Spontaneous Activity in Education by Maria Montessori (best historical biographies txt) 📕

Where the mother does not do her own work, the child, if intelligent, is still more unfortunate. He looks for something which he cannot find, and cries for no reason, he flies into a passion for which no one can account; some fathers lament this, almost with despair. "My child is very intelligent, but so naughty! nothing will satisfy him. It is no use to buy toys for him, he is really overdone with them; nothing is of any use."

The mother asks anxiously, "What do you advise me to do when the child is naughty? and when he gets into passions? He is so naughty, he never keeps still; I cannot contend with him any more."

It is rare to hear a mother say, "My baby is good—it is always asleep." Who has not heard some poor mother shout in a threatening voice to the crying babe in her arms, "Be quiet, be quiet, I tell you!" and then, naturally the child is frightened, and redoubles its cries.

This is the first contest of the man who enters the world: he has to struggle with his parents, with those who have given him life. And this occurs because his infant life is "different" from that of his parents; the child has to form himself, whereas his parents are already formed. The child must move about a great deal, to coordinate his movements, which are not yet under control; the parents, on the other hand, have their voluntary mobility organized, and can control their movements; perhaps also they are often tired after their work. The child's senses are not yet fully developed; his powers of accommodation are insufficient, and need help from touching and feeling, in order to take account of objects as well as of spaces; and his eyes are rectified by the experience of his hands. The parents, on the contrary, have developed senses, and have already corrected the primitive illusions of these; their powers of accommodation are perfect, if they have not spoilt them by abuse; in every way cerebral activity leads the senses to receive an exact impression; they have no need to touch. Children are anxious to get knowledge of the external world; their parents know it too well already.

Therefore they do not understand each other.

Parents want their children to do as they do, and any diversity is called "naughtiness." Think of the mother who drags her child along with her; he has to run while she walks; his legs are short, while hers are long; weak, while hers are strong, he has to bear the weight of his body and his disproportionately large head, while the mother has a head and body which are proportionally lighter and smaller. The child is tired and stands and cries, and the mother exclaims, "Come on, you naughty little thing! I won't have any nonsense. Do you want me to carry you, lazybones? No, I won't give in to you."

Or again, we see mothers who, when their children sit down on the ground—or lay themselves flat on their stomachs with their feet in the air, and support themselves on their elbows, while they look round them, call out, "Off the ground! You are making yourself dirty, naughty child."

All this may be translated in this way: "The child is different from the adult. The formation of his body is such that his head and his body are enormously large in comparison with his small, slender legs, because they are the part which will grow most. Hence the child cannot endure walking, and prefers to lie at full length, which is the most healthy position for him. He has a wonderful tendency towards development; he gets his first ideas of external life and assists his senses of sight and hearing by touching, in order to realize the forms of objects and distance. He moves continually, because he must coordinate and adapt his mobility. Hence he moves a great deal, walks very little, throws himself on the ground, and touches everything, and these are signs that he is alive, and that he is growing." No—all this is looked upon as naughtiness.

This is evidently not a moral question. We do not seek for means to correct these depraved tendencies of the man who is but just born. No, it is not a moral question. It is, however, a question of life.

The child seeks to live and we want to hinder him. In that sense it does become a moral question, as regards ourselves, since we have begun to examine those errors on our part which do harm, and infringe the rights of others. Moreover, our own egotism is concealed beneath our errors of treatment; what we really resent in the child is that he gives us trouble; we struggle against him in order to protect our own comfort, our own liberty. How often at the bottom of our hearts we have felt that we have been unjust, but have stifled this impression. The little rebel does not accuse us or bear us malice. On the contrary; just as he persists in his "naughtinesses" which are forms of life, so does he persist in loving us, in forgiving us everything, in forgetting our offenses, in longing to be with us, to embrace us, to sit upon our knees, to fall asleep on our bosom. This, too, is a form of life. And we, if we are tired or satiated, repulse him, masking this excess of selfishness under a hypocritical pretense of concern for the child himself: "Don't be so silly!" Insult and calumny are always on our lips in the eternal refrain: "Naughty, naughty." And yet the figure of the child might stand for that of perfect goodness, which "thinketh no evil, delighteth not in iniquity, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things." As to us—no, we cannot always say as much of ourselves.

