Читать книгу A Montessori Mother онлайн

45 страница из 51

This brief digression is an illustration of the way in which every thoughtful observer in a Montessori school falls from time to time into a brown study which takes him far afield from the busy babies before him. No greater tribute to the broadly human and universal foundation of the system could be presented than this inevitable tendency in visitors to see in the differing childish activities the unchaining of great natural forces for good which have been kept locked and padlocked by our inertia, our short-sightedness, our lack of confidence in human nature, and our deep-rooted and unfounded prejudice about childhood, our instinctive, mistaken, harsh conviction that it will be industrious, law-abiding, and self-controlled only under pressure from the outside.

It must be admitted that there is one variety of child who is the mortal terror of Montessori teachers. This is not the violently insubordinate child, because his violence and insubordination at home only indicate a strong nature which requires nothing but proper activities to turn it to powerful and energetic life. No, what reduces a Montessori teacher to despair is a child like one I saw in a school for the children of the wealthy, a beautiful, exquisitely attired little fairy of four, whose lovely, healthful body had been cared for with the most scientific exactitude by trained nurses, governesses, and nurse-maids, and the very springs of whose natural initiative and invention seemed to have been broken by the debilitating ministrations of all those caretakers. It is significant that the teacher of this school admitted to me that she found her carefully-reared pupils generally more listless, more selfish, harder to reach, and harder to stimulate than poor children; but the least prosperous of us need not think that because we cannot afford nurse-maids our children will fare better than those of millionaires, for one too devoted mother can equal a regiment of servants in crushing out a child’s initiative, his natural desire for self-dependence, his self-respect, and his natural instinct for self-education.