The Montessori Method
by Maria Montessori · English · Gutenberg #39863 · 723,357 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Montessori Method
Author: Maria Montessori
Author of introduction, etc.: Henry W. Holmes
Translator: Anne E. George
Release date: May 31, 2012 [eBook #39863]
Language: English
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[Illustration: DR. MONTESSORI GIVING A LESSON IN TOUCHING GEOMETRICAL
INSETS]
THE
MONTESSORI METHOD
SCIENTIFIC PEDAGOGY AS APPLIED TO CHILD
EDUCATION IN "THE CHILDREN'S HOUSES"
WITH ADDITIONS AND REVISIONS
BY THE AUTHOR
BY
MARIA MONTESSORI
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY
ANNE E. GEORGE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
PROFESSOR HENRY W. HOLMES
OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
_WITH THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS_
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXII
_Copyright, 1912, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian_
_I place at the beginning of this volume, now appearing in the
United States, her fatherland, the dear name of_
_ALICE HALLGARTEN_
_of New York, who by her marriage to Baron Leopold Franchetti
became by choice our compatriot._
_Ever a firm believer in the principles underlying the Case dei
Bambini, she, with her husband, forwarded the publication of
this book in Italy, and, throughout the last years of her short
life, greatly desired the English translation which should
introduce to the land of her birth the work so near her heart._
_To her memory I dedicate this book, whose pages, like an
ever-living flower, perpetuate the recollection of her
beneficence._
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Mrs. Guy Baring, of London, for
the loan of her manuscript translation of "Pedagogia Scientifica";
to Mrs. John R. Fisher (Dorothy Canfield) for translating a large
part of the new work written by Dr. Montessori for the American
Edition; and to The House of Childhood, Inc., New York, for use
of the illustrations of the didactic apparatus. Dr. Montessori's
patent rights in the apparatus are controlled, for the United
States and Canada, by The House of Childhood, Inc.
THE PUBLISHERS.
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
In February, 1911, Professor Henry W. Holmes, of the Division of
Education of Harvard University, did me the honour to suggest that an
English translation be made of my Italian volume, "_Il Metodo della
Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all' educazione infantile nelle Case dei
Bambini_." This suggestion represented one of the greatest events in the
history of my educational work. To-day, that to which I then looked
forward as an unusual privilege has become an accomplished fact.
The Italian edition of "_Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica_" had no
preface, because the book itself I consider nothing more than the
preface to a more comprehensive work, the aim and extent of which it
only indicates. For the educational method for children of from three to
six years set forth here is but the earnest of a work that, developing
the same principle and method, shall cover in a like manner the
successive stages of education. Moreover, the method which obtains in
the _Case dei Bambini_ offers, it seems to me, an experimental field for
the study of man, and promises, perhaps, the development of a science
that shall disclose other secrets of nature.
In the period that has elapsed between the publication of the Italian
and American editions, I have had, with my pupils, the opportunity to
simplify and render more exact certain practical details of the method,
and to gather additional observations concerning discipline. The results
attest the vitality of the method and the necessity for an extended
scientific collaboration in the near future, and are embodied in two new
chapters written for the American edition. I know that my method has
been widely spoken of in America, thanks to Mr. S. S. McClure, who has
presented it through the pages of his well-known magazine. Indeed, many
Americans have already come to Rome for the purpose of observing
personally the practical application of the method in my little schools.
If, encouraged by this movement, I may express a hope for the future, it
is that my work in Rome shall become the centre of an efficient and
helpful collaboration.
To the Harvard professors who have made my work known in America and to
_McClure's Magazine_, a mere acknowledgment of what I owe them is a
barren response; but it is my hope that the method itself, in its effect
upon the children of America, may prove an adequate expression of my
gratitude.
MARIA MONTESSORI.
ROME, 1912.
CONTENTS
PAGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS V
THE AMERICAN EDITION VII
INTRODUCTION XVII
CHAPTER I
A CRITICAL CONSIDERATION OF THE NEW PEDAGOGY IN ITS RELATION TO
MODERN SCIENCE
Influence of Modern Science upon Pedagogy 1
Italy's part in the development of Scientific Pedagogy 4
Difference between scientific technique and the scientific
spirit 7
Direction of the preparation should be toward the spirit
rather than toward the mechanism 9
The master to study man in the awakening of his intellectual
life 12
Attitude of the teacher in the light of another example 13
The school must permit the free natural manifestations of the
child if in the school Scientific Pedagogy is to be born 15
Stationary desks and chairs proof that the principle of
slavery still informs the school 16
Conquest of liberty, what the school needs 19
What may happen to the spirit 20
Prizes and punishments, the bench of the soul 21
All human victories, all human progress, stand upon the inner
force 24
CHAPTER II
HISTORY OF METHODS
Necessity of establishing the method peculiar to Scientific
Pedagogy 28
Origin of educational system in use in the "Children's
Houses" 31
Practical application of the methods of Itard and Seguin in
the Orthophrenic School at Rome 32
Origin of the methods for the education of deficients 33
Application of the methods in Germany and France 35
Seguin's first didactic material was spiritual 37
Methods for deficients applied to the education of normal
children 42
Social and pedagogic importance of the "Children's Houses" 44
CHAPTER III
INAUGURAL ADDRESS DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE OPENING OF ONE
OF THE "CHILDREN'S HOUSES"
The Quarter of San Lorenzo before and since the establishment
of the "Children's Houses" 48
Evil of subletting the most cruel form of usury 50
The problem of life more profound than that of the
intellectual elevation of the poor 52
Isolation of the masses of the poor, unknown to past
centuries 53
Work of the Roman Association of Good Building and the moral
importance of their reforms 56
The "Children's House" earned by the parents through their
care of the building 60
Pedagogical organization of the "Children's House" 62
The "Children's House" the first step toward the socialisation
of the house 65
The communised house in its relation to the home and to the
spiritual evolution of women 66
Rules and regulations of the "Children's Houses" 70
CHAPTER IV
PEDAGOGICAL METHODS USED IN THE "CHILDREN'S HOUSES"
Child psychology can be established only through the method of
external observation 72
Anthropological consideration 73
Anthropological notes 77
Environment and schoolroom furnishings 80
CHAPTER V
DISCIPLINE
Discipline through liberty 86
Independence 95
Abolition of prizes and external forms of punishment 101
Biological concept of liberty in pedagogy 104
CHAPTER VI
HOW THE LESSON SHOULD BE GIVEN
Characteristics of the individual lessons 107
Method of observation the fundamental guide 108
Difference between the scientific and unscientific methods
illustrated 109
First task of educators to stimulate life, leaving it then
free to develop 115
CHAPTER VII
EXERCISES OF PRACTICAL LIFE
Suggested schedule for the "Children's Houses" 119
The child must be prepared for the forms of social life and
his attention attracted to these forms 121
Cleanliness, order, poise, conversation 122
CHAPTER VIII
REFECTION--THE CHILD'S DIET
Diet must be adapted to the child's physical nature 125
Foods and their preparation 126
Drinks 132
Distribution of meals 133
CHAPTER IX
MUSCULAR EDUCATION--GYMNASTICS
Generally accepted idea of gymnastics is inadequate 137
The special gymnastics necessary for little children 138
Other pieces of gymnastic apparatus 141
Free gymnastics 144
Educational gymnastics 144
Respiratory gymnastics, and labial, dental, and lingual
gymnastics 147
CHAPTER X
NATURE IN EDUCATION--AGRICULTURAL LABOUR: CULTURE OF PLANTS
AND ANIMALS
The savage of the Aveyron 149
Itard's educative drama repented in the education of little
children 153
Gardening and horticulture basis of a method for education
of children 155
The child initiated into observation of the phenomena of life
and into foresight by way of auto-education 156
Children are initiated into the virtue of patience and into
confident expectation, and are inspired with a feeling for
nature 159
The child follows the natural way of development of the human
race 160
CHAPTER XI
MANUAL LABOUR--THE POTTER'S ART, AND BUILDING
Difference between manual labour and manual gymnastics 162
The School of Educative Art 163
Archaeological, historical, and artistic importance of the
vase 164
Manufacture of diminutive bricks and construction of
diminutive walls and houses 165
CHAPTER XII
EDUCATION OF THE SENSES
Aim of education to develop the energies 168
Difference in the reaction between deficient and normal
children in the presentation of didactic material made up
of graded stimuli 169
Education of the senses has as its aim the refinement of
the differential perception of stimuli by means of repeated
exercises 173
Three Periods of Seguin 177
CHAPTER XIII
EDUCATION OF THE SENSES AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE DIDACTIC
MATERIAL: GENERAL SENSIBILITY: THE TACTILE, THERMIC, BARIC
AND STEREOGNOSTIC SENSES
Education of the tactile, thermic and baric senses 185
Education of the stereognostic sense 188
Education of the senses of taste and smell 190
Education of the sense of vision 191
Exercises with the three series of cards 199
Education of the chromatic sense 200
Exercise for the discrimination of sounds 203
Musical education 206
Tests for acuteness of hearing 209
A lesson in silence 212
CHAPTER XIV
GENERAL NOTES ON THE EDUCATION OF THE SENSES
Aim in education biological and social 215
Education of the senses makes men observers and prepares them
directly for practical life 218
CHAPTER XV
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION
Sense exercises a species of auto-education 224
Importance of an exact nomenclature, and how to teach it 225
Spontaneous progress of the child the greatest triumph of
Scientific Pedagogy 228
Games of the blind 231
Application of the visual sense to the observation of
environment 232
Method of using didactic material: dimensions, form,
design 233
Free plastic work 241
Geometric analysis of figures 243
Exercises in the chromatic sense 244
CHAPTER XVI
METHOD FOR THE TEACHING OF READING AND WRITING
Spontaneous development of graphic language: Seguin and
Itard 246
Necessity of a special education that shall fit man for
objective observation and direct logical thought 252
Results of objective observation and logical thought 253
Not necessary to begin teaching writing with vertical
strokes 257
Spontaneous drawing of normal children 258
Use of Froebel mats in teaching children sewing 260
Children should be taught how before they are made to execute
a task 261
Two diverse forms of movement made in writing 262
Experiments with normal children 267
Origin of alphabets in present use 269
CHAPTER XVII
DESCRIPTION OF THE METHOD AND DIDACTIC MATERIAL USED
Exercise tending to develop the muscular mechanism necessary
in holding and using the instrument in writing 271
Didactic material for writing 271
Exercise tending to establish the visual-muscular image of
the alphabetical signs, and to establish the muscular memory
of the movements necessary to writing 275
Exercises for the composition of words 281
Reading, the interpretation of an idea from written signs 296
Games for the reading of words 299
Games for the reading of phrases 303
Point education has reached in the "Children's Houses" 307
CHAPTER XVIII
LANGUAGE OF CHILDHOOD
Physiological importance of graphic language 310
Two periods in the development of language 312
Analysis of speech necessary 319
Defects of language due to education 322
CHAPTER XIX
TEACHING OF NUMERATION: INTRODUCTION TO ARITHMETIC
Numbers as represented by graphic signs 328
Exercises for the memory of numbers 330
Addition and subtraction from one to twenty: multiplication
and division 332
Lessons on decimals: arithmetical calculations beyond ten 335
CHAPTER XX
SEQUENCE OF EXERCISES
Sequence and grades in the presentation of material and in
the exercises 338
First grade 338
Second grade 339
Third grade 342
Fourth grade 343
Fifth grade 345
CHAPTER XXI
GENERAL REVIEW OF DISCIPLINE
Discipline better than in ordinary schools 346
First dawning of discipline comes through work 350
Orderly action is the true rest for muscles intended by nature
for action 354
The exercise that develops life consists in the repetition,
not in the mere grasp of the idea 358
Aim of repetition that the child shall refine his senses
through the exercise of attention, of comparison, of judgment 360
Obedience is naturally sacrifice 363
Obedience develops will-power and the capacity to perform the
act it becomes necessary to obey 367
CHAPTER XXII
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPRESSIONS
The teacher has become the director of spontaneous work in
the "Children's Houses" 371
The problems of religious education should be solved by
positive pedagogy 372
Spiritual influence of the "Children's Houses" 376
ILLUSTRATIONS
Dr. Montessori giving a lesson in touching geometrical
insets _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Dr. Montessori in the garden of the school at Via Giusti 144
Children learning to button and lace. Ribbon and button frames 145
Children playing a game with tablets of coloured silk 186
Girl touching a letter and boy telling objects by weight 187
Pupils arranging colours in chromatic order 187
Didactic apparatus to teach differentiation of objects 190
Blocks by which children are taught thickness, length and size 191
Geometric insets to teach form 194
Geometric insets and cabinet 195
Cards used in teaching form and contour 196
Frames illustrating lacing; shoe buttoning; buttoning
of other garments; hooks and eyes 200
Tablets with silk, for educating the chromatic sense 201
Didactic apparatus for training the sense of touch,
and for teaching writing 282
Children touching letters and making words with cardboard
script 283
Montessori children eating dinner 348
School at Tarrytown, N. Y. 349
INTRODUCTION
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 Seguin,
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
Seguin'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 aesthetic, 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 regime 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 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 fascinating 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.
It is quite possible that the real pedagogical value of the Montessori
apparatus is due to the fact that it keeps children happily engaged in
the exercise of their senses and their fingers when they crave such
exercise most and to the further fact that it teaches them without the
least strain a good deal about forms and materials. These values are not
likely to be much affected by differing school conditions.
In the use of the material for sense-training, English and American
teachers may find profit in two general warnings. First, it should not
be supposed that sense training alone will accomplish all that Dr.
Montessori accomplishes through the whole range of her school
activities. To fill up most of a morning with sense-training is to give
it (except perhaps in the case of the youngest pupils) undue importance.
It is not even certain that the general use of the senses will be much
affected by it, to say nothing of the loss of opportunity for larger
physical and social activity. Second, the isolation of the senses should
be used with some care. To shut off sight is to take one step toward
sleep, and the requirement that a child concentrate his attention, in
this situation, on the sense perceptions he gets by other means than
vision must not be maintained too long. No small strain is involved in
mental action without the usual means of information and control.
The proposal, mentioned above, of a feasible combination of the
Montessori system and the kindergarten may now be set forth. If it is
put very briefly and without defense or prophecy, it is because it is
made without dogmatism, simply in the hope that it will prove suggestive
to some open-minded teacher who is willing to try out any scheme that
promises well for her pupils. The conditions supposed are those of the
ordinary American public-school kindergarten, with a two-year programme
beginning with children three and a half or four years old, a
kindergarten with not too many pupils, with a competent kindergartner
and assistant kindergartner, and with some help from training-school
students.
