more about discipline, with special regard to obedience
i must stop at this point and devote a paragraph or two to laying the ghost of another puritan ancestor who demands, “but where does the discipline come in here, if it is all automatic and unconscious? why sneak exactitude of muscular action into the child’s life by the back door, so to speak? would it not be better for her moral nature to command her outright not to spill the water from her glass at table, and force her to use her will-power by punishing her if she does?”
there are several answers to this searching question, which is by no means so simple and direct as it sounds. the most obvious one is the retort brutal, i.e., that a great many generations have experimented with that simple method of training children, with the result that family life has been considerably embittered and the children very poorly trained. in other words, that practical experience has shown it to be a very bad method indeed and in use only because we know no better one.
one of the reasons why it is bad is because it confuses two radically different activities in the child’s life, including both under one far too-sweeping command.[154] the child’s ability to handle a glass of water is an entirely different function from its willingness to obey orders. to require of its nascent capacities at the same instant a new muscular skill and the moral effort necessary to obey a command is to invite almost certain failure. worse than this, and in fact as bad as anything can be, the result of this impossibly compendious command is to bring about a hopeless confusion in the child’s mind which means unnecessary nervous tension and friction and the beginning of an utterly deplorable mental habit of nervous tension and irritated resistance in the child’s mind, whenever a command is given. that this instinct of irritated resistance is not a natural one is proved by the happily obedient older children in the casa dei bambini in rome. furthermore, anyone who will, under ordinary circumstances, try the simple experiment of asking a little child (too young to have acquired this bad mental habit) to perform some operation which he has thoroughly mastered, will be convinced that obedience in itself involves no pain to a child.
as to the second demand of my puritan ancestor, which runs, “and force her to use her will-power by punishment,” the same flat denial must be given that proposition. experience proves that you can prevent a child from performing some single special action by means of external punishment, but that stimulating the proper use of the will-power is something entirely different. apparently the will-power is more[155] apt to be perverted into grotesque and unprofitable shapes by the use of punishment than to be encouraged into upright, useful, and vigorous growth.
and here it is well to question our own hearts deeply to make sure that we really wish, honestly, without mental reservations, to stimulate the will-power of our children—their will-power, be it remembered, not our own. is there, in the motives which actuate our attempts at securing obedience from children, a trace of the animal-trainer’s instinct? for, though it is true that children are little animals, and that they can be successfully trained by the method of the animal-trainer, it is not to be forgotten that they are trained by those methods only to feats of exactly the same moral and intellectual caliber as those performed by trick dogs and cats. they are forced to struggle blindly, and wholly without aid, towards whatever human achievements they may later accomplish, with the added disadvantage of the mental habit either of sullen dissembled revolt or crushed mental servility, according to their temperaments.
the end and aim of the horse-breaker’s effort is to create an animal who will obey literally, with no volition of his own, any command of any human being. the conscientious parent who faces squarely this ultimate logical conclusion of the animal-trainer’s system, must see that his own aim, being entirely opposed to that, must be attained by very different means; and that, since his final goal is to produce a being wholly and wisely self-governing, the sooner[156] the child can be induced to begin the exercise of the faculty of self-government, the more seasoned in experience it will be when vital things begin to depend on it.
it is highly probable that in the heart of the modern parent of the best type, if there is still some of the animal-trainer’s instinct, he is quite and honestly unconscious of it and would be ashamed of it if he recognized it. i think most of us can say sincerely that we have no conscious wish for anything but the child’s best welfare. but in saying this, we admit at once that our problem is vastly more subtle and complicated than the horse-breaker’s, and that we are in need of every ray of light from any source possible.
the particular, vivifying truth which we must imprint on our minds in this connection is that spontaneity of action is the absolute prerequisite for any moral or intellectual advance on the part of any human being. nor is this, though so constantly insisted upon by dr. montessori, any new invention of hers. dimly felt, it has regulated more or less the best action of the best preachers, the best teachers and lawgivers since the beginning of the world. pestalozzi formulated it in the hard saying, all the more poignant because it came from a man who had devoted himself with such passionate affection to his pupils, “i have found that no man in god’s wide earth is able to help any other man. help must come from the bosom alone.” froebel, in all his general[157] remarks on education, states this principle clearly. finally, it has been crystallized in the homely adage of old wives, “every child’s got to do its own growing.”
