," "a kite," "a flower."

As to physical education, the two systems agree in much the same way: both affirm the need for free bodily activity, for rhythmic exercises, and for the development of muscular control; but whereas the kindergarten seeks much of all this through group games with an imaginative or social content, the Montessori scheme places the emphasis on special exercises designed to give formal training in separate physical functions.

In another general aspect, however, the agreement between the two systems, strong in principle, leaves the Montessori system less formal rather than more formal in practice. The principle in this case consists of the affirmation of the child's need for social training. In the conservative kindergarten this training is sought once more, largely in group games. These are usually imaginative, and sometimes decidedly symbolic: that is, the children play at being farmers, millers, shoemakers, mothers and fathers, birds, animals, knights, or soldiers; they sing songs, go through certain semi-dramatic activities—such as "opening the pigeon house," "mowing the grass," "showing the good child to the knights," and the like; and each takes his part in the representation of some typical social situation. The social training involved in these games is formal only in the sense that the children are not engaged, as the Montessori children often are, in a real social enterprise, such as that of serving dinner, cleaning the room, caring for animals, building a toy house, or making a garden. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that even the most conservative kindergarten does not, on principle, exclude "real" enterprises of this latter sort; but in a three-hour session it does rather little with them. Liberal kindergartens do more, particularly in Europe, where the session is often longer. Nor does the Montessori system wholly exclude imaginative group games. But Dr. Montessori, despite an evidently profound interest not only in social training, but also in Æsthetic, idealistic, and even religious development, speaks of "games and foolish stories" in a casual and derogatory way, which shows that she is as yet unfamiliar with the American kindergartner's remarkable skill and power in the use of these resources. (Of course the American kindergartner does not use "foolish" stories; but stories she does use, and to good effect.) The Montessori programme involves much direct social experience, both in the general life of the school and in the manual work done by the pupils; the kindergarten extends the range of the child's social consciousness through the imagination. The groupings of the Montessori children are largely free and unregulated; the groupings of kindergarten children are more often formal and prescribed.

On one point the Montessori system agrees with the conservative kindergarten, but not with the liberal: it prepares directly for the mastery of the school arts. There can be no doubt that Dr. Montessori has devised a peculiarly successful scheme for teaching children to write, an effective method for the introduction of reading, and good material for early number work. Both types of kindergarten increase, to be sure, the child's general capacity for expression: kindergarten activity adds to his stock of ideas, awakens and guides his imagination, increases his vocabulary, and trains him in the effective use of it. Children in a good kindergarten hear stories and tell them, recount their own experiences, sing songs, and recite verses, all in a company of friendly but fairly critical listeners, which does even more to stimulate and guide expression than does the circle at home. But even the conservative kindergarten does not teach children to write and to read. It does teach them a good deal about number; and it may fairly be questioned whether it does not do more fundamental work in this field than the Montessori system itself. The Froebelian gifts offer exceptional opportunity for concrete illustration of the conceptions of whole and part, through the creation of wholes from parts, and the breaking up of wholes into parts. This aspect of number is at least as important as the series aspect, which children get in counting and for which the Montessori "Long Stair" provides such good material. The Froebelian material may be used very readily for counting, however, and the Montessori material gives some slight opportunity for uniting and dividing. So far as preparation for arithmetic is concerned, a combination of the two bodies of material is both feasible and desirable. The liberal kindergarten, meanwhile, abandoning the use of the gifts and occupations for mathematical purposes, makes no attempt to prepare its pupils directly for the school arts.