The first proposal is for the use of the Montessori material during the
better part of the first year instead of the regular Froebelian
material. To the use of the Montessori devices--including the gymnastic
apparatus--some of the time now devoted to pictures and stories should
also be applied. It is not suggested that no Froebelian material should
be used, but that the two systems be woven into each other, with a
gradual transition from the free, individual use of the Montessori
objects to the same sort of use of the large sizes of the Froebel gifts,
especially the second, third, and fourth. When the children seem to be
ready for it, a certain amount of more formal work with the gifts should
be begun. In the second year the Froebelian gift work should
predominate, without absolute exclusion of the Montessori exercises. In
the latter part of the second year the Montessori exercises preparatory
to writing should be introduced. Throughout the second year the full
time for stories and picture work should be given to them, and in both
years the morning circle and the games should be carried on as usual.
The luncheon period should of course remain the same. One part of Dr.
Montessori's programme the kindergartner and her assistant should use
every effort to incorporate in their work--the valuable training in
self-help and independent action afforded in the care of the materials
and equipment by the children themselves. This need not be confined to
the Montessori apparatus. Children who have been trained to take out,
use, and put away the Montessori objects until they are ready for the
far richer variety of material in the Froebelian system, should be able
to care for it also. Of course if there are children who can return in
the afternoon, it would be very interesting to attempt the gardening,
which both Froebel and Montessori recommend, and the Montessori
vase-work.
For the possible scorn of those to whom all compromise is distasteful,
the author of this Introduction seeks but one compensation--that any
kindergartner who may happen to adopt his suggestion will let him study
the results.
As to the use of the Montessori system in the home, one or two remarks
must suffice. In the first place, parents should not expect that the
mere presence of the material in the nursery will be enough to work an
educational miracle. A Montessori directress does no common "teaching,"
but she is called upon for very skillful and very tiring effort. She
must watch, assist, inspire, suggest, guide, explain, correct, inhibit.
She is supposed, in addition, to contribute by her work to the
upbuilding of a new science of pedagogy; but her educational
efforts--and education is not an investigative and experimental effort,
but a practical and constructive one--are enough to exhaust all her
time, strength, and ingenuity. It will do no harm--except perhaps to the
material itself--to have the Montessori material at hand in the home,
but it must be used under proper guidance if it is to be educationally
effective. And besides, it must not be forgotten that the material is by
no means the most important feature of the Montessori programme. The
best use of the Montessori system in the home will come through the
reading of this book. If parents shall learn from Dr. Montessori
something of the value of child life, of its need for activity, of its
characteristic modes of expression, and of its possibilities, and shall
apply this knowledge wisely, the work of the great Italian educator will
be successful enough.
This Introduction cannot close without some discussion, however limited,
of the important problems suggested by the Montessori method of teaching
children to write and to read. We have in American schools admirable
methods for the teaching of reading; by the Aldine method, for instance,
children of fair ability read without difficulty ten or more readers in
the first school year, and advance rapidly toward independent power. Our
instruction in writing, however, has never been particularly noteworthy.
We have been trying recently to teach children to write a flowing hand
by the "arm movement," without much formation of separate letters by the
fingers, and our results seem to prove that the effort with children
before the age of ten is not worth while. Sensible school officers are
content to let children in the first four grades write largely by
drawing the letters, and there has been, a fairly general conviction
that writing is not in any case especially important before the age of
eight or nine. In view of Dr. Montessori's success in teaching children
of four and five to write with ease and skill, must we not revise our
estimate of the value of writing and our procedure in teaching it? What
changes may we profitably introduce in our teaching of reading?
Here again our theory and our practice have suffered from the headstrong
advocacy of general principles. Because by clumsy methods children used
to be kept at the task of learning the school arts to the undoubted
detriment of their minds and bodies, certain writers have advocated the
total exclusion of reading and writing from the early grades. Many
parents refuse to send their children to school until they are eight,
preferring to let them "run wild." This attitude is well justified by
school conditions in some places; but where the schools are good, it
ignores not only the obvious advantages of school life quite aside from
instruction in written language, but also the almost complete absence of
strain afforded by modern methods. Now that the Montessori system adds a
new and promising method to our resources, it is the more unreasonable:
for as a fact normal children are eager to read and write at six, and
have plenty of use for these accomplishments.
This does not mean, however, that reading and writing are so important
for young children that they should be unduly emphasised. If we can
teach them without strain, let us do so, and the more effectively the
better; but let us remember, as Dr. Montessori does, that reading and
writing should form but a subordinate part of the experience of a child
and should minister in general to his other needs. With the best of
methods the value of reading and writing before six is questionable. Our
conscious life is bookish enough as it is, and it would seem on general
grounds a safer policy to defer written language until the age of normal
interest in it, and even then not to devote to it more time than an easy
and gradual mastery demands.
Of the technical advantages of the Montessori scheme for writing there
can be little doubt. The child gains ready control over his pencil
through exercises which have their own simple but absorbing interest;
and if he does not learn to write with an "arm movement," we may be
quite content with his ability to draw a legible and handsome script.
Then he learns the letters--their forms, their names, and how to make
them--through exercises which have the very important technical
characteristic of involving a _thorough sensory analysis_ of the
material to be mastered. Meumann has taught us of late the great value
in all memory work of complete impression through prolonged and
intensive analytical study. In the teaching of spelling, for instance,
it is comparatively useless to devise schemes for remembering unless the
original impressions are made strong and elaborate; and it is only by
careful, varied, and detailed sense impression that such material as the
alphabet can be thus impressed. So effective is the Montessori scheme
for impressing the letters--especially because of its novel use of the
sense of touch--that the children learn how to make the whole alphabet
before the abstract and formal character of the material leads to any
diminution of interest or enthusiasm. Their initial curiosity over the
characters they see their elders use is enough to carry them through.
In Italian the next step is easy. The letters once learned, it is a
simple matter to combine them into words, for Italian spelling is so
nearly phonetic that it presents very little difficulty to any one who
knows how to pronounce. It is at just this point that the teaching of
English reading by the Montessori method will find its greatest
obstacle. Indeed, it is the unphonetic character of English spelling
that has largely influenced us to give up the alphabet method of
teaching children to read. Other reasons, to be sure, have also induced
us to teach by the word and the sentence method; but this one has been
and will continue to be the deciding factor. We have found it more
effective to teach children whole words, sentences, or rhymes by sight,
adding to sense impressions the interest aroused by a wide range of
associations, and then analysing the words thus acquired into their
phonetic elements to give the children independent power in the
acquisition of new words. Our marked success with this method makes it
by no means certain that it is "in the characteristic process of natural
development" for children to build up written words from their
elements--sounds and syllables. It would seem, on the contrary, as James
concluded, that the mind works quite as naturally in the opposite
direction--grasping wholes first, especially such as have a practical
interest, and then working down to their formal elements. In the
teaching of spelling, of course, the wholes (words) are already known at
sight--that is, the pupil recognises them easily in reading--and the
process aims at impressing upon the child's mind the exact order of
their constituent elements. It is because reading and spelling are in
English such completely separate processes that we can teach a child to
read admirably without making him a "good speller" and are forced to
bring him to the latter glorious state by new endeavours. We gain by
this separation both in reading and in spelling, as experience and
comparative tests--popular superstition to the contrary
notwithstanding--have conclusively proved. The mastery of the alphabet
by the Montessori method will be of great assistance in teaching our
children to write, but of only incidental assistance in teaching them to
read and to spell.
Once more, then, this Introduction attempts to suggest a compromise. In
the school arts the programme used to such good effect in the Italian
schools and the programme which has been so well worked out in English
and American schools may be profitably combined. We can learn much about
writing and reading from Dr. Montessori--especially from the freedom her
children have in the process of learning to write and in the use of
their newly acquired power, as well as from her device for teaching them
to read connected prose. We can use her materials for sense training and
lead as she does to easy mastery of the alphabetic symbols. Our own
schemes for teaching reading we can retain, and doubtless the phonetic
analysis they involve we shall find easier and more effective because of
our adoption of the Montessori scheme for teaching the letters. The
exact adjustment of the two methods is of course a task for teachers in
practice and for educational leaders.
To all educators this book should prove most interesting. Not many of
them will expect that the Montessori method will regenerate humanity.
Not many will wish to see it--or any method--produce a generation of
prodigies such as those who have been heralded recently in America. Not
many will approve the very early acquisition by children of the arts of
reading and writing. But all who are fair-minded will admit the genius
that shines from the pages which follow, and the remarkable
suggestiveness of Dr. Montessori's labors. It is the task of the
professional student of education to-day to submit all systems to
careful comparative study, and since Dr. Montessori's inventive power
has sought its tests in practical experience rather than in comparative
investigation, this duller task remains to be done. But however he may
scrutinise the results of her work, the educator who reads of it here
will honour in the Dottoressa Maria Montessori the enthusiasm, the
patience, and the constructive insight of the scientist and the friend
of humanity.
HENRY W. HOLMES.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
February 22, 1912.
THE MONTESSORI METHOD
CHAPTER I
A CRITICAL CONSIDERATION OF THE NEW PEDAGOGY IN ITS RELATION TO MODERN
SCIENCE
It is not my intention to present a treatise on Scientific Pedagogy. The
modest design of these incomplete notes is to give the results of an
experiment that apparently opens the way for putting into practice those
new principles of science which in these last years are tending to
revolutionise the work of education.
Much has been said in the past decade concerning the tendency of
pedagogy, following in the footsteps of medicine, to pass beyond the
purely speculative stage and base its conclusions on the positive
results of experimentation. Physiological or experimental psychology
which, from Weber and Fechner to Wundt, has become organised into a new
science, seems destined to furnish to the new pedagogy that fundamental
preparation which the old-time metaphysical psychology furnished to
philosophical pedagogy. Morphological anthropology applied to the
physical study of children, is also a strong element in the growth of
the new pedagogy.
But in spite of all these tendencies, Scientific Pedagogy has never yet
been definitely constructed nor defined. It is something vague of which
we speak, but which does not, in reality, exist. We might say that it
has been, up to the present time, the mere intuition or suggestion of a
science which, by the aid of the positive and experimental sciences that
have renewed the thought of the nineteenth century, must emerge from the
mist and clouds that have surrounded it. For man, who has formed a new
world through scientific progress, must himself be prepared and
developed through a new pedagogy. But I will not attempt to speak of
this more fully here.
Several years ago, a well-known physician established in Italy a _School
of Scientific Pedagogy_, the object of which was to prepare teachers to
follow the new movement which had begun to be felt in the pedagogical
world. This school had, for two or three years, a great success, so
great, indeed, that teachers from all over Italy flocked to it, and it
was endowed by the City of Milan with a splendid equipment of scientific
material. Indeed, its beginnings were most propitious, and liberal help
was afforded it in the hope that it might be possible to establish,
through the experiments carried on there, "the science of forming man."
The enthusiasm which welcomed this school was, in a large measure, due
to the warm support given it by the distinguished anthropologist,
Giuseppe Sergi, who for more than thirty years had earnestly laboured to
spread among the teachers of Italy the principles of a new civilisation
based upon education. "To-day in the social world," said Sergi, "an
imperative need makes itself felt--the reconstruction of educational
methods; and he who fights for this cause, fights for human
regeneration." In his pedagogical writings collected in a volume under
the title of "_Educazione ed Istruzione_" (Pensieri),[1] he gives a
resume of the lectures in which he encouraged this new movement, and
says that he believes the way to this desired regeneration lies in a
methodical study of the one to be educated, carried on under the
guidance of pedagogical anthropology and of experimental psychology.
[1] Trevisini, 1892.
"For several years I have done battle for an idea concerning the
instruction and education of man, which appeared the more just and
useful the more deeply I thought upon it. My idea was that in order to
establish natural, rational methods, it was essential that we make
numerous, exact, and rational observations of man as an individual,
principally during infancy, which is the age at which the foundations of
education and culture must be laid.
"To measure the head, the height, etc., does not indeed mean that we are
establishing a system of pedagogy, but it indicates the road which we
may follow to arrive at such a system, since if we are to educate an
individual, we must have a definite and direct knowledge of him."
The authority of Sergi was enough to convince many that, given such a
knowledge of the individual, the art of educating him would develop
naturally. This, as often happens, led to a confusion of ideas among his
followers, arising now from a too literal interpretation, now from an
exaggeration, of the master's ideas. The chief trouble lay in confusing
the experimental study of the pupil, with his education. And since the
one was the road leading to the other, which should have grown from it
naturally and rationally, they straightway gave the name of Scientific
Pedagogy to what was in truth pedagogical anthropology. These new
converts carried as their banner, the "Biographical Chart," believing
that once this ensign was firmly planted upon the battle-field of the
school, the victory would be won.
The so-called School of Scientific Pedagogy, therefore, instructed the
teachers in the taking of anthropometric measurements, in the use of
esthesiometric instruments, in the gathering of Psychological Data--and
the army of new scientific teachers was formed.
It should be said that in this movement Italy showed herself to be
abreast of the times. In France, in England, and especially in America,
experiments have been made in the elementary schools, based upon a study
of anthropology and psychological pedagogy, in the hope of finding in
anthropometry and psychometry, the regeneration of the school. In these
attempts it has rarely been the _teachers_ who have carried on the
research; the experiments have been, in most cases, in the hands of
physicians who have taken more interest in their especial science than
in education. They have usually sought to get from their experiments
some contribution to psychology, or anthropology, rather than to attempt
to organise their work and their results toward the formation of the
long-sought Scientific Pedagogy. To sum up the situation briefly,
anthropology and psychology have never devoted themselves to the
question of educating children in the schools, nor have the
scientifically trained teachers ever measured up to the standards of
genuine scientists.
The truth is that the practical progress of the school demands a genuine
_fusion_ of these modern tendencies, in practice and thought; such a
fusion as shall bring scientists directly into the important field of
the school and at the same time raise teachers from the inferior
intellectual level to which they are limited to-day. Toward this
eminently practical ideal the University School of Pedagogy, founded in
Italy by Credaro, is definitely working. It is the intention of this
school to raise Pedagogy from the inferior position it has occupied as a
secondary branch of philosophy, to the dignity of a definite science,
which shall, as does Medicine, cover a broad and varied field of
comparative study.
And among the branches affiliated with it will most certainly be found
Pedagogical Hygiene, Pedagogical Anthropology, and Experimental
Psychology.
Truly, Italy, the country of Lombroso, of De-Giovanni, and of Sergi, may
claim the honour of being pre-eminent in the organisation of such a
movement. In fact, these three scientists may be called the founders of
the new tendency in Anthropology: the first leading the way in criminal
anthropology, the second in medical anthropology, and the third in
pedagogical anthropology. For the good fortune of science, all three of
them have been the recognised leaders of their special lines of thought,
and have been so prominent in the scientific world that they have not
only made courageous and valuable disciples, but have also prepared the
minds of the masses to receive the scientific regeneration which they
have encouraged. (For reference, see my treatise "Pedagogical
Anthropology.")[2]
[2] Montessori: "L'Antropologia Pedagogica." Vallardi.
Surely all this is something of which our country may be justly proud.
To-day, however, those things which occupy us in the field of education
are the interests of humanity at large, and of civilisation, and before
such great forces we can recognise only one country--the entire world.
