armchair, so placed that he might see his companions at work, and giving him those games and toys to which he was most attracted. This isolation almost always succeeded in calming the child; from his position he could see the entire assembly of his companions, and the way in which they carried on their work was an object-lesson much more efficacious than any words of the teacher could possibly have been. Little by little he would come to see the advantages of being one of the company working so busily before his eyes, and he would really wish to go back and do as the others did.” The corrections which the teachers first offer never take the form of scoldings; the child is quietly told that what he is doing is not polite or disturbs the other children. Then he is told how he ought to behave to be a pleasant companion, or his attention is diverted to a piece of work. Because children are working on something of their own choice, and when they want to, and because they may move and talk enough so that they do not get nervously tired, there is very little need for any “punishment.” Except for an isolated case of real lawlessness, such as Montessori refers to in the quotation just cited, the visitor to one of her schools sees very little need of negative discipline. The teachers’ corrections are practically all for small breaches of manners or for carelessness.
Activity founded on liberty being the guiding principle of the Montessori schools, activity is expended by the child on two sorts of material. Montessori believes that the child needs practice in the actions of daily life; that, for example, he should be taught how to take care of and wait on himself. Part of the work is accordingly directed to this end. She also believes that the child possesses innate faculties which should be allowed to develop to their fullest; consequently part of the work is designed to give adequate expression to these faculties. These exercises for the culture of the inner potentialities of the child she considers the more important of the two. The child needs to know how to adjust himself to his environment in order to be independent and happy; but an imperfect development of the child’s faculties is an imperfect development of life itself; so the real object of education consists in furnishing active help to the normal expansion of the life of the child. These two lines of development Madame Montessori considers to be so distinct one from the other that the exercises of practical life cannot perform the function of the exercises arranged to train the faculties and senses of the child.
The exercises of practical life are designed to teach the child to be independent, to supply his own wants, and to perform the actions of daily life with skill and grace. The pupils keep the schoolroom in order, dusting and arranging the furniture, and putting away each piece of material as soon as they are through with it. They wait on themselves while they are working, getting out the things they want, finding a convenient place to work, and then taking care of the apparatus when they have worked with it as long as they like. In schools where the children do not live in the building, a midday lunch is served for the pupils; and, except for the cooking, the children do all the work connected with the meal, setting tables, serving food, and then clearing away and washing the dishes. All the pupils share alike in this work, regardless of their age; children of three and four soon learn to handle the plates and glasses, and to pass the food. Wherever possible the schools have gardens, which the children care for, and animal pets of a useful sort—hens and chickens or pigeons. Even the youngest children put on their own wraps, button and unbutton their aprons and slippers, and when they can not do it for themselves, they help each other. The necessity of the pupils’ learning to take care of themselves as early as possible is so much insisted upon that in order to help the youngest in learning this lesson, Montessori has designed several appliances to give them practice before they begin to wait upon themselves. These are wooden frames, fitted with cloth which is opened down the center. Then the edges are joined either with buttons, hooks and eyes, or ribbons, and practice consists in opening and closing these edges by buttoning, hooking, or tying as the case may be.
These appliances may be taken as a bridge between the two sorts of exercises in use in the Montessori schools. They mark a transition from the principles which are common to most educational reformers to those associated particularly with the method worked out by Madame Montessori. Another quotation from her first book gives the clew to an understanding of this method: “In a pedagogical method which is experimental the education of the senses must undoubtedly assume the greatest importance.... The method used by me is that of making a pedagogical experiment with a didactic object and awaiting the spontaneous reaction of the child.... With little children, we must proceed to the making of trials, and must select the didactic materials in which they show themselves to be interested.... I believe, however, that I have arrived at a selection of objects representing the minimum necessary to a practical sense education.”
Madame Montessori started her career as a teacher among deficient children in the hospitals where Seguin had worked. Naturally she experimented with the material used with her subnormal pupils when she began working with normal children. It is equally natural that many of the objects which had proved useful with the former were also usable with the average school child. Ordinary school methods succeed with deficient children when used more slowly and with more patience; and in the same way Madame Montessori found that many of the appliances which had before been used only for deficients produced remarkably successful results with ordinary children, when used with more rapidity and liberty. Therefore her “didactic material” includes many things that are used generally to develop sensory consciousness among deficients. But instead of using the material in a fixed order and under the guidance of a teacher, the normal child is allowed complete liberty in its use; for the object is no longer to awaken powers that are nearly lacking, but to exercise powers that the child is using constantly in all his daily actions, so that he may have a more and more accurate and skillful control over them.
The exercises to develop the faculties of the child are especially so arranged as to train the power to discriminate and to compare. His sensory organs are nearly all exercised with apparatus designed, like the button frames, to allow the child to do one thing for one purpose. The pupil does not have to use these objects in any fixed order or work for any length of time on one thing. Except for the very youngest children, who do only the very simplest exercises, pupils are at liberty to work at any one they wish and for as long as they wish. Montessori believes that the child will turn naturally to the exercise he is ready for. The materials to develop the sense of touch are among the simplest. There are small boards with strips of sandpaper running from the roughest to the smoothest, and pieces of different kinds of cloth; these the child rubs his hands over while his eyes are blindfolded, distinguishing the differences. The appliances designed to teach the child to distinguish differences of form and size use the sense of touch as a strong aid to sight. There are blocks of wood with holes of different diameters and depths, and cylinders to fit each hole. The child takes all the cylinders out, rubs his fingers around their edge and then around the rim of the holes and puts them back in the proper hole. The ability to judge of size is also exercised by giving the child a set of graduated wooden blocks with which he builds a tower, and another set which he may use to make a stair. The power to distinguish form is developed by wooden insets of all shapes which fit into holes in a thin board. The child takes out the insets, feels of them and then replaces them. Later the teacher tells him the geometrical name of each form while he is touching it, and then has him distinguish them by name.
There are sets of cardboard forms to correspond to the wooden ones, and metal plaques where the form appears as a hole in the center of the plaque. These are used in games which consist in matching the same form in the different materials, and for drawing the form in outline on paper to be filed in with colored pencils.
The method of teaching reading and writing uses the sense of touch to reënforce the lesson the pupil gets through the eye and ear. Sandpaper alphabets with each letter pasted on a square of cardboard are given a child. He rubs his finger over these as if he were writing and makes the sound of the letter as he rubs. Movable letters are used only after the child is familiar with the letters by touch, and with them he makes words. Writing usually precedes reading when children learn in this way; when they take pencil or chalk, they are able to trace the letters with very little difficulty because the muscles as well as the eye are familiar with the forms.
The sense of hearing is exercised by means of
