There are no two plants, in all the infinity of vegetable life, which are exactly alike. There are not, so geologists tell us, even two stones precisely the same. To lump children (even two or three children closely related) in a mass, with generalizations about what will appeal to them, is a mental habit that experience constantly and luridly proves to be the extremest folly. This does not mean individualism run wild. There are some general broad principles which hold true of all plants, and which we will do well to learn from an experienced gardener. All plants prosper better out-of-doors than in a cellar, and all children have activity for the law of their nature. But lilies-of-the-valley shrivel up in the amount of sunshine which supplies just the right conditions for nasturtiums, and your particular three-year-old may need a much quieter (or more boisterous) activity than his four-year-old sister. Neither of them may be, at first, in the least attracted by the problem of the geometric insets, or by the idea of matching colors. They may not have reached that stage, or they may have gone beyond it. You will need all your ingenuity and your good judgment to find out where they are, intellectually, and what they are intellectually. The Montessori rule is never to try to force or even to coax a child to use any part of the apparatus. The problem involved is explained to him clearly, and if he feels no spontaneous desire to solve it, no effort is made to induce him to undertake it. Some other bit of apparatus is what, for the moment, he needs, and one only wastes time in trying to persuade him to feel an interest which he is, for the time, incapable of.
If you doubt this, and most of us feel a lingering suspicion that we know better than the child what he wants, look back over your own school-life and confess to yourself how utterly has vanished from your mind the information forced upon you in courses which did not arouse your interest. My own private example of that is a course on “government.” I was an ordinarily intelligent and conscientious child, and I attended faithfully all the interminable dreary recitations of that subject, even filling a note-book with selections from the teacher’s remarks, and, at the end of the course, passing a fairly creditable examination. The only proof I have of all this is the record of the examination and the presence, among my relics of the past, of the note-book in my handwriting; for, among all the souvenirs of my school-life, there is not one faintest trace of any knowledge about the way in which people are governed. I cannot even remember that I ever did know anything about it. My mind is a perfect, absolute blank on the subject, although I can remember the look of the schoolroom in which I sat to hear the lectures on it, I can see the face of the teacher as plainly as though she still stood before me, I can recall the pictures on the wall, the very graining of the wood on my desk. There is only no more recollection of the subject than if the lectures had been delivered in Hindustani. The long hours I spent in that classroom are as wholly wasted and lost out of my all-too-short life as though I had been thrust into a dark closet for those three hours a week. Even the amount of “discipline” I received, namely the capacity to sit still and endure almost intolerable ennui, would have been exactly as great in one case as in the other, and would have cost the State far less.