And in a cause of such great importance, all those who have given any
contribution, even though it be only an attempt not crowned with
success, are worthy of the respect of humanity throughout the civilised
world. So, in Italy, the schools of Scientific Pedagogy and the
Anthropological Laboratories, which have sprung up in the various cities
through the efforts of elementary teachers and scholarly inspectors, and
which have been abandoned almost before they became definitely
organised, have nevertheless a great value by reason of the faith which
inspired them, and because of the doors they have opened to thinking
people.
It is needless to say that such attempts were premature and sprang from
too slight a comprehension of new sciences still in the process of
development. Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from
imperfect achievements. When St. Francis of Assisi saw his Lord in a
vision, and received from the Divine lips the command--"Francis, rebuild
my Church!"--he believed that the Master spoke of the little church
within which he knelt at that moment. And he immediately set about the
task, carrying upon his shoulders the stones with which he meant to
rebuild the fallen walls. It was not until later that he became aware of
the fact that his mission was to renew the Catholic Church through the
spirit of poverty. But the St. Francis who so ingenuously carried the
stones, and the great reformer who so miraculously led the people to a
triumph of the spirit, are one and the same person in different stages
of development. So we, who work toward one great end, are members of one
and the same body; and those who come after us will reach the goal only
because there were those who believed and laboured before them. And,
like St. Francis, we have believed that by carrying the hard and barren
stones of the experimental laboratory to the old and crumbling walls of
the school, we might rebuild it. We have looked upon the aids offered by
the materialistic and mechanical sciences with the same hopefulness with
which St. Francis looked upon the squares of granite, which he must
carry upon his shoulders.
Thus we have been drawn into a false and narrow way, from which we must
free ourselves, if we are to establish true and living methods for the
training of future generations.
To prepare teachers in the method of the experimental sciences is not an
easy matter. When we shall have instructed them in anthropometry and
psychometry in the most minute manner possible, we shall have only
created machines, whose usefulness will be most doubtful. Indeed, if it
is after this fashion that we are to initiate our teachers into
experiment, we shall remain forever in the field of theory. The teachers
of the old school, prepared according to the principles of metaphysical
philosophy, understood the ideas of certain men regarded as authorities,
and moved the muscles of speech in talking of them, and the muscles of
the eye in reading their theories. Our scientific teachers, instead, are
familiar with certain instruments and know how to move the muscles of
the hand and arm in order to use these instruments; besides this, they
have an intellectual preparation which consists of a series of typical
tests, which they have, in a barren and mechanical way, learned how to
apply.
The difference is not substantial, for profound differences cannot exist
in exterior technique alone, but lie rather within the inner man. Not
with all our initiation into scientific experiment have we prepared _new
masters_, for, after all, we have left them standing without the door
of real experimental science; we have not admitted them to the noblest
and most profound phase of such study,--to that experience which makes
real scientists.
And, indeed, what is a scientist? Not, certainly, he who knows how to
manipulate all the instruments in the physical laboratory, or who in the
laboratory of the chemist handles the various reactives with deftness
and security, or who in biology knows how to make ready the specimens
for the microscope. Indeed, it is often the case that an assistant has a
greater dexterity in experimental technique than the master scientist
himself. We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt
experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of
life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this
pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature,
so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself. The scientist is
not the clever manipulator of instruments, he is the worshipper of
nature and he bears the external symbols of his passion as does the
follower of some religious order. To this body of real scientists belong
those who, forgetting, like the Trappists of the Middle Ages, the world
about them, live only in the laboratory, careless often in matters of
food and dress because they no longer think of themselves; those who,
through years of unwearied use of the microscope, become blind; those
who in their scientific ardour inoculate themselves with tuberculosis
germs; those who handle the excrement of cholera patients in their
eagerness to learn the vehicle through which the diseases are
transmitted; and those who, knowing that a certain chemical preparation
may be an explosive, still persist in testing their theories at the risk
of their lives. This is the spirit of the men of science, to whom
nature freely reveals her secrets, crowning their labours with the glory
of discovery.
There exists, then, the "spirit" of the scientist, a thing far above his
mere "mechanical skill," and the scientist is at the height of his
achievement when the spirit has triumphed over the mechanism. When he
has reached this point, science will receive from him not only new
revelations of nature, but philosophic syntheses of pure thought.
It is my belief that the thing which we should cultivate in our teachers
is more the _spirit_ than the mechanical skill of the scientist; that
is, the _direction_ of the _preparation_ should be toward the spirit
rather than toward the mechanism. For example, when we considered the
scientific preparation of teachers to be simply the acquiring of the
technique of science, we did not attempt to make these elementary
teachers perfect anthropologists, expert experimental psychologists, or
masters of infant hygiene; we wished only to _direct them_ toward the
field of experimental science, teaching them to manage the various
instruments with a certain degree of skill. So now, we wish to _direct_
the teacher, trying to awaken in him, in connection with his own
particular field, the school, that scientific _spirit_ which opens the
door for him to broader and bigger possibilities. In other words, we
wish to awaken in the mind and heart of the educator an _interest in
natural phenomena_ to such an extent that, loving nature, he shall
understand the anxious and expectant attitude of one who has prepared an
experiment and who awaits a revelation from it.[3]
[3] See in my treatise on Pedagogical Anthropology the chapter
on "The Method Used In Experimental Sciences."
The instruments are like the alphabet, and we must know how to manage
them if we are to read nature; but as the book, which contains the
revelation of the greatest thoughts of an author, uses in the alphabet
the means of composing the external symbols or words, so nature, through
the mechanism of the experiment, gives us an infinite series of
revelations, unfolding for us her secrets.
Now one who has learned to spell mechanically all the words in his
spelling-book, would be able to read in the same mechanical way the
words in one of Shakespeare's plays, provided the print were
sufficiently clear. He who is initiated solely into the making of the
bare experiment, is like one who spells out the literal sense of the
words in the spelling-book; it is on such a level that we leave the
teachers if we limit their preparation to technique alone.
We must, instead, make of them worshippers and interpreters of the
spirit of nature. They must be like him who, having learned to spell,
finds himself, one day, able to read behind the written symbols the
_thought_ of Shakespeare, or Goethe, or Dante. As may be seen, the
difference is great, and the road long. Our first error was, however, a
natural one. The child who has mastered the spelling-book gives the
impression of knowing how to read. Indeed, he does read the signs over
the shop doors, the names of newspapers, and every word that comes under
his eyes. It would be very natural if, entering a library, this child
should be deluded into thinking that he knew how to read the sense of
all the books he saw there. But attempting to do this, he would soon
feel that "to know how to read mechanically" is nothing, and that he
needs to go back to school. So it is with the teachers whom we have
thought to prepare for scientific pedagogy by teaching them
anthropometry and psychometry.
But let us put aside the difficulty of preparing scientific masters in
the accepted sense of the word. We will not even attempt to outline a
programme of such preparation, since this would lead us into a
discussion which has no place here. Let us suppose, instead, that we
have already prepared teachers through long and patient exercises for
the _observation_ of _nature_, and that we have led them, for example,
to the point attained by those students of natural sciences who rise at
night and go into the woods and fields that they may surprise the
awakening and the early activities of some family of insects in which
they are interested. Here we have the scientist who, though he may be
sleepy and tired with walking, is full of watchfulness, who is not aware
that he is muddy or dusty, that the mist wets him, or the sun burns him;
but is intent only upon not revealing in the least degree his presence,
in order that the insects may, hour after hour, carry on peacefully
those natural functions which he wishes to observe. Let us suppose these
teachers to have reached the standpoint of the scientist who, half
blind, still watches through his microscope the spontaneous movements of
some particular infusory animalcule. These creatures seem to this
scientific watcher, in their manner of avoiding each other and in their
way of selecting their food, to possess a dim intelligence. He then
disturbs this sluggish life by an electric stimulus, observing how some
group themselves about the positive pole, and others about the negative.
Experimenting further, with a luminous stimulus, he notices how some run
toward the light, while others fly from it. He investigates these and
like phenomena; having always in mind this question: whether the fleeing
from or running to the stimulus be of the same character as the
avoidance of one another or the selection of food--that is, whether such
differences are the result of choice and are due to that dim
consciousness, rather than to physical attraction or repulsion similar
to that of the magnet. And let us suppose that this scientist, finding
it to be four o'clock in the afternoon, and that he has not yet lunched,
is conscious, with a feeling of pleasure, of the fact that he has been
at work in his laboratory instead of in his own home, where they would
have called him hours ago, interrupting his interesting observation, in
order that he might eat.
Let us imagine, I say, that the teacher has arrived, independently of
his scientific training, at such an attitude of interest in the
observation of natural phenomena. Very well, but such a preparation is
not enough. The master, indeed, is destined in his particular mission
not to the observation of insects or of bacteria, but of man. He is not
to make a study of man in the manifestations of his daily physical
habits as one studies some family of insects, following their movements
from the hour of _their morning awakening_. _The master is to study man
in_ the awakening of his intellectual life.
The interest in humanity to which we wish to educate the teacher must be
characterised by the intimate relationship between the observer and the
individual to be observed; a relationship which does not exist between
the student of zoology or botany and that form of nature which he
studies. Man cannot love the insect or the chemical reaction which he
studies, without sacrificing a part of himself. This self-sacrifice
seems to one who looks at it from the standpoint of the world, a
veritable renunciation of life itself, almost a martyrdom.
But the love of man for man in a far more tender thing, and so simple
that it is universal. To love in this way is not the privilege of any
especially prepared intellectual class, but lies within the reach of all
men.
To give an idea of this second form of preparation, that of the spirit,
let us try to enter into the minds and hearts of those first followers
of Christ Jesus as they heard Him speak of a Kingdom not of this world,
greater far than any earthly kingdom, no matter how royally conceived.
In their simplicity they asked of Him, "Master, tell us who shall be
greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven!" To which Christ, caressing the head
of a little child who, with reverent, wondering eyes, looked into His
face, replied, "Whosoever shall become as one of these little ones, he
shall be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven." Now let us picture among
those to whom these words were spoken, an ardent, worshipping soul, who
takes them into his heart. With a mixture of respect and love, of sacred
curiosity and of a desire to achieve this spiritual greatness, he sets
himself to observe every manifestation of this little child. Even such
an observer placed in a classroom filled with little children will not
be the new educator whom we wish to form. But let us seek to implant in
the soul the self-sacrificing spirit of the scientist with the reverent
love of the disciple of Christ, and we shall have prepared the _spirit_
of the teacher. From the child itself he will learn how to perfect
himself as an educator.
Let us consider the attitude of the teacher in the light of another
example. Picture to yourself one of our botanists or zoologists
experienced in the technique of observation and experimentation; one who
has travelled in order to study "certain fungi" in their native
environment. This scientist has made his observations in open country
and, then, by the aid of his microscope and of all his laboratory
appliances, has carried on the later research work in the most minute
way possible. He is, in fact, a scientist who understands what it is to
study nature, and who is conversant with all the means which modern
experimental science offers for this study.
Now let us imagine such a man appointed, by reason of the original work
he has done, to a chair of science in some university, with the task
before him of doing further original research work with hymenoptera. Let
us suppose that, arrived at his post, he is shown a glass-covered case
containing a number of beautiful butterflies, mounted by means of pins,
their outspread wings motionless. The student will say that this is some
child's play, not material for scientific study, that these specimens in
the box are more fitly a part of the game which the little boys play,
chasing butterflies and catching them in a net. With such material as
this the experimental scientist can do nothing.
The situation would be very much the same if we should place a teacher
who, according to our conception of the term, is scientifically
prepared, in one of the public schools where the children are repressed
in the spontaneous expression of their personality till they are almost
like dead beings. In such a school the children, like butterflies
mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place, the desk, spreading the
useless wings of barren and meaningless knowledge which they have
acquired.
It is not enough, then, to prepare in our Masters the scientific spirit.
We must also make ready the _school_ for their observation. The school
must permit the _free_, _natural manifestations_ of the _child_ if in
the school scientific pedagogy is to be born. This is the essential
reform.
No one may affirm that such a principle already exists in pedagogy and
in the school. It is true that some pedagogues, led by Rousseau, have
given voice to impracticable principles and vague aspirations for the
liberty of the child, but the true concept of liberty is practically
unknown to educators. They often have the same concept of liberty which
animates a people in the hour of rebellion from slavery, or perhaps, the
conception of _social liberty_, which although it is a more elevated
idea is still invariably restricted. "Social liberty" signifies always
one more round of Jacob's ladder. In other words it signifies a partial
liberation, the liberation of a country, of a class, or of thought.
That concept of liberty which must inspire pedagogy is, instead,
universal. The biological sciences of the nineteenth century have shown
it to us when they have offered us the means for studying life. If,
therefore, the old-time pedagogy foresaw or vaguely expressed the
principle of studying the pupil before educating him, and of leaving him
free in his spontaneous manifestations, such an intuition, indefinite
and barely expressed, was made possible of practical attainment only
after the contribution of the experimental sciences during the last
century. This is not a case for sophistry or discussion, it is enough
that we state our point. He who would say that the principle of liberty
informs the pedagogy of to-day, would make us smile as at a child who,
before the box of mounted butterflies, should insist that they were
alive and could fly. The principle of slavery still pervades pedagogy,
and, therefore, the same principle pervades the school. I need only give
one proof--the stationary desks and chairs. Here we have, for example, a
striking evidence of the errors of the early materialistic scientific
pedagogy which, with mistaken zeal and energy, carried the barren stones
of science to the rebuilding of the crumbling walls of the school. The
schools were at first furnished with the long, narrow benches upon which
the children were crowded together. Then came science and perfected the
bench. In this work much attention was paid to the recent contributions
of anthropology. The age of the child and the length of his limbs were
considered in placing the seat at the right height. The distance between
the seat and the desk was calculated with infinite care, in order that
the child's back should not become deformed, and, finally, the seats
were separated and the width so closely calculated that the child could
barely seat himself upon it, while to stretch himself by making any
lateral movements was impossible. This was done in order that he might
be separated from his neighbour. These desks are constructed in such a
way as to render the child visible in all his immobility. One of the
ends sought through this separation is the prevention of immoral acts in
the schoolroom. What shall we say of such prudence in a state of society
where it would be considered scandalous to give voice to principles of
sex morality in education, for fear we might thus contaminate innocence?
And, yet, here we have science lending itself to this hypocrisy,
fabricating machines! Not only this; obliging science goes farther
still, perfecting the benches in such a way as to permit to the greatest
possible extent the immobility of the child, or, if you wish, to repress
every movement of the child.
It is all so arranged that, when the child is well-fitted into his
place, the desk and chair themselves force him to assume the position
considered to be hygienically comfortable. The seat, the foot-rest, the
desks are arranged in such a way that the child can never stand at his
work. He is allotted only sufficient space for sitting in an erect
position. It is in such ways that schoolroom desks and benches have
advanced toward perfection. Every cult of the so-called scientific
pedagogy has designed a model scientific desk. Not a few nations have
become proud of their "national desk,"--and in the struggle of
competition these various machines have been patented.