we all admit the truth of this theory. what is so startling about dr. montessori’s attitude towards it, is that she really acts upon it! more than that, she expects us to act on it, all the time, in all the multiform crises of our lives as parents, in this intricate problem of discipline and the training of the will-power as well as in the simpler form of physically refraining from interfering with the child’s efforts to feed and dress himself.
and yet it is natural enough that we should find at first sight such general philosophic statements rather vague and remote, and not at all sufficiently reassuring as we stand face to face with the problem of securing obedience from a lively child of three. we may have seen how we overlooked the obvious reason why a child who cannot obey a command will not; and we may be quite convinced that the first step in securing both self-control and obedience from a child is to put the necessary means in his power; and yet we may be still frankly at a loss and deeply apprehensive about what seems the hopeless undertaking of directly securing obedience even after the child has learned how to obey. all that dr. montessori has done for us so far is to call our attention to the fact, which we did not in the least perceive before, that a child is no more born into the world with[158] a full-fledged capacity to obey orders, than to do a sum in arithmetic. but though we agree that we must first teach him his numbers before expecting him to add and subtract, how, we ask ourselves anxiously, can we be in the least sure that he will be willing to use his numbers to do sums with, that he will be willing to utilize his careful preparatory training when it comes to the point of really obeying orders.
at this juncture i can recommend from successful personal experience a courageous abandonment of our traditional attitude of deep distrust towards life, of our medieval conviction that desirable traits can only be hewed painfully out across the grain of human nature. the old monstrous idea which underlay all schooling was that the act of educating himself was fundamentally abhorrent to a child and that he could be forced to do it only by external violence. this was an idea, held by more generations of school-teachers and parents than is at all pleasant to consider, when one reflects that it would have been swept out upon the dump-heap of discarded superstitions by one single, unprejudiced survey of one normal child under normal conditions.
dr. montessori, carrying to its full extent a theory which has been slowly gaining ground in the minds of all modern enlightened teachers, has been the first to have the courage to act without reservation on the strength of her observation that the child prefers learning to any other occupation, since the child is the true representative of our race which does advance,[159] even with such painful slowness, away from ignorance towards knowledge. now, in addition she tells us just as forcibly, that they prefer right, orderly, disciplined behavior to the unregulated disobedience which we slanderously insist is their natural taste. as a result of her scientific and unbiased observation of child-life she informs us that our usual lack of success in handling the problems of obedience comes because, while we do not expect a child at two or three or even four to have mastered completely even the elements of any other of his activities, we do expect him to have mastered all the complex muscular, nervous, mental, and moral elements involved in the act of obedience to a command from outside his own individuality.
she points out that obedience is evidently a deep-rooted instinct in human nature, since society is founded on obedience. indeed, on the whole, history seems to show that the average human being has altogether too much native instinct to obey anyone who will shout out a command; and that the advance from one bad form of government to another only slightly better, is so slow because the mass of grown men are too much given to obeying almost any positive order issued to them. going back to our surprised recognition of the child as an inheritor of human nature in its entirety, we must admit that obedience is almost certainly an instinct latent in children.
the obvious theoretic deduction from this reasoning is, that we need neither persuade nor force a[160] child to obey, but only clear-sightedly remove the various moral and physical obstructions which lie in the way of his obedience, with the confident expectation that his latent instinct will develop spontaneously in the new and favorable conditions.
when we plant a bean in the ground we do not feel that we need to try to force it to grow; indeed, we know very well that we can do nothing whatever about that since it is governed entirely by the presence or absence in the seed of the mysterious element of life; nor do we feel any apprehension about the capacity of that smooth, small seed, ultimately to develop into a vine which will climb up the pole we have set for it, will blossom, and bear fruit. we know that, barring accidents (which it is our business as gardeners to prevent), it cannot do anything else, because that is the nature of beans, and we know all about the nature of beans from a long acquaintance with them.
we would laugh at an ignorant, city-bred person gardening for the first time, who, the instant the two broad cotyledons showed above the ground, began tying strings to them to induce them to climb his pole. our advice to him would be the obvious counsel, “leave them alone until they grow their tendrils. you not only can’t do any good by trying to induce those first primitive leaves to climb, but you may hurt your plant so that it will never develop normally.”
