If, on the other hand, he seems distressed at the difficulties before him, and calls repeatedly for help and explanation, one of three conditions is present. Either the exercise is too hard for him, or he has acquired already the bad habit of dependence on others, in both of which cases he needs an easier exercise; or, lastly, he has simply had enough formal “sensory exercises” for a while. It is the most mistaken notion about the Montessori Children’s Home to conceive that the children are occupied from morning till night over the apparatus of her formal instruction. They use it exactly as long, or as often, or as seldom, as they please, just as a child in an ordinary nursery uses his ordinary toys. It must be kept constantly in mind that the wonderful successes attained by the Montessori schools in Rome cannot be repeated by the mere repetition of sensory exercises, thrust spasmodically into the midst of another system, or lack of system, in child-training. The Italian children of five or six, who have had two or three years of Montessori discipline, and who are such marvels of sweet, reasonable self-control, who govern their own lives so sanely, who have accomplished such astonishing feats in reading and writing, are the results of many other factors besides buttoning-frames and geometric insets, important as these are.
[Illustration: BUTTONING-FRAMES TO DEVELOP CO-ORDINATED MOVEMENTS OF THE FINGERS AND PREPARE THE CHILDREN FOR EXERCISES OF PRACTICAL LIFE.
Perhaps the most vital of these other factors is the sense of responsibility, genuine responsibility, not the make-believe kind, with which we are too often apt to put off our children when they first show their touchingly generous impulse to share some of the burdens of our lives. For instance, to take a rather extreme instance, but one which we must all have seen, a child in an ordinary home is allowed to pick up a bit of waste-paper on the floor, after having had his attention called to it, and is told to throw it in the waste-paper basket. This action of mechanical obedience, suitable only for a child under two years of age, is then praised insincerely to the child’s face as an instance of “how _much_ help he is to Mother!”