Undoubtedly there is much that is scientific underlying the construction
of these benches. Anthropology has been drawn upon in the measuring of
the body and the diagnosis of the age; physiology, in the study of
muscular movements; psychology, in regard to perversion of instincts;
and, above all, hygiene, in the effort to prevent curvature of the
spine. These desks were indeed scientific, following in their
construction the anthropological study of the child. We have here, as I
have said, an example of the literal application of science to the
schools.
I believe that before very long we shall all be struck with great
surprise by this attitude. It will seem incomprehensible that the
fundamental error of the desk should not have been revealed earlier
through the attention given to the study of infant hygiene,
anthropology, and sociology, and through the general progress of
thought. The marvel is greater when we consider that during the past
years there has been stirring in almost every nation a movement toward
the protection of the child.
I believe that it will not be many years before the public, scarcely
believing the descriptions of these scientific benches, will come to
touch with wondering bands the amazing seats that were constructed for
the purpose of preventing among our school children curvature of the
spine!
The development of these scientific benches means that the pupils were
subjected to a regime, which, even though they were born strong and
straight, made it possible for them to become humpbacked! The vertebral
column, biologically the most primitive, fundamental, and oldest part of
the skeleton, the most fixed portion, of our body, since the skeleton is
the most solid portion of the organism--the vertebral column, which
resisted and was strong through the desperate struggles of primitive man
when he fought against the desert-lion, when he conquered the mammoth,
when he quarried the solid rock and shaped the iron to his uses, bends,
and cannot resist, under the yoke of the school.
It is incomprehensible that so-called _science_ should have worked to
perfect an instrument of slavery in the school without being enlightened
by one ray from the movement of social liberation, growing and
developing throughout the world. For the age of scientific benches was
also the age of the redemption of the working classes from the yoke of
unjust labor.
The tendency toward social liberty is most evident, and manifests itself
on every hand. The leaders of the people make it their slogan, the
labouring masses repeat the cry, scientific and socialistic publications
voice the same movement, our journals are full of it. The underfed
workman does not ask for a tonic, but for better economic conditions
which shall prevent malnutrition. The miner who, through the stooping
position maintained during many hours of the day, is subject to inguinal
rupture, does not ask for an abdominal support, but demands shorter
hours and bettor working conditions, in order that he may be able to
lead a healthy life like other men.
And when, during this same social epoch, we find that the children in
our schoolrooms are working amid unhygienic conditions, so poorly
adapted to normal development that even the skeleton becomes deformed,
our response to this terrible revelation is an orthopedic bench. It is
much as if we offered to the miner the abdominal brace, or arsenic to
the underfed workman.
Some time ago a woman, believing me to be in sympathy with all
scientific innovations concerning the school, showed me with evident
satisfaction _a corset or brace for pupils_. She had invented this and
felt that it would complete the work of the bench.
Surgery has still other means for the treatment of spinal curvature. I
might mention orthopedic instruments, braces, and a method of
periodically suspending the child, by the head or shoulders, in such a
fashion that the weight of the body stretches and thus straightens the
vertebral column. In the school, the orthopedic instrument in the shape
of the desk is in great favour to-day; someone proposes the brace--one
step farther and it will be suggested that we give the scholars a
systematic course in the suspension method!
All this is the logical consequence of a material application of the
methods of science to the decadent school. Evidently the rational method
of combating spinal curvature in the pupils, is to change the form of
their work--so that they shall no longer be obliged to remain for so
many hours a day in a harmful position. It is a conquest of liberty
which the school needs, not the mechanism of a bench.
Even were the stationary seat helpful to the child's body, it would
still be a dangerous and unhygienic feature of the environment, through
the difficulty of cleaning the room perfectly when the furniture cannot
be moved. The foot-rests, which cannot be removed, accumulate the dirt
carried in daily from the street by the many little feet. To-day there
is a general transformation in the matter of house furnishings. They are
made lighter and simpler so that they may be easily moved, dusted, and
even washed. But the school seems blind to the transformation of the
social environment.
It behooves us to think of what may happen to the _spirit_ of the child
who is condemned to grow in conditions so artificial that his very bones
may become deformed. When we speak of the redemption of the workingman,
it is always understood that beneath the most apparent form of
suffering, such as poverty of the blood, or ruptures, there exists that
other wound from which the soul of the man who is subjected to any form
of slavery must suffer. It is at this deeper wrong that we aim when we
say that the workman must be redeemed through liberty. We know only too
well that when a man's very blood has been consumed or his intestines
wasted away through his work, his soul must have lain oppressed in
darkness, rendered insensible, or, it may be, killed within him. The
_moral_ degradation of the slave is, above all things, the weight that
opposes the progress of humanity--humanity striving to rise and held
back by this great burden. The cry of redemption speaks far more clearly
for the souls of men than for their bodies.
What shall we say then, when the question before us is that of
_educating children_?
We know only too well the sorry spectacle of the teacher who, in the
ordinary schoolroom, must pour certain cut and dried facts into the
heads of the scholars. In order to succeed in this barren task, she
finds it necessary to discipline her pupils into immobility and to force
their attention. Prizes and punishments are every-ready and efficient
aids to the master who must force into a given attitude of mind and body
those who are condemned to be his listeners.
It is true that to-day it is deemed expedient to abolish official
whippings and habitual blows, just as the awarding of prizes has become
less ceremonious. These partial reforms are another prop approved of by
science, and offered to the support of the decadent school. Such prizes
and punishments are, if I may be allowed the expression, the _bench_ of
the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit. Here, however, these
are not applied to lessen deformities, but to provoke them. The prize
and the punishment are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort,
and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of
the child in connection with them. The jockey offers a piece of sugar to
his horse before jumping into the saddle, the coachman beats his horse
that he may respond to the signs given by the reins; and, yet, neither
of these runs so superbly as the free horse of the plains.
And here, in the case of education, shall man place the yoke upon man?
True, we say that social man is natural man yoked to society. But if we
give a comprehensive glance to the moral progress of society, we shall
see that little by little, the yoke is being made easier, in other
words, we shall see that nature, or life, moves gradually toward
triumph. The yoke of the slave yields to that of the servant, and the
yoke of the servant to that of the workman.
All forms of slavery tend little by little to weaken and disappear, even
the sexual slavery of woman. The history of civilisation is a history of
conquest and of liberation. We should ask in what stage of civilisation
we find ourselves and if, in truth, the good of prizes and of
punishments be necessary to our advancement. If we have indeed gone
beyond this point, then to apply such a form of education would be to
draw the new generation back to a lower level, not to lead them into
their true heritage of progress.
Something very like this condition of the school exists in society, in
the relation between the government and the great numbers of the men
employed in its administrative departments. These clerks work day after
day for the general national good, yet they do not feel or see the
advantage of their work in any immediate reward. That is, they do not
realise that the state carries on its great business through their daily
tasks, and that the whole nation is benefited by their work. For them
the immediate good is promotion, as passing to a higher class is for the
child in school. The man who loses sight of the really big aim of his
work is like a child who has been placed in a class below his real
standing: like a slave, he is cheated of something which is his right.
His dignity as a man is reduced to the limits of the dignity of a
machine which must be oiled if it is to be kept going, because it does
not have within itself the impulse of life. All those petty things such
as the desire for decorations or medals, are but artificial stimuli,
lightening for the moment the dark, barren path in which he treads.
In the same way we give prizes to school children. And the fear of not
achieving promotion, withholds the clerk from running away, and binds
him to his monotonous work, even as the fear of not passing into the
next class drives the pupil to his book. The reproof of the superior is
in every way similar to the scolding of the teacher. The correction of
badly executed clerical work is equivalent to the bad mark placed by the
teacher upon the scholar's poor composition. The parallel is almost
perfect.
But if the administrative departments are not carried on in a way which
would seem suitable to a nation's greatness; if corruption too easily
finds a place; it is the result of having extinguished the true
greatness of man in the mind of the employee, and of having restricted
his vision to those petty, immediate facts, which he has come to look
upon as prizes and punishments. The country stands, because the
rectitude of the greater number of its employees is such that they
resist the corruption of the prizes and punishments, and follow an
irresistible current of honesty. Even as life in the social environment
triumphs against every cause of poverty and death, and proceeds to new
conquests, so the instinct of liberty conquers all obstacles, going from
victory to victory.
It is this personal and yet universal force of life, a force often
latent within the soul, that sends the world forward.
But he who accomplishes a truly human work, he who does something really
great and victorious, is never spurred to his task by those trifling
attractions called by the name of "prizes," nor by the fear of those
petty ills which we call "punishments." If in a war a great army of
giants should fight with no inspiration beyond the desire to win
promotion, epaulets, or medals, or through fear of being shot, if these
men were to oppose a handful of pygmies who were inflamed by love of
country, the victory would go to the latter. When real heroism has died
within an army, prizes and punishments cannot do more than finish the
work of deterioration, bringing in corruption and cowardice.
All human victories, all human progress, stand upon the inner force.
Thus a young student may become a great doctor if he is spurred to his
study by an interest which makes medicine his real vocation. But if he
works in the hope of an inheritance, or of making a desirable marriage,
or if indeed he is inspired by any material advantage, he will never
become a true master or a great doctor, and the world will never make
one step forward because of his work. He to whom such stimuli are
necessary, had far better never become a physician. Everyone has a
special tendency, a special vocation, modest, perhaps, but certainly
useful. The system of prizes may turn an individual aside from this
vocation, may make him choose a false road, for him a vain one, and
forced to follow it, the natural activity of a human being may be
warped, lessened, even annihilated.
We repeat always that the world _progresses_ and that we must urge men
forward to obtain progress. But progress comes from the _new things that
are born_, and these, not being foreseen, are not rewarded with prizes:
rather, they often carry the leader to martyrdom. God forbid that poems
should ever be born of the desire to be crowned in the Capitol! Such a
vision need only come into the heart of the poet and the muse will
vanish. The poem must spring from the soul of the poet, when he thinks
neither of himself nor of the prize. And if he does win the laurel, he
will feel the vanity of such a prize. The true reward lies in the
revelation through the poem of his own triumphant inner force.
There does exist, however, an external prize for man; when, for example,
the orator sees the faces of his listeners change with the emotions he
has awakened, he experiences something so great that it can only be
likened to the intense joy with which one discovers that he is loved.
Our joy is to touch, and conquer souls, and this is the one prize which
can bring us a true compensation.
Sometimes there is given to us a moment when we fancy ourselves to be
among the great ones of the world. These are moments of happiness given
to man that he may continue his existence in peace. It may be through
love attained or because of the gift of a son, through a glorious
discovery or the publication of a book; in some such moment we feel that
there exists no man who is above us. If, in such a moment, someone
vested with authority comes forward to offer us a medal or a prize, he
is the important destroyer of our real reward--"And who are you?" our
vanished illusion shall cry, "Who are you that recalls me to the fact
that I am not the first among men? Who stands so far above me that he
may give me a prize?" The prize of such a man in such a moment can only
be Divine.
As for punishments, the soul of the normal man grows perfect through
expanding, and punishment as commonly understood is always a form of
_repression_. It may bring results with those inferior natures who grow
in evil, but these are very few, and social progress is not affected by
them. The penal code threatens us with punishment if we are dishonest
within the limits indicated by the laws. But we are not honest through
fear of the laws; if we do not rob, if we do not kill, it is because we
love peace, because the natural trend of our lives leads us forward,
leading us ever farther and more definitely away from the peril of low
and evil acts.
Without going into the ethical or metaphysical aspects of the question,
we may safely affirm that the delinquent before he transgresses the law,
has, _if he knows of the existence of a punishment_, felt the
threatening weight of the criminal code upon him. He has defined it, or
he has been lured into the crime, deluding himself with the idea that he
would be able to avoid the punishment of the law. But there has occurred
within his mind, a _struggle between the crime and the punishment_.
Whether it be efficacious in hindering crime or not, this penal code is
undoubtedly made for a very limited class of individuals; namely,
criminals. The enormous majority of citizens are honest without any
regard whatever to the threats of the law.
The real punishment of normal man is the loss of the consciousness of
that individual power and greatness which are the sources of his inner
life. Such a punishment often falls upon men in the fullness of success.
A man whom we would consider crowned by happiness and fortune may be
suffering from this form of punishment. Far too often man does not see
the real punishment which threatens him.
And it is just here that education may help.
To-day we hold the pupils in school, restricted by those instruments so
degrading to body and spirit, the desk--and material prizes and
punishments. Our aim in all this is to reduce them to the discipline of
immobility and silence,--to lead them,--where? Far too often toward no
definite end.
Often the education of children consists in pouring into their
intelligence the intellectual contents of school programmes. And often
these programmes have been compiled in the official department of
education, and their use is imposed by law upon the teacher and the
child.
Ah, before such dense and wilful disregard of the life which is growing
within these children, we should hide our heads in shame and cover our
guilty faces with our hands!
Sergi says truly: "To-day an urgent need imposes itself upon society:
the reconstruction of methods in education and instruction, and he who
fights for this cause, fights for human regeneration."
CHAPTER II
HISTORY OF METHODS
If we are to develop a system of scientific pedagogy, we must, then,
proceed along lines very different from those which have been followed
up to the present time. The transformation of the school must be
contemporaneous with the preparation of the teacher. For if we make of
the teacher an observer, familiar with the experimental methods, then we
must make it possible for her to observe and to experiment in the
school. The fundamental principle of scientific pedagogy must be,
indeed, the _liberty of the pupil_;--such liberty as shall permit a
development of individual, spontaneous manifestations of the child's
nature. If a new and scientific pedagogy is to arise from the _study of
the individual_, such study must occupy itself with the observation of
_free_ children. In vain should we await a practical renewing of
pedagogical methods from methodical examinations of pupils made under
the guidance offered to-day by pedagogy, anthropology, and experimental
psychology.
Every branch of experimental science has grown out of the application of
a method peculiar to itself. Bacteriology owes its scientific content to
the method of isolation and culture of microbes. Criminal, medical, and
pedagogical anthropology owe their progress to the application of
anthropological methods to individuals of various classes, such as
criminals, the insane, the sick of the clinics, scholars. So
experimental psychology needs as its starting point an exact definition
of the technique to be used in making the experiment.
To put it broadly, it is important to define _the method_, _the
technique_, and from its application to _await_ the definite result,
which must be gathered entirely from actual experience. One of the
characteristics of experimental sciences is to proceed to the making of
an experiment _without preconceptions of any sort_ as to the final
result of the experiment itself. For example, should we wish to make
scientific observations concerning the development of the head as
related to varying degrees of intelligence, one of the conditions of
such an experiment would be to ignore, in the taking of the
measurements, which were the most intelligent and which the most
backward among the scholars examined. And this because the preconceived
idea that the most intelligent should have the head more fully developed
will inevitably alter the results of the research.
He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every
preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method
of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all
former creeds and to proceed by means of the _method_ in the search for
truth.