Compared with the kindergarten, then, the Montessori system presents these main points of interest: it carries out far more radically the principle of unrestricted liberty; its materials are intended for the direct and formal training of the senses; it includes apparatus designed to aid in the purely physical development of the children; its social training is carried out mainly by means of present and actual social activities; and it affords direct preparation for the school arts. The kindergarten, on the other hand, involves a certain amount of group-teaching, in which children are held—not necessarily by the enforcement of authority, yet by authority, confessedly, when other means fail—to definite activities; its materials are intended primarily for creative use by the children and offer opportunity for mathematical analysis and the teaching of design; and its procedure is rich in resources for the imagination. One thing should be made entirely clear and emphatic: in none of these characteristics are the two systems rigidly antagonistic. Much kindergarten activity is free, and the principle of prescription is not wholly given over by the "Houses of Childhood"—witness their Rules and Regulations; the kindergarten involves direct sense training, and the Montessori system admits some of the Froebel blocks for building and design; there are many purely muscular activities in the kindergarten, and some of the usual kindergarten games are used by Montessori; the kindergarten conducts some gardening, care of animals, construction-work, and domestic business, and the Montessori system admits a few imaginative social plays; both systems (but not the liberal form of the kindergarten) work directly toward the school arts. Since the difference between the two programmes is one of arrangement, emphasis, and degree, there is no fundamental reason why a combination especially adapted to English and American schools cannot be worked out.

The broad contrast between a Montessori school and a kindergarten appears on actual observation to be this: whereas the Montessori children spend almost all their time handling things, largely according to their individual inclination and under individual guidance, kindergarten children are generally engaged in group work and games with an imaginative background and appeal. A possible principle of adjustment between the two systems might be stated thus: work with objects designed for formal sensory, motor, and intellectual training should be done individually or in purely voluntary groups; imaginative and social activity should be carried on in regulated groups. This principle is suggested only as a possible basis for education during the kindergarten age; for as children grow older they must be taught in classes, and they naturally learn how to carry out imaginative and social enterprises in free groups, and the former often alone. Nor should it be supposed that the principle is suggested as a rule to which there can be no exception. It is suggested simply as a general working hypothesis, the value of which must be tested in experience. Although it has long been observed by kindergartners themselves that group-work with the Froebelian materials, especially such work as involves geometrical analysis and formal design, soon tires the children, it has been held that the kindergartner could safeguard her pupils from loss of interest or real fatigue by watching carefully for the first signs of weariness and stopping the work promptly on their appearance. For small groups of the older children, who can do work of this sort with ease and enjoyment, no doubt the inevitable restraint of group teaching is a negligible factor, the fatiguing effects of which any good kindergartner can forestall. But for younger children a rÉgime of complete freedom would seem to promise better results—at least so far as work with objects is concerned. In games, on the other hand, group teaching means very little restraint and the whole process is less tiring any way. To differentiate in method between these two kinds of activity may be the best way to keep them both in an effective educational programme.

To speak of an effective educational programme leads at once, however, to an important aspect of the Montessori system, quite aside from its relation to the kindergarten, with which this Introduction must now deal. This is the social aspect, which finds its explanation in Dr. Montessori's own story of her first school. In any discussion of the availability of the Montessori system in English and American schools—particularly in American public schools and English "Board" schools—two general conditions under which Dr. Montessori did her early work in Rome should be borne in mind. She had her pupils almost all day long, practically controlling their lives in their waking hours; and her pupils came for the most part from families of the laboring class. We cannot expect to achieve the results Dr. Montessori has achieved if we have our pupils under our guidance only two or three hours in the morning, nor can we expect exactly similar results from children whose heredity and experience make them at once more sensitive, more active, and less amenable to suggestion than hers. If we are to make practical application of the Montessori scheme we must not neglect to consider the[Pg xxviii] modifications of it which differing social conditions may render necessary.

The conditions under which Dr. Montessori started her original school in Rome do not, indeed, lack counterpart in large cities the world over. When one reads her eloquent "Inaugural Address" it is impossible not to wish that a "School within the Home" might stand as a centre of hopeful child life in the midst of every close-built city block. Better, of course, if there were no hive-like city tenements at all, and if every family could give to its own children on its own premises enough of "happy play in grassy places." Better if every mother and father were in certain ways an expert in child psychology and hygiene. But while so many unfortunate thousands still live in the hateful cliff-dwellings of our modern cities, we must welcome Dr. Montessori's large conception of the social function of her "Houses of Childhood" as a new gospel for the schools which serve the city poor. No matter what didactic apparatus such schools may use, they should learn of Dr. Montessori the need of longer hours, complete care of the children, closer co-operation with the home, and larger aims. In such schools, too, it is probable that the two fundamental features of Dr. Montessori's work—her principle of liberty and her scheme for sense training—will find their completest and most fruitful application.

