It is true that self-control in the face of pain or indifference is a necessary element in adult moral and intellectual life, but it now appears that, like every other factor in life, it must start from small beginnings and grow slowly. The buttoning boy showed not only self-control, but the only variety of it which a baby is capable of manifesting. When I had the notion that I ought (for his own good, of course) to demand of him self-control in the face of pain, even of a very small pain, I was asking something which he could not as yet give, and of which compulsory obedience could only obtain an empty and misleading appearance, an appearance really harmful to the child’s best interests since it completely blinded me to the fact that he had not made the least beginning towards attaining a real self-control. He must begin slowly to learn self-control, as he must begin slowly to learn how to walk. I am quite satisfied if he takes a single step at first, because I know that is the essential. If he can do that, he will ultimately learn to climb a mountain. If he can overcome the naturally vagrant impulses of his mind through intellectual interest (for it is none other) in the completion of his task of buttoning up the cloth on his frame, he has begun a mental habit the value of which cannot be overestimated, and which will later, in its full development, make it possible for him to master calculus without the agonizing, too-tardy effort at mental self-control which embittered my own struggle with that subject.
From time immemorial, the child himself has always instinctively used in his games and plays this method of learning self-control and mental concentration, as much as adults would allow him. The admirable, thoroughgoing concentration of a child on a game of marbles or ball is proverbial; but while the rest of us, with some unsystematic exceptions, have looked idly on at this great natural stream of mental vigor pouring itself out in profusion before our eyes, Dr. Montessori has stepped in with an ingeniously devised waterwheel and set it to work.
The child in the Casa dei Bambini advances from one scientifically graded stage of mental self-control to the next, from the buttoning-frames to the geometric insets, from these to their use in drawing and the control of the pencil, and then on into the mastery of the alphabet, always with a greater and greater control of the processes of his mind.