We must not start, for example, from any dogmatic ideas which we may
happen to have held upon the subject of child psychology. Instead, we
must proceed by a method which shall tend to make possible to the child
complete liberty. This we must do if we are to draw from the observation
of his spontaneous manifestations conclusions which shall lead to the
establishment of a truly scientific child psychology. It may be that
such a method holds for us great surprises, unexpected possibilities.
Child psychology and pedagogy must establish their content by successive
conquests arrived at through the method of experimentation.
Our problem then, is this: to establish the _method peculiar_ to
experimental pedagogy. It cannot be that used in other experimental
sciences. It is true that scientific pedagogy is rounded out by hygiene,
anthropology, and psychology, and adopts in part the technical method
characteristic of all three, although limiting itself to a special study
of the individual to be educated. But in pedagogy this study of the
individual, though it must accompany the very different work of
_education_, is a limited and secondary part of the science as a whole.
This present study deals in part with the _method_ used in experimental
pedagogy, and is the result of my experiences during two years in the
"Children's Houses." I offer only a beginning of the method, which I
have applied to children between the ages of three and six. But I
believe that these tentative experiments, because of the surprising
results which they have given, will be the means of inspiring a
continuation of the work thus undertaken.
Indeed, although our educational system, which experience has
demonstrated to be excellent, is not yet entirely completed, it
nevertheless constitutes a system well enough established to be
practical in all institutions where young children are cared for, and in
the first elementary classes.
Perhaps I am not exact when I say that the present work springs from two
years of experience. I do not believe that these later attempts of mine
could alone have rendered possible all that I set forth in this book.
The origin of the educational system in use in the "Children's Houses"
is much more remote, and if this experience with normal children seems
indeed rather brief, it should be remembered that it sprang from
preceding pedagogical experiences with abnormal children, and that
considered in this way, it represents a long and thoughtful endeavour.
About fifteen years ago, being assistant doctor at the Psychiatric
Clinic of the University of Rome, I had occasion to frequent the insane
asylums to study the sick and to select subjects for the clinics. In
this way I became interested in the idiot children who were at that time
housed in the general insane asylums. In those days thyroid
organotherapy was in full development, and this drew the attention of
physicians to deficient children. I myself, having completed my regular
hospital services, had already turned my attention to the study of
children's diseases.
It was thus that, being interested in the idiot children, I became
conversant with the special method of education devised for these
unhappy little ones by Edward Seguin, and was led to study thoroughly
the idea, then beginning to be prevalent among the physicians, of the
efficacy of "pedagogical treatment" for various morbid forms of disease
such as deafness, paralysis, idiocy, rickets, etc. The fact that
pedagogy must join with medicine in the treatment of disease was the
practical outcome of the thought of the time. And because of this
tendency the method of treating disease by gymnastics became widely
popular. I, however, differed from my colleagues in that I felt that
mental deficiency presented chiefly a pedagogical, rather than mainly a
medical, problem. Much was said in the medical congresses of the
medico-pedagogic method for the treatment and education of the feeble
minded, and I expressed my differing opinion in an address on _Moral
Education_ at the Pedagogical Congress of Turin in 1898. I believe that
I touched a chord already vibrant, because the idea, making its way
among the physicians and elementary teachers, spread in a flash as
presenting a question of lively interest to the school.
In fact I was called upon by my master, Guido Baccelli, the great
Minister of Education, to deliver to the teachers of Rome a course of
lectures on the education of feeble-minded children. This course soon
developed into the State Orthophrenic School, which I directed for more
than two years.
In this school we had an all-day class of children composed of those who
in the elementary schools were considered hopelessly deficient. Later
on, through the help of a philanthropic organisation, there was founded
a Medical Pedagogic Institute where, besides the children from the
public schools, we brought together all of the idiot children from the
insane asylums in Rome.
I spent these two years with the help of my colleagues in preparing the
teachers of Rome for a special method of observation and education of
feeble-minded children. Not only did I train teachers, but what was much
more important, after I had been in London and Paris for the purpose of
studying in a practical way the education of deficients, I gave myself
over completely to the actual teaching of the children, directing at the
same time the work of the other teachers in our institute.
I was more than an elementary teacher, for I was present, or directly
taught the children, from eight in the morning to seven in the evening
without interruption. These two years of practice are my first and
indeed my true degree in pedagogy. From the very beginning of my work
with deficient children (1898 to 1900) I felt that the methods which I
used had in them nothing peculiarly limited to the instruction of
idiots. I believed that they contained educational principles _more
rational_ than those in use, so much more so, indeed, that through their
means an inferior mentality would be able to grow and develop. This
feeling, so deep as to be in the nature of an intuition, became my
controlling idea after I had left the school for deficients, and, little
by little, I became convinced that similar methods applied to normal
children would develop or set free their personality in a marvellous and
surprising way.
It was then that I began a genuine and thorough study of what is known
as remedial pedagogy, and, then, wishing to undertake the study of
normal pedagogy and of the principles upon which it is based, I
registered as a student of philosophy at the University. A great faith
animated me, and although I did not know that I should ever be able to
test the truth of my idea, I gave up every other occupation to deepen
and broaden its conception. It was almost as if I prepared myself for an
unknown mission.
The methods for the education of deficients had their origin at the time
of the French Revolution in the work of a physician whose achievements
occupy a prominent place in the history of medicine, as he was the
founder of that branch of medical science which to-day is known as
Otiatria (diseases of the ear).
He was the first to attempt a methodical education of the sense of
hearing. He made these experiments in the institute for deaf mutes
founded in Paris by Pereire, and actually succeeded in making the
semi-deaf hear clearly. Later on, having in charge for eight years the
idiot boy known as "the wild boy of Aveyron," he extended to the
treatment of all the senses those educational methods which had already
given such excellent results in the treatment of the sense of hearing. A
student of Pinel, Itard, was the first educator to practise _the
observation_ of the pupil in the way in which the sick are observed in
the hospitals, especially those suffering from diseases of the nervous
system.
The pedagogic writings of Itard are most interesting and minute
descriptions of educational efforts and experiences, and anyone reading
them to-day must admit that they were practically the first attempts at
experimental psychology. But the merit of having completed a genuine
educational system for deficient children was due to Edward Seguin,
first a teacher and then a physician. He took the experiences of Itard
as his starting point, applying these methods, modifying and completing
them during a period of ten years' experience with children taken from
the insane asylums and placed in, a little school in Rue Pigalle in
Paris. This method was described for the first time in a volume of more
than six hundred pages, published in Paris in 1846, with the title:
"Traitement Moral, Hygiene et Education des Idiots." Later Seguin
emigrated to the United States of America where he founded many
institutions for deficients, and where, after another twenty years of
experience, he published the second edition of his method, under a very
different title: "Idiocy and its Treatment by the Physiological Method."
This volume was published in New York in 1886, and in it Seguin had
carefully defined his method of education, calling it the _physiological
method_. He no longer referred in the title to a method for the
"education of idiots" as if the method were special to them, but spoke
now of idiocy treated by a physiological method. If we consider that
pedagogy always had psychology as its base, and that Wundt defines a
"physiological psychology," the coincidence of these ideas must strike
us, and lead us to suspect in the physiological method some connection
with physiological psychology.
While I was assistant at the Psychiatric Clinic, I had read Edward
Seguin's French book, with great interest. But the English book which
was published in New York twenty years later, although it was quoted in
the works about special education by Bourneville, was not to be found in
any library. I made a vain quest for it, going from house to house of
nearly all the English physicians, who were known to be specially
interested in deficient children, or who were superintendents of special
schools. The fact that this book was unknown in England, although it had
been published in the English language, made me think that the Seguin
system had never been understood. In fact, although Seguin was
constantly quoted in all the publications dealing with institutions for
deficients, the educational _applications_ described, were quite
different from the applications of Seguin's system.
Almost everywhere the methods applied to deficients are more or less the
same as those in use for normal children. In Germany, especially, a
friend who had gone there in order to help me in my researches, noticed
that although special materials existed here and there in the
pedagogical museums of the schools for deficients, these materials were
rarely used. Indeed, the German educators hold the principle that it is
well to adapt to the teaching of backward children, the same method used
for normal ones; but these methods are much more objective in Germany
than with us.
At the Bicetre, where I spent some time, I saw that it was the didactic
apparatus of Seguin far more than his _method_ which was being used,
although, the French text was in the hands of the educators. The
teaching there was purely mechanical, each teacher following the rules
according to the letter. I found, however, wherever I went, in London as
well as in Paris, a desire for fresh counsel and for new experiences,
since far too often Seguin's claim that with his methods the education
of idiots was actually possible, had proved only a delusion.
After this study of the methods in use throughout Europe I concluded my
experiments upon the deficients of Rome, and taught them throughout two
years. I followed Seguin's book, and also derived much help from the
remarkable experiments of Itard.
Guided by the work of these two men, I had manufactured a great variety
of didactic material. These materials, which I have never seen complete
in any institution, became in the hands of those who knew how to apply
them, a most remarkable and efficient means, but unless rightly
presented, they failed to attract the attention of the deficients.
I felt that I understood the discouragement of those working with
feeble-minded children, and could see why they had, in so many cases,
abandoned the method. The prejudice that the educator must place himself
on a level with the one to be educated, sinks the teacher of deficients
into a species of apathy. He accepts the fact that he is educating an
inferior personality, and for that very reason he does not succeed. Even
so those who teach little children too often have the idea that they are
educating babies and seek to place themselves on the child's level by
approaching him with games, and often with foolish stories. Instead of
all this, we must know how to call to the _man_ which lies dormant
within the soul of the child. I felt this, intuitively, and believed
that not the didactic material, but my voice which called to them,
_awakened_ the children, and encouraged them to use the didactic
material, and through it, to educate themselves. I was guided in my work
by the deep respect which I felt for their misfortune, and by the love
which these unhappy children know how to awaken in those who are near
them.
Seguin, too, expressed himself in the same way on this subject. Reading
his patient attempts, I understand clearly that the first didactic
material used by him was _spiritual_. Indeed, at the close of the French
volume, the author, giving a resume of his work, concludes by saying
rather sadly, that all he has established will be lost or useless, if
the _teachers_ are not prepared for their work. He holds rather original
views concerning the preparation of teachers of deficients. He would
have them good to look upon, pleasant-voiced, careful in every detail of
their personal appearance, doing everything possible to make themselves
attractive. They must, he says, render themselves attractive in voice
and manner, since it is their task to awaken souls which are frail and
weary, and to lead them forth to lay hold upon the beauty and strength
of life.
This belief that we must act upon the spirit, served as a sort of
_secret key_, opening to me the long series of didactic experiments so
wonderfully analysed by Edward Seguin,--experiments which, properly
understood, are really most efficacious in the education of idiots. I
myself obtained most surprising results through their application, but I
must confess that, while my efforts showed themselves in the
intellectual progress of my pupils, a peculiar form of exhaustion
prostrated me. It was as if I gave to them some vital force from within
me. Those things which we call encouragement, comfort, love, respect,
are drawn from the soul of man, and the more freely we give of them, the
more do we renew and reinvigorate the life about us.
Without such inspiration the most perfect _external stimulus_ may pass
unobserved. Thus the blind Saul, before the glory of the sun, exclaimed,
"This?--It is the dense fog!"
Thus prepared, I was able to proceed to new experiments on my own
account. This is not the place for a report of these experiments, and I
will only note that at this time I attempted an original method for the
teaching of reading and writing, a part of the education of the child
which was most imperfectly treated in the works of both Itard and
Seguin.
I succeeded in teaching a number of the idiots from the asylums both to
read and to write so well that I was able to present them at a public
school for an examination together with normal children. And they passed
the examination successfully.
These results seemed almost miraculous to those who saw them. To me,
however, the boys from the asylums had been able to compete with the
normal children only because they had been taught in a different way.
They had been helped in their psychic development, and the normal
children had, instead, been suffocated, held back. I found myself
thinking that if, some day, the special education which had developed
these idiot children in such a marvellous fashion, could be applied to
the development of normal children, the "miracle" of which my friends
talked would no longer be possible. The abyss between the inferior
mentality of the idiot and that of the normal brain can never be bridged
if the normal child has reached his full development.
While everyone was admiring the progress of my idiots, I was searching
for the reasons which could keep the happy healthy children of the
common schools on so low a plane that they could be equalled in tests of
intelligence by my unfortunate pupils!
One day, a directress in the Institute for Deficients, asked me to read
one of the prophecies of Ezekiel which had made a profound impression
upon her, as it seemed to prophesy the education of deficients.
"The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of
the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of
bones.
"And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very
many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
"And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered,
O Lord God, thou knowest.
"Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O
ye dry hones, hear the word of the Lord.
"Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath
to enter into you, and ye shall live:
"And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and
cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye
shall know that I am the Lord.
"So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a
noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his
bone.
"And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and
the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
"Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and
say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O
breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
"So I prophesied as He commanded me, and the breath came into them, and
they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.
"Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of
Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we
are cut off for our parts."
In fact, the words--"I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall
live," seem to me to refer to the direct individual work of the master
who encourages, calls to, and helps his pupil, preparing him for
education. And the remainder--"I will lay sinews upon you, and will
bring up flesh upon you," recalled the fundamental phrase which sums up
Seguin's whole method,--"to lead the child, as it were, by the hand,
from the education of the muscular system, to that of the nervous
system, and of the senses." It was thus that Seguin taught the idiots
how to walk, how to maintain their equilibrium in the most difficult
movements of the body--such as going up stairs, jumping, etc., and
finally, to feel, beginning the education of the muscular sensations by
touching, and reading the difference of temperature, and ending with the
education of the particular senses.
But if the training goes no further than this, we have only led these
children to adapt themselves to a low order of life (almost a vegetable
existence). "Call to the Spirit," says the prophecy, and the spirit
shall enter into them, and they shall have life. Seguin, indeed, led
the idiot from the vegetative to the intellectual life, "from the
education, of the senses to general notions, from general notions to
abstract thought, from abstract thought to morality." But when this
wonderful work is accomplished, and by means of a minute physiological
analysis and of a gradual progression in method, the idiot has become a
man, he is still an inferior in the midst of his fellow men, an
individual who will never be able fully to adapt himself to the social
environment: "Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost; we are cut off
for our parts."
This gives us another reason why the tedious method of Seguin was so
often abandoned; the tremendous difficulty of the means, did not justify
the end. Everyone felt this, and many said, "There is still so much to
be done for normal children!"
Having through actual experience justified my faith in Seguin's method,
I withdrew from active work among deficients, and began a more thorough
study of the works of Itard and Seguin. I felt the need of meditation. I
did a thing which I had not done before, and which perhaps few students
have been willing to do,--I translated into Italian and copied out with
my own hand, the writings of these men, from beginning to end, making
for myself books as the old Benedictines used to do before the diffusion
of printing.
I chose to do this by hand, in order that I might have time to weigh the
sense of each word, and to read, in truth, the _spirit_ of the author. I
had just finished copying the 600 pages of Seguin's French volume when I
received from New York a copy of the English book published in 1866.