It is just these fundamental features, however, which will be most bitterly attacked whenever the social status of the original Casa dei Bambini is forgotten. Anthropometric measurements, baths, training in personal self-care, the serving of meals, gardening, and the care of animals we may hear sweepingly recommended for all schools, even for those with a three-hour session and a socially favored class of pupils; but the need for individual liberty and for the training of the senses will be denied even in the work of schools where the conditions correspond closely to those at San Lorenzo. Of course no practical educator will actually propose bathtubs for all schools, and no doubt there will be plenty of wise conservatism about transferring to a given school any function now well discharged by the homes that support it. The problems raised by the proposal to apply in all schools the Montessori conception of discipline and the Montessori sense-training are really more difficult to solve. Is individual liberty a universal educational principle, or a principle which must be modified in the case of a school with no such social status as that of the original "House of Childhood"? Do all children need sense training, or only those of unfavorable inheritance and home environment? No serious discussion of the Montessori system can avoid these questions. What is said in answer to them here is written in the hope that subsequent discussion may be somewhat influenced to keep in view the really deciding factor in each case—the actual situation in the school.

There is occasion enough in these questions, to be sure, for philosophical and scientific argument. The first question involves an ethical issue, the second a psychological issue, and both may be followed through to purely metaphysical issues. Dr. Montessori believes in liberty for the pupil because she thinks of life "as a superb goddess, ever advancing to new conquests." Submission, loyalty, self-sacrifice seem to her, apparently, only incidental necessities of life, not essential elements of its eternal form. There is obvious opportunity here for profound difference of philosophic theory and belief. She seems to hold, too, that sense perception forms the sole basis for the mental and hence for the moral life; that "sense training will prepare the ordered foundation upon which the child may build up a clear and strong mentality," including, apparently, his moral ideals; and that the cultivation of purpose and of the imaginative and creative capacities of children is far less important than the development of the power to learn from the environment by means of the senses. These views seem to agree rather closely with those of Herbart and to some extent with those of Locke. Certainly they offer material for both psychological and ethical debate. Possibly, however, Dr. Montessori would not accept the views here ascribed to her on the evidence of this book; and in any case these are matters for the philosopher and the psychologist. A pedagogical issue is never wholly an issue of high principle.

Can it reasonably be maintained, then, that an actual situation like that in the first "House of Childhood" at Rome is the only situation in which the Montessori principle of liberty can justifiably find full application? Evidently the Roman school is a true Republic of Childhood, in which nothing need take precedence of the child's claim to pursue an active purpose of his own. Social restraints are here reduced to a minimum; the children must, to be sure, subordinate individual caprice to the demands of the common good, they are not allowed to quarrel or to interfere with each other, and they have duties to perform at stated times; but each child is a citizen in a community governed wholly in the interests of the equally privileged members thereof, his liberty is rarely interfered with, he is free to carry out his own purposes, and he has as much influence in the affairs of the commonwealth as the average member of an adult democracy. This situation is never duplicated in the home, for a child is not only a member of the family, whose interests are to be considered with the rest, but literally a subordinate member, whose interests must often be frankly set aside for those of an adult member or for those of the household itself. Children must come to dinner at dinner time, even if continued digging in the sand would be more to their liking or better for their general development of muscle, mind, or will. It is possible, of course, to refine on the theory of the child's membership in the family community and of the right of elders to command, but practically it remains true that the common conditions of family life prohibit any such freedom as is exercised in a Montessori school. In the same way a school of large enrollment that elects to cover in a given time so much work that individual initiative cannot be trusted to compass it, is forced to teach certain things at nine o'clock and others at ten, and to teach in groups; and the individual whose life is thus cabined and confined must get what he can. For a given school the obvious question is, Considering the work to be done in the time allowed, can we give up the safeguards of a fixed programme and group teaching? The deeper question lies here: Is the work to be done in itself so important that it is worth while to have the children go through it under compulsion or on interest induced by the teacher? Or to put it another way: May not the work be so much less important than the child's freedom that we had better trust to native curiosity and cleverly devised materials anyway and run the risk of his losing part of the work, or even the whole of it?

