I leave to the last chapter the question, a most searching and painful one for me, as to whether the Casa dei Bambini will not ultimately be the Home for all our children, and here confine myself to the statement, which no unprejudiced mind can deny, that such an institution, arranged as it has been with the most single-hearted desire to further the children’s interests, is now better adapted for child-life than our average homes, into which children may be welcomed lovingly, but which are adapted in every detail of their material, intellectual, and spiritual life for adults only. It is my firm conviction that, in my own case, a working compromise may be effected, thanks to my alarmed jealousy of the greater perfection of the Montessori Children’s Home; but I realize that it required the alarming sight and study of that institution to make me see that I was forcing my children to live under a great many unnecessary restrictions. And, if there is one thing above all others to be kept in mind by a convert to these new ideas it is that an _unnecessary restriction in a child’s life is a crime_. The most puritanical soul among us must see that there are quite enough necessary restrictions for the child, if they are all recognized and rigorously obeyed, to serve as disciplinary forces to the most turbulent nature.
SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON THE NATURE OF “DISCIPLINE”
With the last affirmation of the preceding chapter I have brought myself to another bed-rock principle of this new religion of childhood, one which at first I was unable to understand and hence to accept. In my very blood there runs that conviction of the necessity for discipline which colored so profoundly all early New England life. At the sight of this too-pleasant and too-smiling world of children, some old Puritan of an ancestor sprang to life in me and cried out sourly, “But it’s good for children to do what they don’t like to do, and to keep on with something after they want to stop. They must in later life. They should begin now.”
The answer to this objection is one I have had practically to work out for myself, since the Italian exponents of the system, having back of them an unbroken line of life-loving and life-trusting Latin forefathers, found it practically impossible to understand what was in my mind. There was much talk of “discipline” in their discussion of the theories of the method; but evidently they did not attach the same meaning to the word as the one I had been trained to use. This fact led me to meditate on what I myself really meant by discipline: a process of definition which, as it always does, clarified my ideas and proved them in some respects quite different from what I had thought them.