the question seems to be, whether we will have the[161] courage and good sense to take similar sound advice from a more experienced and a wiser child-gardener. dr. montessori not only expounds to us theoretically this doctrine that the child, properly trained, will spontaneously obey reasonable orders suited to his age with a prompt willingness which grows with his growth, but she shows us in the garden of her schools, bean-poles wreathed triumphantly with vines to the very top. or, to drop a perhaps too-elaborated metaphor, she shows us children of three or four who willingly obey suggestions suited to their capacities, developing rapidly and surely into children of six and seven whose obedience in all things is a natural and delightful function of their lives. she not only says to us, “this theory will work in actual practice,” but, “it has worked. look at the result!”
of course the crux of the matter lies in that phrase, “proper training.” it means years of patient, intelligent, faithful effort on the part of the guardian, to clear away from before the child the different obstacles to the free natural growth of this, as of all other desirable instincts of human nature. to give our children this “proper training” it is not enough to have intellectually grasped the theory of the montessori method. with each individual child we have a fresh problem of its application to him. our mother-wits must be sharpened and in constant use. dr. montessori has only compiled a book of recipes, which will not feed our families, unless we exert ourselves, and unless we provide the necessary ingredients[162] of patience, intelligence, good judgment, and devotion.
the prize which seems possible to attain by such efforts makes them, however, worthy of all the time and thought we may possibly put upon them. apparently, judging by the results obtained in the casa dei bambini among italian children, and by miss george in her school for american children, there is no more need for the occasional storms of temper or outbreaks of exasperated egotism which are so familiar to all of us who care for children, than there is for the occasional “fits of indigestion,” “feverishness,” or “teething-sickness” the almost universal absence of which in the lives of our scientifically-reared children so astonishes the older generation.
for the notable success of miss george’s tarrytown school disposes once and for all of the theory that “it may work for italians, but not with our naturally self-indulgent, spoiled american children.” fresh from the casa dei bambini in rome, i visited miss george’s children’s home and, except for the language, would have thought myself again on the via giusti. the same happy, unforced interest in the work, the same montessori atmosphere of spontaneous life, the same utter unconsciousness of visitors, the same astonishing industry.
counting boxes.
copyright 1912, by carl r. byoir
when theoretically by talk and discussion with experts on the subject and practically by the sight of the astonishing results shown in the enlightenment and self-mastery of the older children who had been[163] trained in the system, i was led towards the conviction that children really have not that irresistible tendency towards naughtiness which my puritan blood led me unconsciously to assume, but that their natural tendency is on the whole to prefer to do what is best for them, i felt as though someone had tried to prove to me that the world before my eyes was emancipating itself from the action of some supposedly inexorable natural law.
naturally, being an anglo-saxon, an inhabitant of a cold climate, and the descendant of those troublesome puritan forefathers, who have interfered so much with the composition of this book, i could not, all in a breath, in this dizzying manner lose that firm conviction of original sin which, though no longer insisted upon openly in the teachings of the church, which i no longer attend as assiduously as my parents, still is, i discovered, a very vital element in my conception of life.
no, the doctrine of original sin is in the very marrow of my new england bones, but, as a lover of my kind, i rejoice to be convinced of the smallness of its proportion in relation to other elements of human nature, and i bear witness gladly that i never saw or heard of a single case of wilful naughtiness among all the children in the casa dei bambini in rome. and though i still cling unreasonably to my superstition that there is, at least in some american children, an irreducible minimum of the quality which our country people picturesquely call “the old[164] harry,” i am convinced that there is far, far less of it than i supposed, and i am overcome with retrospective remorse for all the children i have misjudged in the course of my life.
to put it statistically, i would estimate that out of every thousand cases of “naughtiness” among little children, nine hundred and ninety-nine are due to something else than a “bad” impulse in the child’s heart. old-wife wisdom has already reduced by one-half the percentage of infantile wickedness, in its fireside proverb, “give a young one that’s acting bad something to eat and put him to bed. half the time he’s tired or starved and don’t know what ails him.”
it now seems likely that the other half of the time he is either hungry for intellectual food, weary with the artificial stimulation of too much mingling with adult life, or exasperated by perfectly unnecessary insistence on a code of rules which has really nothing to do with the question of right or wrong conduct. when it comes to choosing between really right and really wrong conduct, apparently the majority of the child’s natural instincts are for the really right, as is shown by his real preference for the orderly, educating activity of the children’s home over disorderly “naughtiness.” our business should be to see to it that he is given the choice.
