A Montessori Mother
9781465636997
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
AN observation often made by philosophic observers of our social organization is that the tremendous importance of primary teachers is ridiculously underestimated. The success or failure of the teachers of little children may not perhaps determine the amount of information acquired later in its educative career by each generation, but no one can deny that it determines to a considerable extent the character of the next generation, and character determines practically everything worth considering in the world of men. Yet the mind of the average community admits this but haltingly. The teachers of small children are paid more than they were, but still far less than the importance of their work deserves, and they are still regarded by the unenlightened majority as insignificant compared to those who impart information to older children and adolescents, a class of pupils which, in the nature of things, is vastly more able to protect its own individuality from the character of the teacher. But is there a thoughtful parent living who has not quailed at the haphazard way in which Fate has pitchforked him into a profession greatly more important and enormously more difficult? For it is not quite fair to us to say that we chose the profession of parent with our eyes open when we repeated the words of the marriage service. It cannot be denied that every pair of fiancés know that probably they will have children, but this knowledge has about the same degree of first-hand vividness in their minds that the knowledge of ultimate certain death has in the mind of the average healthy young person: there is as little conscious preparation for the coming event in the one case as in the other. No, we have some right on our side, under the prevailing conditions of education about the facts of life, in claiming that we are tossed headlong by a force stronger than ourselves into a profession and a terrifying responsibility which many of us would never have had the presumption to undertake in cold blood. We might conceivably have undertaken to build railway bridges, even though the lives of multitudes depended on them; we might have become lawyers and settled people’s material affairs for them or even, as doctors, settled the matter of their physical life or death; but to be responsible to God, to society, and to the soul in question for the health, happiness, moral growth, and usefulness of a human soul, what reflective parent among the whole army of us has not had moments of heartsick terror at the realization of what he has been set to do? I say “moments” advisedly, for it must be admitted that most of us manage to forget pretty continually the alarming possibilities of our situation. In this we are imitating the curious actual indifference to peril which, from time immemorial, has been observed among those who are exposed to any danger which is very long continued. The incapacity of human nature to feel any strong emotion for a considerable length of time, even one connected with the supposedly sacrosanct instinct for self-preservation, is to be observed in the well-worn examples of people living on the sides of volcanoes, and of workers among machinery, who will not take the most elementary precautions against accidents if the precautions consume much time or thought. Consequently it is not surprising that, as a whole, parents are not only not stricken to the earth by the responsibilities of their situation, but as a class are singularly blind to their duties, and oddly difficult to move to any serious, continued consideration of the task before them.
