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136 THE CRISIS

[[portrait of 3 women captioned: MISS R. L. JONES, Fisk; MISS EDITH WRIGHT Cleveland High School; MISS ISABELLA VANDERVALL New York Medical College

mind is that of general mud sill to society--dumb, faithful, disfranchised and cheap. 
If this is not what is meant then let young people like those pictured on these pages have a chance for such higher and fuller self-development as will enable them to compete with modern men under modern conditions. Is it fair to educate a race of scullions and then complain of their lack of proven ability?

THE MONTESSORI METHOD--ITS POSSIBILITIES
By Jessie Fauset
NO one probably arrives at his majority without beginning that habit of retrospection which is to be with him more or less of rate rest of his life. It is at times like these that he is brought face to face with the realization of the years it has taken him to get, so to speak, on his mental feet. Such an appalling waste, and even yet he is lumbering! His judgment is not always stable, his mental acts somehow lack co-ordination, his self-control is at best dependent on environment, and his initiative is often entirely lacking.
Indeed, when one considers the pitiful brevity of the allotted span of year, the amount of time generally deemed necessary to fit an individual to become a useful member of society seems totally disproportionate and ridiculous. Twenty-one years--one-third of a man's whole life. The lower animals, especially cats and dogs, seldom live beyond the age of ten years. Suppose it took a kitten three years to learn to co-ordinate its movements to the catching of a mouse, to learn to control its body and its faint mentality! One is amused at the idea. 
It is not hard to place the faults in the development of human beings. There are many. But surely these are the two most obvious. The child is trained from infancy to abject dependence on his elders. Secondly, he is a girt about with rules and precedents which stifle originality and initiative. He is simply smothered by too much and wrongly applied care and kindness. 
Now it is exactly this condition of affairs that the Montessori system is seeking to obviate. Doctor Montessori, in a long and scientific study of childhood, has arrived at, among many others, the following important conclusions: First, the the child naturally independent; secondly, that he is ambitious to prove this; thirdly, that he will, if his small feet are once set upon the way, 

137 THE MONTESSORI METHOD

spontaneously arrive at a given point; and fourthly, that his powers of initiative are tremendous.
With these views in mind, Dr. Montessori set about the development of that system which bids far to revolutionize the educational schemes of the world. Her slogan is "Liberate the personality of the cild, permit him his natural manifestations; let him choose his activities, for it makes very little difference what he does, as long as he does no harm."
Again she says: "We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at the time when the child is just beginning to be active; perhaps we suffocate life itself."
All this sounds very simple; so simple, one may say, that it scarcely needs exploiting, but wait. Consider our modern schools and their methods. There one sees row after row of little children, and in the higher schools big children, too, seated in clamped-down benches that cannot possibly allow freedom to all. Everybody, except in very rare cases, is subject to the same rules; everybody has his facts presented in the same general manner; everybody is engaged, particularly in the lower schools, in about the same activities.
Now in the Case del Bambini, the Children's Houses in the quarter of San Lorenzo in Rome, all this is different. Here the children sit, when they are sitting, in small, comfortable, portable armchairs. Here, while one child fingers the wooden letters of the alphabet and unconsciously learns to distinguish between them, another is absorbed in touching pieces of silk and velvet and sandpaper, and so learning the difference between "rough" and "smooth." A third is interested in a wooden frame on which are mounted two pieces of cloth or leather to be fastened and unfastened by mens of the buttons and buttonholes, hooks and eyes, eyelets and lacings, or automatic fastenings. 
That little girl will get up some morning, and before she realizes it will begin to fasten her little garments herself. When she does realize her ability, think of the eagerness with which she will try to manipulate all the strings and bows and buttons she possesses. She will have attained independence.
Naturally enough, the question arises: How, in a school of this order, is discipline maintained? If by discipline is meant the stolidity, the utter silence, the rigidity maintained by or rather forced on pupils in the ordinary schools, the answer, of course, must be, there is no discipline. And yet no one could call the pupils in the "Children's Houses" disorderly. The point is that the child is taught here that good and immobility, evil and activity, are not necessarily synonymous. As a result, there is generally to be found in these classrooms the pleasant bustle of intense preoccupation.
The children in one group are helping a teacher to put away the didactic material, and their services are never refused. Because the child is distrusted he does his best. In a few days--at most in a few weeks--he is able to carry one of the little armchairs from one place to another, without coming in contact with anything. He gathers up the cardboard letters and arranges them in their boxes just as sees the teacher do it. Gradually, unconsciously, he acquires the habit of keeping his own this in order. Sometimes a child who has been working at some self-imposed task attains perfection with unexpected celerity and utters an exclamation of joy. But this does not interfere. Either the other children, attracted by his pleasure, group themselves around him and he tries to show them how he met his success, or else, incited by his example, they bend to their own tasks with renewed energy. 
Most important of all, very few of these children are persistently naughty. They have no occasion to be. For, as Dr. Montessori says, naughtiness is very often the instinctive effort of the child to assert a repressed personality. Since these children's activities are not repressed, but are simply directed into safe channels, and there allowed full play--there is no need for such assertion. Thus, these tiny children, ranging in age from three years upward, acquire a discipline which will be theirs when hard and fast laws and restrictions fail.
One of the most important aims of the Montessori system is the direct training of the senses. We have already spoken briefly of the deliberate development of the sense of touch, whereby the child is enabled, to distinguish between rough and smooth, thick and thin, heavy and light. Indeed, the children finally grow to look upon their ten fingers as their "other eyes." The sense of sight, however, particularly in regard to colors, is also given barely attention.