This old volume had been found among the books discarded from the
private library of a New York physician. I translated it with the help
of an English friend. This volume did not add much in the way of new
pedagogical experiments, but dealt with the philosophy of the
experiences described in the first volume. The man who had studied
abnormal children for thirty years expressed the idea that the
physiological method, which has as its base the individual study of the
pupil and which forms its educative methods upon the analysis of
physiological and psychological phenomena, must come also to be applied
to normal children. This step, he believed, would show the way to a
complete human regeneration.
The voice of Seguin seemed to be like the voice of the forerunner crying
in the wilderness, and my thoughts were filled with the immensity and
importance of a work which should be able to reform the school and
education.
At this time I was registered at the University as a student of
philosophy, and followed the courses in experimental psychology, which
had only recently been established in Italian universities, namely, at
Turin, Rome and Naples. At the same time I made researches in Pedagogic
Anthropology in the elementary schools, studying in this way the methods
in organisation used for the education of normal children. This work led
to the teaching of Pedagogic Anthropology in the University of Rome.
I had long wished to experiment with the methods for deficients in a
first elementary class of normal children, but I had never thought of
making use of the homes or institutions where very young children were
cared for. It was pure chance that brought this new idea to my mind.
It was near the end of the year 1906, and I had just returned from
Milan, where I had been one of a committee at the International
Exhibition for the assignment of prizes in the subjects of Scientific
Pedagogy and Experimental Psychology. A great opportunity came to me,
for I was invited by Edoardo Talamo, the Director General of the Roman
Association for Good Building, to undertake the organisation of infant
schools in its model tenements. It was Signor Talamo's happy idea to
gather together in a large room all the little ones between the ages of
three and seven belonging to the families living in the tenement. The
play and work of these children was to be carried on under the guidance
of a teacher who should have her own apartment in the tenement house. It
was intended that every house should have its school, and as the
Association for Good Building already owned more than 400 tenements in
Rome the work seemed to offer tremendous possibilities of development.
The first school was to be established in January, 1907, in a large
tenement house in the Quarter of San Lorenzo. In the same Quarter the
Association already owned fifty-eight buildings, and according to Signor
Talamo's plans we should soon be able to open sixteen of these "schools
within the house."
This new kind of school was christened by Signora Olga Lodi, a mutual
friend of Signor Talamo and myself, under the fortunate title of _Casa
dei Bambini_ or "The Children's House." Under this name the first of our
schools was opened on the sixth of January, 1907, at 58 Via dei Masi. It
was confided to the care of Candida Nuccitelli and was under my guidance
and direction.
From the very first I perceived, in all its immensity, the social and
pedagogical importance of such institutions, and while at that time my
visions of a triumphant future seemed exaggerated, to-day many are
beginning to understand that what I saw before was indeed the truth.
On the seventh of April of the same year, 1907, a second "Children's
House" was opened in the Quarter of San Lorenzo; and on the eighteenth
of October, 1908, another was inaugurated by the Humanitarian Society in
Milan in the Quarter inhabited by workingmen. The workshops of this same
society undertook the manufacture of the materials which we used.
On the fourth of November following, a third "Children's House" was
opened in Rome, this time not in the people's Quarter, but in a modern
building for the middle classes, situated in Via Famagosta, in that part
of the city known as the Prati di Castello; and in January, 1909,
Italian Switzerland began to transform its orphan asylums and children's
homes in which the Froebel system had been used, into "Children's
Houses" adopting our methods and materials.
The "Children's House" has a twofold importance: the social importance
which it assumes through its peculiarity of being a school within the
house, and its purely pedagogic importance gained through its methods
for the education of very young children, of which I now made a trial.
As I have said, Signor Talamo's invitation gave me a wonderful
opportunity for applying the methods used with deficients to normal
children, not of the elementary school age, but of the age usual in
infant asylums.
If a parallel between the deficient and the normal child is possible,
this will be during the period of early infancy _when the child who has
not the force to develop_ and _he who is not yet developed_ are in some
ways alike.
The very young child has not yet acquired a secure co-ordination of
muscular movements, and, therefore, walks imperfectly, and is not able
to perform the ordinary acts of life, such as fastening and unfastening
its garments. The sense organs, such as the power of accommodation of
the eye, are not yet completely developed; the language is primordial
and shows those defects common to the speech of the very young child.
The difficulty of fixing the attention, the general instability, etc.,
are characteristics which the normal infant and the deficient child have
in common. Preyer, also, in his psychological study of children has
turned aside to illustrate the parallel between pathological linguistic
defects, and those of normal children in the process of developing.
Methods which made growth possible to the mental personality of the
idiot ought, therefore, to _aid the development of young children_, and
should be so adapted as to constitute a hygienic education of the entire
personality of a normal human being. Many defects which become
permanent, such as speech defects, the child acquires through being
neglected during the most important period of his age, the period
between three and six, at which time he forms and establishes his
principal functions.
Here lies the significance of my pedagogical experiment in the
"Children's Houses." It represents the results of a series of trials
made by me, in the education of young children, with methods already
used with deficients. My work has not been in any way an application,
pure and simple, of the methods of Seguin to young children, as anyone
who will consult the works of the author will readily see. But it is
none the less true that, underlying these two years of trial, there is a
basis of experiment which goes back to the days of the French
Revolution, and which represents the earnest work of the lives of Itard
and Seguin.
As for me, thirty years after the publication of Seguin's second book, I
took up again the ideas and, I may even say, the work of this great
man, with the same freshness of spirit with which he received the
inheritance of the work and ideas of his master Itard. For _ten years_ I
not only made practical experiments according to their methods, but
through reverent meditation absorbed the works of these noble and
consecrated men, who have left to humanity most vital proof of their
obscure heroism.
Thus my ten years of work may in a sense be considered as a summing up
of the forty years of work done by Itard and Seguin. Viewed in this
light, fifty years of active work preceded and prepared for this
apparently brief trial of only two years, and I feel that I am not wrong
in saying that these experiments represent the successive work of three
physicians, who from Itard to me show in a greater or less degree the
first steps along the path of psychiatry.
As definite factors in the civilisation of the people, the "Children's
Houses" deserve a separate volume. They have, in fact, solved so many of
the social and pedagogic problems in ways which have seemed to be
Utopian, that they are a part of that modern transformation of the home
which must most surely be realised before many years have passed. In
this way they touch directly the most important side of the social
question--that which deals with the intimate or home life of the people.
It is enough here to reproduce the inaugural discourse delivered by me
on the occasion of the opening of the second "Children's House" in Rome,
and to present the rules and regulations[4] which I arranged in
accordance with the wishes of Signor Talamo.
[4] See page 70.
It will be noticed that the club to which I refer, and the dispensary
which is also an out-patients' institution for medical and surgical
treatment (all such institutions being free to the inhabitants) have
already been established. In the modern tenement--Casa Moderna in the
Prati di Castello, opened November 4, 1908, through the philanthropy of
Signor Talamo--they are also planning to annex a "communal kitchen."
CHAPTER III
INAGURAL ADDRESS DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE OPENING OF ONE OF THE
"CHILDREN'S HOUSES"
It may be that the life lived by the very poor is a thing which some of
you here to-day have never actually looked upon in all its degradation.
You may have only felt the misery of deep human poverty through the
medium of some great book, or some gifted actor may have made your soul
vibrato with its horror.
Let us suppose that in some such moment a voice should cry to you, "Go
look upon these homes of misery and blackest poverty. For there have
sprung up amid the terror and the suffering, cases of happiness, of
cleanliness, of peace. The poor are to have an ideal house which shall
be their own. In Quarters where poverty and vice ruled, a work of moral
redemption is going on. The soul of the people is being set free from
the torpor of vice, from the shadows of ignorance. The little children
too have a 'House' of their own. The new generation goes forward to meet
the new era, the time when misery shall no longer be deplored but
destroyed. They go to meet the time when the dark dens of vice and
wretchedness shall have become things of the past, and when no trace of
them shall be found among the living." What a change of emotions we
should experience! and how we should hasten here, as the wise men
guided by a dream and a star hastened to Bethlehem!
I have spoken thus in order that you may understand the great
significance, the real beauty, of this humble room, which seems like a
bit of the house itself set apart by a mother's hand for the use and
happiness of the children of the Quarter. This is the second "Children's
House"[5] which has been established within the ill-favoured Quarter of
San Lorenzo.
[5] Dr. Montessori no longer directs the work in the Casa dei
Bambini in the Quarter of San Lorenzo.
The Quarter of San Lorenzo is celebrated, for every newspaper in the
city is filled with almost daily accounts of its wretched happenings.
Yet there are many who are not familiar with the origin of this portion
of our city.
It was never intended to build up here a tenement district for the
people. And indeed San Lorenzo is not the _People's_ Quarter, it is the
Quarter of the _poor_. It is the Quarter where lives the underpaid,
often unemployed workingman, a common type in a city which has no
factory industries. It is the home of him who undergoes the period of
surveillance to which he is condemned after his prison sentence is
ended. They are all here, mingled, huddled together.
The district of San Lorenzo sprang into being between 1884 and 1888 at
the time of the great building fever. No standards either social or
hygienic guided these new constructions. The aim in building was simply
to cover with walls square foot after square foot of ground. The more
space covered, the greater the gain of the interested Banks and
Companies. All this with a complete disregard of the disastrous future
which they were preparing. It was natural that no one should concern
himself with the stability of the building he was creating, since in no
case would the property remain in the possession of him who built it.
When the storm burst, in the shape of the inevitable building panic of
1888 to 1890, these unfortunate houses remained for a long time
untenanted. Then, little by little, the need of dwelling-places began to
make itself felt, and these great houses began to fill. Now, those
speculators who had been so unfortunate as to remain possessors of these
buildings could not, and did not wish to, add fresh capital to that
already lost, so the houses constructed in the first place in utter
disregard of all laws of hygiene, and rendered still worse by having
been used as temporary habitations, came to be occupied by the poorest
class in the city.
The apartments not being prepared for the working class, were too large,
consisting of five, six, or seven rooms. These were rented at a price
which, while exceedingly low in relation to the size, was yet too high
for any one family of very poor people. This led to the evil of
subletting. The tenant who has taken a six room apartment at eight
dollars a month sublets rooms at one dollar and a half or two dollars a
month to those who can pay so much, and a corner of a room, or a
corridor, to a poorer tenant, thus making an income of fifteen dollars
or more, over and above the cost of his own rent.
This means that the problem of existence is in great part solved for
him, and that in every case he adds to his income through usury. The one
who holds the lease traffics in the misery of his fellow tenants,
lending small sums at a rate which generally corresponds to twenty cents
a week for the loan of two dollars, equivalent to an annual rate of 500
per cent.
Thus we have in the evil of subletting the most cruel form of usury:
that which only the poor know how to practise upon the poor.
To this we must add the evils of crowded living, promiscuousness,
immorality, crime. Every little while the newspapers uncover for us one
of these _interieurs_: a large family, growing boys and girls, sleep in
one room; while one corner of the room is occupied by an outsider, a
woman who receives the nightly visits of men. This is seen by the girls
and the boys; evil passions are kindled that lead to the crime and
bloodshed which unveil for a brief instant before our eyes, in some
lurid paragraph, this little detail of the mass of misery.
Whoever enters, for the first time, one of these apartments is
astonished and horrified. For this spectacle of genuine misery is not at
all like the garish scene he has imagined. We enter here a world of
shadows, and that which strikes us first is the darkness which, even
though it be midday, makes it impossible to distinguish any of the
details of the room.
When the eye has grown accustomed to the gloom, we perceive, within, the
outlines of a bed upon which lies huddled a figure--someone ill and
suffering. If we have come to bring money from some society for mutual
aid, a candle must be lighted before the sum can be counted and the
receipt signed. Oh, when we talk of social problems, how often we speak
vaguely, drawing upon our fancy for details instead of preparing
ourselves to judge intelligently through a personal investigation of
facts and conditions.
We discuss earnestly the question of home study for school children,
when for many of them home means a straw pallet thrown down in the
corner of some dark hovel. We wish to establish circulating libraries
that the poor may read at home. We plan to send among these people books
which shall form their domestic literature--books through whose
influence they shall come to higher standards of living. We hope through
the printed page to educate these poor people in matters of hygiene, of
morality, of culture, and in this we show ourselves profoundly ignorant
of their most crying needs. For many of them have no light by which to
read!
There lies before the social crusader of the present day a problem more
profound than that of the intellectual elevation of the poor; the
problem, indeed, of _life_.
In speaking of the children born in these places, even the conventional
expressions must be changed, for they do not "first see the light of
day"; they come into a world of gloom. They grow among the poisonous
shadows which envelope over-crowded humanity. These children cannot be
other than filthy in body, since the water supply in an apartment
originally intended to be occupied by three or four persons, when
distributed among twenty or thirty is scarcely enough for drinking
purposes!
We Italians have elevated our word "casa" to the almost sacred
significance of the English word "home," the enclosed temple of domestic
affection, accessible only to dear ones.
Far removed from this conception is the condition of the many who have
no "casa," but only ghastly walls within which the most intimate acts of
life are exposed upon the pillory. Here, there can be no privacy, no
modesty, no gentleness; here, there is often not even light, nor air,
nor water! It seems a cruel mockery to introduce here our idea of the
home as essential to the education of the masses, and as furnishing,
along with the family, the only solid basis for the social structure. In
doing this we would be not practical reformers but visionary poets.
Conditions such as I have described make it more decorous, more
hygienic, for these people to take refuge in the street and to let their
children live there. But how often these streets are the scene of
bloodshed, of quarrel, of sights so vile as to be almost inconceivable.
The papers tell us of women pursued and killed by drunken husbands! Of
young girls with the fear of worse than death, stoned by low men. Again,
we see untellable things--a wretched woman thrown, by the drunken men
who have preyed upon her, forth into the gutter. There, when day has
come, the children of the neighbourhood crowd about her like scavengers
about their dead prey, shouting and laughing at the sight of this wreck
of womanhood, kicking her bruised and filthy body as it lies in the mud
of the gutter!
Such spectacles of extreme brutality are possible here at the very gate
of a cosmopolitan city, the mother of civilisation and queen of the fine
arts, because of a new fact which was unknown to past centuries, namely,
_the isolation of the masses of the poor_.
In the Middle Ages, leprosy was isolated: the Catholics isolated the
Hebrews in the Ghetto; but poverty was never considered a peril and an
infamy so great that it must be isolated. The homes of the poor were
scattered among those of the rich and the contrast between these was a
commonplace in literature up to our own times. Indeed, when I was a
child in school, teachers, for the purpose of moral education,
frequently resorted to the illustration of the kind princess who sends
help to the poor cottage next door, or of the good children from the
great house who carry food to the sick woman in the neighbouring attic.
