SOME GENERAL REMARKS ABOUT THE MONTESSORI APPARATUS IN THE AMERICAN HOME
The first thing to do, if you can manage it, is to secure a set of the Montessori apparatus. It is the result of the ripest thought, ingenuity, and practical experience of a gifted specialist who has concentrated all her forces on the invention of the different devices of her apparatus. But there are various supplementary statements to be made which modify this simple advice.
One is, that the arrival in your home of the box containing the Montessori apparatus means just as much for the mental welfare of your children as the arrival in the kitchen of a box of miscellaneous groceries means for their physical health. The presence on the pantry shelf of a bag of the best flour ever made will not satisfy your children’s hunger unless you add brains and good judgment to it, and make edible, digestible bread for them. There is nothing magical or miraculous about the Montessori apparatus. It is as yet the best raw material produced for satisfying the intellectual hunger of normal children from three to six, but it will have practically no effect on them if its use is not regulated by the most attentive care, supplemented by a keen and never-ceasing objective scrutiny of the children who are to use it. This is one reason why mothers find it harder to educate their children by the Montessori system (as by all other systems) than teachers do, for they have an age-long mental habit of clasping their little ones so close in their arms that, figuratively speaking, they never get a fair, square look at them.
This study of the children is an essential part of all education which Dr. Montessori is among the first pointedly and definitely to emphasize. The necessity for close observation of conditions before any attempt is made to modify them is an intellectual habit which is the direct result of the methods of positive sciences, in the study of which she received her intellectual training. Just as the astronomer looks fixedly at the stars, and the biologist at the protoplasm before he tries to generalize about their ways of life and action, so we must learn honestly and whole-heartedly to try to see what sort of children Mary and Bob and Billy _are_, as well as to love them with all our might. This should not be, as it is apt to be, a study limited to their moral characteristics, to seeing that Mary’s fault is vanity and Bob’s is indifference, but should be directed with the most passionate attention to their intellectual traits as well, to the way in which they naturally learn or don’t learn, to the doors which are open, and those which are shut, to their intellectual interest. For children of three and four have a life which it is no exaggeration to call genuinely intellectual, and their constant presence under the eyes of their parents gives us a chance to know this, which helps to make up for our lack of educational theory and experience in which almost any teacher outstrips us.