If the struggle between the adult and the child could be brought to an end in "peace," and the adult, accepting the conditions of infant life, would seek to help the child, the former would be able to advance towards one of the most sublime enjoyments which Nature can bestow: that of following the natural development of the child, and seeing the man evolved. If the opening rosebud has become a commonplace of poetry, how much greater is the poetry of the infant soul in its manifestations? Now this ineffable gift which was placed beside us, in order that the miracle might accompany us and comfort us, we trample under foot in our wrath, blaspheming as if demented.

When the child desires to touch and to act, in spite of "punishments of every kind," he persists in exercises necessary "to his development," and displays a strength of will in the matter against which we are often powerless; he shows the same persistence as in breathing, in crying when he is hungry, and in raising himself when he wants to walk. Thus the child turns to external objects which respond to his needs: if he finds them, he displays his powers in muscular or sensory exercises, and then he is joyous; and if he does not find them, he is restless as when his desires are unsatisfied. Toys are too light to satisfy arms which require to make the efforts necessary in lifting and moving objects; they are too complex to satisfy senses which need to analyze a single sensation. They are vanity, and in themselves they represent simulacra and parodies of actual life. And yet they form the world of our children, in which they are constrained to "consume" their potential powers in a continuous exasperation, which incites them to destroy things.

Happily, children do not hear the pronouncement of the common formula, that children have an "instinct" for destruction. Nor are they familiar with the other axiom which contradicts this: That the instinct of "property," in other words, selfishness, is strongly developed in them. On the contrary, the child has merely the overpowering instinct to "grow," and therefore to raise and to perfect himself; in every period of life he seeks instinctively to prepare himself for the next period. This fact is very much more comprehensible than the strange instincts we calumniously attribute to him.

Just try the experiment of allowing children to act for themselves; they are at once "transformed." In the Guerrieri Gonzaga Children's House, it sufficed to provide a comb, to transform the naughtiest, most rebellious of the children, the one whom the teacher designated as in need of "taming," into a lively and attractive little girl, who combed the hair of her companions most carefully, with evident delight. We had only to say to an awkward, lethargic child, who came forward holding out her arms to have her sleeves pulled down for her: "Do it yourself," and there was a flash of intelligence in her eyes, her weary face was lighted up by an expression of satisfied pride and amazement, and she began to pull down her sleeves with positive delight. When these children were given a little basin and a piece of soap, how carefully they emptied and replaced the receptacle, fearing to break it, and how caressingly they handled the soap, laying it down very gently! It seemed as if the task had been confided to a mechanism of moving figures, with an accompaniment of music: the figures were the children, the music was their own joy.

These children, occupied in dressing, cleaning, washing, combing, cleansing, and arranging their environment, work themselves. As a result, they love useful objects so much that they will preserve a piece of paper for years, and instead of knocking against furniture, and breaking objects, they perfect their movements.

But we place ourselves beside these lives which are hastening triumphantly to their salvation, and seek to bind them to ourselves, in spite of the struggle which has begun and the fear we have already provoked. We approach them gently and seductively; and because when a child breaks things he is obviously grieved, and therefore would endeavor to correct and perfect his movements, we spare him this grief, which would be in the nature of "an act of repentance on the part of the muscles which have transgressed," and give him unbreakable objects: plates, basins, and drinking vessels made of metal, toys made of stuff, woolly bears, india-rubber dolls. Henceforth his "errors" will be concealed. Every error of the muscles will pass unnoticed by the child: he will no longer feel the pain of evil-doing, repentance, an effort to perfect himself. He will be able to sink into error; behold him, clumsy, heavy, without expression in his face, a stuffed bear in his arms! He is now bound fast to vanity and error, and has lost all consciousness thereof.

The adult hems him in ever more closely: he does everything for the child, dresses him, even feeds him. But the child's desire is not to be dressed and materially nourished: his deep desire is to "do," to exercise his own powers intelligently, and thus to rise to his higher level. With what subtle insinuations does the adult seek to confound him! You are exerting yourself and why? That you may be washed? That you may put on your pinafore? You can have all this done for you without any effort. You will find it all done with greater perfection and ease. Without moving a finger you shall have a hundred times more done for you than you