For schools beyond the primary grade there will be no doubt as to the answer to this question. There are many ways in which school work may safely be kept from being the deadening and depressing process it so often is, but the giving up of all fixed and limited schedules and the prescriptions of class teaching is not one of them. Even if complete liberty of individual action were possible in schools of higher grade, it is not certain that it would be desirable: for we must learn to take up many of our purposes in life under social imperative. But with young children the question becomes more difficult. What work do we wish to make sure that each child does? If our schools can keep but half a day, is there time enough for every child to cover this work without group teaching at stated times? Is the prescription and restraint involved in such group teaching really enough to do the children any harm or to make our teaching less effective? Can we not give up prescription altogether for parts of the work and minimise it for others? The general question of individual liberty is thus reduced to a series of practical problems of adjustment. It is no longer a question of total liberty or no liberty at all, but a question of the practical mediation of these extremes. When we consider, furthermore, that the teacher's skill and the attractiveness of her personality, the alluring power of the didactic apparatus and the ease with which it enables children to learn, to say nothing of a cheerful and pleasant room and the absence of set desks and seats, may all work together to prevent scheduled teaching in groups from becoming in the least an occasion for restraint, it is plain that in any given school there may be ample justification for abating the rigour of Dr. Montessori's principle of freedom. Every school must work out its own solution of the problem in the face of its particular conditions.

The adoption of sense-training would seem to be much less a matter for variable decision. Some children may need less than others, but for all children between the ages of three and five the Montessori material will prove fas[Pg xxxiii]cinating as well as profitable. A good deal of modern educational theory has been based on the belief that children are interested only in what has social value, social content, or "real use"; yet a day with any normal child will give ample evidence of the delight that children take in purely formal exercises. The sheer fascination of tucking cards under the edge of a rug will keep a baby happy until any ordinary supply of cards is exhausted; and the wholly sensory appeal of throwing stones into the water gives satisfaction enough to absorb for a long time the attention of older children—to say nothing of grown-ups. The Montessori apparatus satisfies sense hunger when it is keen for new material, and it has besides a puzzle-interest which children eagerly respond to. Dr. Montessori subordinates the value of the concrete mental content her material supplies to its value in rendering the senses more acute; yet it is by no means certain that this content—purely formal as it is—does not also give the material much of its importance. Indeed, the refinement of sensory discrimination may not in itself be particularly valuable. What Professor G. M. Whipple says on this point in his Manual of Menial and Physical Tests (p. 130) has much weight:

The use of sensory tests in correlation work is particularly interesting. In general, some writers are convinced that keen discrimination is a prerequisite to keen intelligence, while others are equally convinced that intelligence is essentially conditioned by "higher" processes, and only remotely by sensory capacity—barring, of course, such diminution of capacity as to interfere seriously with the experiencing of sensations, as in partial deafness or partial loss of vision. While it is scarcely the place here to discuss the evolutionary significance of discriminative sensitivity, it may be pointed out that the normal capacity is many times in excess of the actual demands of life, and that it is consequently difficult to understand why nature has been so prolific and generous; to understand, in other words, what is the sanction for the seemingly hypertrophied discriminative capacity of the human sense organs. The usual "teleological explanations" of our sensory life fail to account for this discrepancy. Again, the very fact of the existence of this surplus capacity seems to negative at the outset the notion that sensory capacity can be a conditioning factor in intelligence—with the qualification already noted.