Читать книгу A Montessori Mother онлайн

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One day she reached over shyly for a buttoning frame, left on the next table by a child who had wandered off to other joys. She sat with this some time, looking about suspiciously to see if some adult were meditating that condescending swoop of patronizing congratulation which is so offensive to the self-respecting pride of a naturally reserved personality. No one noticed her. Still glancing up with frequent suspicious starts, she began trying to insert the buttons in the buttonholes, and then, by degrees, lost herself, forgot entirely the tragic self-consciousness which had embittered her little life, and with a real “Montessori face,” a countenance of ardent, happy, self-forgetting interest in overcoming obstacles, she set definitely to work. After a time, finding that her cape impeded her motions, she flung it off, taking unconsciously the step into which, three days before, only superior physical force could have coerced her.

I watched her through the winter with much interest, her reticent, self-contained nature always marking her off from the other little ones more or less, and I rejoiced to see that all the natural manifestations of her differing individuality were religiously respected by the wise Directress. It was not long before she was trotting freely about the room choosing her activities with lively delight, and looking on with friendly, though never very intimate, interest at the doings of the other children. But it was months before she cared to join at all in enterprises undertaken in common by the majority of the pupils, the rollicking file, for instance, which stamped about lustily in time to the music. She watched them, half-astonished, half-disapproving, wholly contented with her own permitted aloofness, like a slim little greyhound watching the light-hearted, heavy-footed antics of a litter of Newfoundland puppies. At least one person who saw her thanked Heaven many times that a kind Providence had saved her from well-meaning adult efforts to make her over according to the Newfoundland pattern. Hers was a rare individuality, the integrity of which was being preserved entire for the future leavening of an all-too-uniform civilization. For although the Montessori school furnishes the best possible practical training for democracy, inasmuch as every child learns speedily first the joys of self-dependence and then the self-abnegating pleasure of serving others, it is also preparing the greatest possible amelioration of our present-day democracy, by counteracting that bad, but apparently not inevitable, tendency of democracy to a dead level of uniform and characterless mediocrity. The Casa dei Bambini proves in actual practice that even the best interests of the sacred majority do not demand that powerful and differing individualities be forced into a common mould, but only guided into the higher forms of their own natural activities.