To-day all this would be as unreal and artificial as a fairy tale. The
poor may no longer learn from their more fortunate neighbours lessons in
courtesy and good breeding, they no longer have the hope of help from
them in cases of extreme need. We have herded them together far from us,
without the walls, leaving them to learn of each other, in the abandon
of desperation, the cruel lessons of brutality and vice. Anyone in whom
the social conscience is awake must see that we have thus created
infected regions that threaten with deadly peril the city which, wishing
to make all beautiful and shining according to an aesthetic and
aristocratic ideal, has thrust without its walls whatever is ugly or
diseased.
When I passed for the first time through these streets, it was as if I
found myself in a city upon which some great disaster had fallen. It
seemed to me that the shadow of some recent struggle still oppressed the
unhappy people who, with something very like terror in their pale faces,
passed me in these silent streets. The very silence seemed to signify
the life of a community interrupted, broken. Not a carriage, not even
the cheerful voice of the ever-present street vender, nor the sound of
the hand-organ playing in the hope of a few pennies, not even these
things, so characteristic of poor quarters, enter here to lighten this
sad and heavy silence.
Observing these streets with their deep holes, the doorsteps broken and
tumbling, we might almost suppose that this disaster had been in the
nature of a great inundation which had carried the very earth away; but
looking about us at the houses stripped of all decorations, the walls
broken and scarred, we are inclined to think that it was perhaps an
earthquake which has afflicted this quarter. Then, looking still more
closely, we see that in all this thickly settled neighbourhood there is
not a shop to be found. So poor is the community that it has not been
possible to establish even one of those popular bazars where necessary
articles are sold at so low a price as to put them within the reach of
anyone. The only shops of any sort are the low wine shops which open
their evil-smelling doors to the passer-by. As we look upon all this, it
is borne upon us that the disaster which has placed its weight of
suffering upon these people is not a convulsion of nature, but
poverty--poverty with its inseparable companion, vice.
This unhappy and dangerous state of things, to which our attention is
called at intervals by newspaper accounts of violent and immoral crime,
stirs the hearts and consciences of many who come to undertake among
these people some work of generous benevolence. One might almost say
that every form of misery inspires a special remedy and that all have
been tried here, from the attempt to introduce hygienic principles into
each house, to the establishment of creches, "Children's Houses," and
dispensaries.
But what indeed is benevolence? Little more than an expression of
sorrow; it is pity translated into action. The benefits of such a form
of charity cannot be great, and through the absence of any continued
income and the lack of organisation it is restricted to a small number
of persons. The great and widespread peril of evil demands, on the other
hand, a broad and comprehensive work directed toward the redemption of
the entire community. Only such an organisation, as, working for the
good of others, shall itself grow and prosper through the general
prosperity which it has made possible, can make a place for itself in
this quarter and accomplish a permanent good work.
It is to meet this dire necessity that the great and kindly work of the
Roman Association of Good Building has been undertaken. The advanced and
highly modern way in which this work is being carried on is due to
Edoardo Talamo, Director General of the Association. His plans, so
original, so comprehensive, yet so practical, are without counterpart in
Italy or elsewhere.
This Association was incorporated three years ago in Rome, its plan
being to acquire city tenements, remodel them, put them into a
productive condition, and administer them as a good father of a family
would.
The first property acquired comprised a large portion of the Quarter of
San Lorenzo, where to-day the Association possesses fifty-eight houses,
occupying a ground space of about 30,000 square metres, and containing,
independent of the ground floor, 1,600 small apartments. Thousands of
people will in this way receive the beneficent influence of the
protective reforms of the Good Building Association. Following its
beneficent programme, the Association set about transforming these old
houses, according to the most modern standards, paying as much attention
to questions related to hygiene and morals as to those relating to
buildings. The constructional changes would make the property of real
and lasting value, while the hygienic and moral transformation, would,
through the improved condition of the inmates, make the rent from these
apartments a more definite asset.
The Association of Good Building therefore decided upon a programme
which would permit of a gradual attainment of their ideal. It is
necessary to proceed slowly because it is not easy to empty a tenement
house at a time when houses are scarce, and the humanitarian principles
which govern the entire movement make it impossible to proceed more
rapidly in this work of regeneration. So it is, that the Association has
up to the present time transformed only three houses in the Quarter of
San Lorenzo. The plan followed in this transformation is as follows:
A: To demolish in every building all portions of the structure not
originally constructed with the idea of making homes, but, from a purely
commercial standpoint, of making the rental roll larger. In other words,
the new management tore down those parts of the building which
encumbered the central court, thus doing away with dark, ill-ventilated
apartments, and giving air and light to the remaining portion of the
tenement. Broad airy courts take the place of the inadequate air and
light shafts, rendering the remaining apartments more valuable and
infinitely more desirable.
B: To increase the number of stairways, and to divide the room space in
a more practical way. The large six or seven room suites are reduced to
small apartments of one, two, or three rooms, and a kitchen.
The importance of such changes may be recognised from the economic point
of view of the proprietor as well as from the standpoint of the moral
and material welfare of the tenant. Increasing the number of stairways
diminishes that abuse of walls and stairs inevitable where so many
persons must pass up and down. The tenants more readily learn to respect
the building and acquire habits of cleanliness and order. Not only this,
but in reducing the chances of contact among the inhabitants of the
house, especially late at night, a great advance has been made in the
matter of moral hygiene.
The division of the house into small apartments has done much toward
this moral regeneration. Each family is thus set apart, _homes_ are made
possible, while the menacing evil of subletting together with all its
disastrous consequences of overcrowding and immorality is checked in the
most radical way.
On one side this arrangement lessens the burden of the individual lease
holders, and on the other increases the income of the proprietor, who
now receives those earnings which were the unlawful gain of the system
of subletting. When the proprietor who originally rented an apartment of
six rooms for a monthly rental of eight dollars, makes such an apartment
over into three small, sunny, and airy suites consisting of one room and
a kitchen, it is evident that he increases his income.
The moral importance of this reform as it stands to-day is tremendous,
for it has done away with those evil influences and low opportunities
which arise from crowding and from promiscuous contact, and has brought
to life among these people, for the first time, the gentle sentiment of
feeling themselves free within their own homes, in the intimacy of the
family.
But the project of the Association goes beyond even this. The house
which it offers to its tenants is not only sunny and airy, but in
perfect order and repair, almost shining, and as if perfumed with purity
and freshness. These good things, however, carry with them a
responsibility which the tenant must assume if he wishes to enjoy them.
He must pay an actual tax of _care_ and _good will_. The tenant who
receives a clean house must keep it so, must respect the walls from the
big general entrance to the interior of his own little apartment. He who
keeps his house in good condition receives the recognition and
consideration due such a tenant. Thus all the tenants unite in an
ennobling warfare for practical hygiene, an end made possible by the
simple task of _conserving_ the already perfect conditions.
Here indeed is something new! So far only our great national buildings
have had a continued _maintenance fund_. Here, in these houses offered
to the people, the maintenance is confided to a hundred or so
workingmen, that is, to all the occupants of the building. This care is
almost perfect. The people keep the house in perfect condition, without
a single spot. The building in which we find ourselves to-day has been
for two years under the sole protection of the tenants, and the work of
maintenance has been left entirely to them. Yet few of our houses can
compare in cleanliness and freshness with this home of the poor.
The experiment has been tried and the result is remarkable. The people
acquire together with the lore of home-making, that of cleanliness. They
come, moreover, to wish to beautify their homes. The Association helps
this by placing growing plants and trees in the courts and about the
halls.
Out of this honest rivalry in matters so productive of good, grows a
species of pride new to this quarter; this is the pride which the entire
body of tenants takes in having the best-cared-for building and in
having risen to a higher and more civilised plane of living. They not
only live in a house, but they _know how to live_, they _know how to
respect_ the house in which they live.
This first impulse has led to other reforms. From the clean home will
come personal cleanliness. Dirty furniture cannot be tolerated in a
clean house, and those persons living in a permanently clean house will
come to desire personal cleanliness.
One of the most important hygienic reforms of the Association is that
of _the baths_. Each remodeled tenement has a place set apart for
bathrooms, furnished with tubs or shower, and having hot and cold water.
All the tenants in regular turn may use these baths, as, for example, in
various tenements the occupants go according to turn, to wash their
clothes in the fountain in the court. This is a great convenience which
invites the people to be clean. These hot and cold baths _within the
house_ are a great improvement upon the general public baths. In this
way we make possible to these people, at one and the same time, health
and refinement, opening not only to the sun, but to progress, those dark
habitations once the _vile caves_ of misery.
But in striving to realise its ideal of a semi-gratuitous maintenance of
its buildings, the Association met with a difficulty in regard to those
children under school age, who must often be left alone during the
entire day while their parents went out to work. These little ones, not
being able to understand the educative motives which taught their
parents to respect the house, became ignorant little vandals, defacing
the walls and stairs. And here we have another reform the expense of
which may be considered as indirectly assumed by the tenants as was the
care of the building. This reform may be considered as the most
brilliant transformation of a tax which progress and civilisation have
as yet devised. The "Children's House" is earned by the parents through
the care of the building. Its expenses are met by the sum that the
Association would have otherwise been forced to spend upon repairs. A
wonderful climax, this, of moral benefits received! Within the
"Children's House," which belongs exclusively to those children under
school age, working mothers may safely leave their little ones, and may
proceed with a feeling of great relief and freedom to their own work.
But this benefit, like that of the care of the house, is not conferred
without a tax of care and of good will. [6]The Regulations posted on the
walls announce it thus:
[6] See page 70.
"The mothers are obliged to send their children to the 'Children's
House' clean, and to co-operate with the Directress in the educational
work."
Two obligations: namely, the physical and moral care of their own
children. If the child shows through its conversation that the
educational work of the school is being undermined by the attitude taken
in his home, he will be sent back to his parents, to teach them thus how
to take advantage of their good opportunities. Those who give themselves
over to low-living, to fighting, and to brutality, shall feel upon them
the weight of those little lives, so needing care. They shall feel that
they themselves have once more cast into the darkness of neglect those
little creatures who are the dearest part of the family. In other words,
the parents must learn to _deserve_ the benefit of having within the
house the great advantage of a school for their little ones.
"Good will," a willingness to meet the demands of the Association is
enough, for the directress is ready and willing to teach them how. The
regulations say that the mother must go at least once a week, to confer
with the directress, giving an account of her child, and accepting any
helpful advice which the directress may be able to give. The advice thus
given will undoubtedly prove most illuminating in regard to the child's
health and education, since to each of the "Children's Houses" is
assigned a physician as well as a directress.
The directress is always at the disposition of the mothers, and her
life, as a cultured and educated person, is a constant example to the
inhabitants of the house, for she is obliged to live in the tenement and
to be therefore a co-habitant with the families of all her little
pupils. This is a fact of immense importance. Among these almost savage
people, into these houses where at night no one dared go about unarmed,
there has come not only to teach, _but to live the very life they live_,
a gentlewoman of culture, an educator by profession, who dedicates her
time and her life to helping those about her! A true missionary, a moral
queen among the people, she may, if she be possessed of sufficient tact
and heart, reap an unheard-of harvest of good from her social work.
This house is verily _new_; it would seem a dream impossible of
realisation, but it has been tried. It is true that there have been
before this attempts made by generous persons to go and live among the
poor to civilise them. But such work is not practical, unless the house
of the poor is hygienic, making it possible for people of better
standards to live there. Nor can such work succeed in its purpose unless
some common advantage or interest unites all of the tenants in an effort
toward better things.
This tenement is new also because of the pedagogical organisation of the
"Children's House." This is not simply a place where the children are
kept, not just an _asylum_, but a true school for their education, and
its methods are inspired by the rational principles of scientific
pedagogy.
The physical development of the children is followed, each child being
studied from the anthropological standpoint. Linguistic exercises, a
systematic sense-training, and exercises which directly fit the child
for the duties of practical life, form the basis of the work done. The
teaching is decidedly objective, and presents an unusual richness of
didactic material.
It is not possible to speak of all this in detail. I must, however,
mention that there already exists in connection with the school a
bathroom, where the children may be given hot or cold baths and where
they may learn to take a partial bath, hands, face, neck, ears. Wherever
possible the Association has provided a piece of ground in which the
children may learn to cultivate the vegetables in common use.
It is important that I speak here of the pedagogical progress attained
by the "Children's House" as an institution. Those who are conversant
with the chief problems of the school know that to-day much attention is
given to a great principle, one that is ideal and almost beyond
realisation,--the union of the family and the school in the matter of
educational aims. But the family is always something far away from the
school, and is almost always regarded as rebelling against its ideals.
It is a species of phantom upon which the school can never lay its
hands. The home is closed not only to pedagogical progress, but often to
social progress. We see here for the first time the possibility of
realising the long-talked-of pedagogical ideal. We have put _the school
within the house_; and this is not all. We have placed it within the
house as the _property of the collectivity_, leaving under the eyes of
the parents the whole life of the teacher in the accomplishment of her
high mission.
This idea of the collective ownership of the school is new and very
beautiful and profoundly educational.
The parents know that the "Children's House" is their property, and is
maintained by a portion of the rent they pay. The mothers may go at any
hour of the day to watch, to admire, or to meditate upon the life
there. It is in every way a continual stimulus to reflection, and a
fount of evident blessing and help to their own children. We may say
that the mothers _adore_ the "Children's House," and the directress. How
many delicate and thoughtful attentions these good mothers show the
teacher of their little ones! They often leave sweets or flowers upon
the sill of the schoolroom window, as a silent token, reverently, almost
religiously, given.
And when after three years of such a novitiate, the mothers send their
children to the common schools, they will be excellently prepared to
co-operate in the work of education, and will have acquired a sentiment,
rarely found even among the best classes; namely, the idea that they
must _merit_ through their own conduct and with their own virtue, the
possession of an educated son.
Another advance made by the "Children's Houses" as an institution is
related to scientific pedagogy. This branch of pedagogy, heretofore,
being based upon the anthropological study of the pupil whom it is to
educate, has touched only a few of the positive questions which tend to
transform education. For a man is not only a biological but a social
product, and the social environment of individuals in the process of
education, is the home. Scientific pedagogy will seek in vain to better
the new generation if it does not succeed in influencing also the
environment within which this new generation grows! I believe,
therefore, that in opening the house to the light of new truths, and to
the progress of civilisation we have solved the problem of being able to
modify directly, the _environment_ of the new generation, and have thus
made it possible to apply, in a practical way, the fundamental
principles of scientific pedagogy.
The "Children's House" marks still another triumph; it is the first step
toward the _socialisation of the house_. The inmates find under their
own roof the convenience of being able to leave their little ones in a
place, not only safe, but where they have every advantage.
And let it be remembered that _all_ the mothers in the tenement may
enjoy this privilege, going away to their work with easy minds. Until
the present time only one class in society might have this advantage.
Rich women were able to go about their various occupations and
amusements, leaving their children in the hands of a nurse or a
governess. To-day the women of the people who live in these remodeled
houses, may say, like the great lady, "I have left my son with the
governess and the nurse." More than this, they may add, like the
princess of the blood, "And the house physician watches over them and
directs their sane and sturdy growth." These women, like the most
advanced class of English and American mothers, possess a "Biographical
Chart," which, filled for the mother by the directress and the doctor,
gives her the most practical knowledge of her child's growth and
condition.
We are all familiar with the ordinary advantages of the communistic
transformation of the general environment. For example, the collective
use of railway carriages, of street lights, of the telephone, all these
are great advantages. The enormous production of useful articles,
brought about by industrial progress, makes possible to all, clean
clothes, carpets, curtains, table-delicacies, better tableware, etc. The
making of such benefits generally tends to level social caste. All this
we have seen in its reality. But the communising of _persons_ is new.
That the collectivity shall benefit from the services of the servant,
the nurse, the teacher--this is a modern ideal.
We have in the "Children's Houses" a demonstration of this ideal which
is unique in Italy or elsewhere. Its significance is most profound, for
it corresponds to a need of the times. We can no longer say that the
convenience of leaving their children takes away from the mother a
natural social duty of first importance; namely, that of caring for and
educating her tender offspring. No, for to-day the social and economic
evolution calls the working-woman to take her place among wage-earners,
and takes away from her by force those duties which would be most dear
to her! The mother must, in any event, leave her child, and often with
the pain of knowing him to be abandoned. The advantages furnished by
such institutions are not limited to the labouring classes, but extend
also to the general middle-class, many of whom work with the brain.
Teachers, professors, often obliged to give private lessons after school
hours, frequently leave their children to the care, of some rough and
ignorant maid-of-all-work. Indeed, the first announcement of the
"Children's House" was followed by a deluge of letters from persons of
the better class demanding that these helpful reforms be extended to
their dwellings.
We are, then, communising a "maternal function," a feminine duty, within
the house. We may see here in this practical act the solving of many of
woman's problems which have seemed to many impossible of solution. What
then will become of the home, one asks, if the woman goes away from it?
The home will be transformed and will assume the functions of the woman.
I believe that in the future of society other forms of communistic life
will come.
Take, for example, the infirmary; woman is the natural nurse for the
dear ones of her household. But who does not know how often in these
days she is obliged to tear herself unwillingly from the bedside of her
sick to go to her work? Competition is great, and her absence from her
post threatens the tenure of the position from which she draws the means
of support. To be able to leave the sick one in a "house-infirmary," to
which she may have access any free moments she may have, and where she
is at liberty to watch during the night, would be an evident advantage
to such a woman.
And how great would be the progress made in the matter of family
hygiene, in all that relates to isolation and disinfection! Who does not
know the difficulties of a poor family when one child is ill of some
contagions disease, and should be isolated from the others? Often such a
family may have no kindred or friends in the city to whom the other
children may be sent.
Much more distant, but not impossible, is the communal kitchen, where
the dinner ordered in the morning is sent at the proper time, by means
of a dumb-waiter, to the family dining-room. Indeed, this has been
successfully tried in America. Such a reform would be of the greatest
advantage to those families of the middle-class who must confide their
health and the pleasures of the table to the hands of an ignorant
servant who ruins the food. At present, the only alternative in such
cases is to go outside the home to some cafe where a cheap table d'hote
may be had.
Indeed, the transformation of the house must compensate for the loss in
the family of the presence of the woman who has become a social
wage-earner.
In this way the house will become a centre, drawing into itself all
those good things which have hitherto been lacking: schools, public
baths, hospitals, etc.
Thus the tendency will be to change the tenement houses, which have been
places of vice and peril, into centres of education, of refinement, of
comfort. This will be helped if, besides the schools for the children,
there may grow up also _clubs_ and reading-rooms for the inhabitants,
especially for the men, who will find there a way to pass the evening
pleasantly and decently. The tenement-club, as possible and as useful in
all social classes as is the "Children's House," will do much toward
closing the gambling-houses and saloons to the great moral advantage of
the people. And I believe that the Association of Good Building will
before long establish such clubs in its reformed tenements here in the
Quarter of San Lorenzo; clubs where the tenants may find newspapers and
books, and where they may hear simple and helpful lectures.
We are, then, very far from the dreaded dissolution of the home and of
the family, through the fact that woman has been forced by changed
social and economic conditions to give her time and strength to
remunerative work. The home itself assumes the gentle feminine
attributes of the domestic housewife. The day may come when the tenant,
having given to the proprietor of the house a certain sum, shall receive
in exchange whatever is necessary to the _comfort_ of life; in other
words, the administration shall become the _steward_ of the family.
The house, thus considered, tends to assume in its evolution a
significance more exalted than even the English word "home" expresses.
It does not consist of walls alone, though these walls be the pure and
shining guardians of that intimacy which is the sacred symbol of the
family. The home shall become more than this. It lives! It has a soul.
It may be said to embrace its inmates with the tender, consoling arms
of woman. It is the giver of moral life, of blessings; it cares for, it
educates and feeds the little ones. Within it, the tired workman shall
find rest and newness of life. He shall find there the intimate life of
the family, and its happiness.
The new woman, like the butterfly come forth from the chrysalis, shall
be liberated from all those attributes which once made her desirable to
man only as the source of the material blessings of existence. She shall
be, like man, an individual, a free human being, a social worker; and,
like man, she shall seek blessing and repose within the house, the house
which has been reformed and communised.
She shall wish to be loved for herself and not as a giver of comfort and
repose. She shall wish a love free from every form of servile labour.
The goal of human love is not the egotistical end of assuring its own
satisfaction--it is the sublime goal of multiplying the forces of the
free spirit, making it almost Divine, and, within such beauty and light,
perpetuating the species.
This ideal love is made incarnate by Frederick Nietzsche, in the woman
of Zarathustra, who conscientiously wished her son to be better than
she. "Why do you desire me?" she asks the man. "Perhaps because of the
perils of a solitary life?
"In that case go far from me. I wish the man who has conquered himself,
who has made his soul great. I wish the man who has conserved a clean
and robust body. I wish the man who desires to unite with me, body and
soul, to create a son! A son better, more perfect, stronger, than any
created heretofore!"
To better the species consciously, cultivating his own health, his own
virtue, this should be the goal of man's married life. It is a sublime
concept of which, as yet, few think. And the socialised home of the
future, living, provident, kindly; educator and comforter; is the true
and worthy home of those human mates who wish to better the species, and
to send the race forward triumphant into the eternity of life!
RULES AND REGULATIONS OF THE "CHILDREN'S HOUSES"
The Roman Association of Good Building hereby establishes within its
tenement house number, a "Children's House," in which may be gathered
together all children under common school age, belonging to the families
of the tenants.
The chief aim of the "Children's House" is to offer, free of charge, to
the children of those parents who are obliged to absent themselves for
their work, the personal care which the parents are not able to give.
In the "Children's House" attention is given to the education, the
health, the physical and moral development of the children. This work is
carried on in a way suited to the age of the children.
There shall be connected with the "Children's House" a Directress, a
Physician, and a Caretaker.
The programme and hours of the "Children's House" shall be fixed by the
Directress.
There may be admitted to the "Children's House" all the children in the
tenement between the ages of three and seven.
The parents who wish to avail themselves of the advantages of the
"Children's House" pay nothing. They must, however, assume these binding
obligations:
(a) To send their children to the "Children's House" at the
appointed time, clean in body and clothing, and provided with
a suitable apron.
(b) To show the greatest respect and deference toward the
Directress and toward all persons connected with the
"Children's House," and to co-operate with the Directress
herself in the education of the children. Once a week, at
least, the mothers may talk with the Directress, giving her
information concerning the home life of the child, and
receiving helpful advice from her.
There shall be expelled from the "Children's House":
(a) Those children who present themselves unwashed, or in
soiled clothing.
(b) Those who show themselves to be incorrigible.
(c) Those whose parents fail in respect to the persons
connected with the "Children's House," or who destroy through
bad conduct the educational work of the institution.
CHAPTER IV
PEDAGOGICAL METHODS USED IN THE "CHILDREN'S HOUSES"
As soon as I knew that I had at my disposal a class of little children,
it was my wish to make of this school a field for scientific
experimental pedagogy and child psychology. I started with a view in
which Wundt concurs; namely, that child psychology does not exist.
Indeed, experimental researches in regard to childhood, as, for example,
those of Preyer and Baldwin, have been made upon not more than two or
three subjects, children of the investigators. Moreover, the instruments
of psychometry must be greatly modified and simplified before they can
be used with children, who do not lend themselves passively as subjects
for experimentation. Child psychology can be established only through
the method of external observation. We must renounce all idea of making
any record of internal states, which can be revealed only by the
introspection of the subject himself. The instruments of psychometric
research, as applied to pedagogy, have up to the present time been
limited to the esthesiometric phase of the study.
My intention was to keep in touch with the researches of others, but to
make myself independent of them, proceeding to my work without
preconceptions of any kind. I retained as the only essential, the
affirmation, or, rather, the definition of Wundt, that "all methods of
experimental psychology may be reduced to one; namely, carefully
recorded observation of the subject."
Treating of children, another factor must necessarily intervene: the
study of the development. Here too, I retained the same general
criterion, but without clinging to any dogma about the activity of the
child according to age.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONSIDERATION
In regard to physical development, my first thought was given to the
regulating of anthropometric observations, and to the selection of the
most important observations to be made.
I designed an anthropometer provided with the metric scale, varying
between .50 metre and 1.50 metres. A small stool, 30 centimetres high,
could be placed upon the floor of the anthropometer for measurements
taken in a sitting position. I now advise making the anthropometer with
a platform on either side of the pole bearing the scale, so that on one
side the total stature can be measured, and on the other the height of
the body when seated. In the second case, the zero is indicated at 30
centimetres; that is, it corresponds to the seat of the stool, which is
fixed. The indicators on the vertical post are independent one of the
other and this makes it possible to measure two children at the same
time. In this way the inconvenience and waste of time caused by having
to move the seat about, is obviated, and also the trouble of having to
calculate the difference in the metric scale.
Having thus facilitated the technique of the researches, I decided to
take the measurements of the children's stature, seated and standing,
every month, and in order to have these regulated as exactly as possible
in their relation to development, and also to give greater regularity
to the research work of the teacher, I made a rule that the measurements
should be taken on the day on which the child completed each month of
his age. For this purpose I designed a register arranged on the
following plan:--
==========================================================
|| SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER
---------++--------------------+--------------------------
Day of || Stature | Stature Etc.
month |+----------+---------+----------+---------------
|| Standing | Sitting | Standing | Sitting
---------++----------+---------+----------+---------------
1 || | | |
|+----------+---------+----------+---------------
2 || | | |
|+----------+---------+----------+---------------
3 || | | |
|+----------+---------+----------+---------------
4 || | | |
|+----------+---------+----------+---------------
Etc. || | | |
---------++----------+---------+----------+---------------
The spaces opposite each number are used to register the name of the
child born on that day of the month. Thus the teacher knows which
scholars she must measure on the days which are marked on the calendar,
and she fills in his measurements to correspond with the month in which
he was born. In this way a most exact registration can be arrived at
without having the teacher feel that she is overburdened, or fatigued.
With regard to the weight of the child, I have arranged that it shall be
taken every week on a pair of scales which I have placed in the
dressing-room where the children are given their bath. According to the
day on which the child is born, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., we
have him weighed when he is ready to take a bath. Thus the children's
baths (no small matter when we consider a class of fifty) are
sub-divided into seven days, and from three to five children go to the
bath every day. Certainly, theoretically, a daily bath would be
desirable, but in order to manage this a large bath or a number of small
ones would be necessary, so that a good many children could be bathed at
once. Even a weekly bath entails many difficulties, and sometimes has to
be given up. In any case, I have distributed the taking of the weight in
the order stated with the intention of thus arranging for and making
sure of periodical baths.[7]
[7] Incidentally, I may say, that I have invented a means
of bathing children contemporaneously, without having a
large bath. In order to manage this, I thought of having a
long trough with supports at the bottom, on which small,
separate tubs could rest, with rather large holes in the
bottom. The little tubs are filled from the large trough, into
which the water runs and then goes into all the little tubs
together, by the law of the levelling of liquids, going
through the holes in the bottom. When the water is settled, it
does not pass from tub to tub, and the children will each have
their own bath. The emptying of the trough brings with it the
simultaneous emptying of the little tubs, which being of light
metal, will be easily moved from the bottom of the big tub, in
order to clean it. It is not difficult to imagine arranging a
cork for the hole at the bottom. These are only projects for
the future!
The form here given shows the register which we use in recording the
weight of the children. Every page of the register corresponds to a
month.
It seems to me that the anthropological measurements, the taking and
recording of which I have just described, should be the only ones with
which the schoolmistress need occupy herself; and, therefore, the only
ones which should be taken actually within the school. It is my plan
that other measurements should be taken by a physician, who either is,
or is preparing to be, a specialist in infant anthropology. In the
meantime, I take these special measurements myself.
======================================================
| SEPTEMBER
+----------+----------+----------+----------
| 1st week | 2nd week | 3rd week | 4th week
| Lbs. | Lbs. | Lbs. | Lbs.
+----------+----------+----------+----------
Monday____|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
Tuesday___|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
Wednesday_|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
______|__________|__________|__________|__________
Etc. | | | |
| | | |
----------+----------+----------+----------+----------
The examination made by the physician must necessarily be complex, and
to facilitate and regulate the taking of these measurements I have
designed and had printed biological charts, of which I here give an
example.
_Number_ _____________ _Date_ _________________
_Name and Surname_ ______________________________ _Age_ ________
_Name of Parents_ ________ _Mother's Age_ ___ _Father's Age_ ___
_Professions_ __________________________________________
_Details of Hereditary Antecedents_ ____________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_Personal Antecedents_ ________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTES
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Standing | Weight | Chest | Seated | Index of | Ponderal |
| Stature | | Meas. | Stature | Stature[8] | Index[9] |
|----------+--------+-------+---------+------------+----------|
| | | | | | |
|----------+--------+-------+---------+------------+----------|
| | | | | | |
+----------+--------+-------+---------+------------+----------+
+------------------------------------+
| HEAD |
|----------------+-------------------|
| | Dia. | Dia. | Cephalic |
| Cir. | Front | Across | Index |
| | to Back | | |
|------+---------+--------+----------|
| | | | |
|------+---------+--------+----------|
| | | | |
+------+---------+--------+----------+
_Physical Constitution_ ________________________________
_Condition of Muscles_ ________________________________
_Colour of Skin_ ______________________________________
_Colour of Hair_ ______________________________________
NOTES
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
[8] For the Index of Stature Dr. Montessori combines the seated and
standing statures.
[9] The Ponderal Index is found by combining the height and weight.
As will be seen, these charts are very simple. I made them so because I
wished the doctor and the schoolmistress to be able to use them freely
and independently.
By this method the anthropometrical records are arranged in an orderly
way, while the simplicity of the mechanism, and the clearness of the
charts, guarantee the making of such observations as I have considered
fundamental. Referring to the physician's biographical chart, I advise
that once
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