In other words, when there is some real occasion for formulating or obeying a law which facilitates social life, they formulate it and obey it from an inward conviction, based on genuine circumstances of their own lives, that they must do so, or life would not be tolerable for any of them; and when there is no genuine occasion for their making this really great sacrifice for the common weal, they are left, as we all desire to be left, to the pursuit of their own lives. No artificial occasion for this sacrifice is manufactured by the routine of the school--an artificial occasion which is apt to be resented by the stronger spirits among children even as young as those of kindergarten age. They feel, as we all do, that there is nothing intrinsically sacred or valuable about the compromises necessary to attain peaceable social life, and that they should not be demanded of us except when necessary. Crudely stated, Froebel’s purpose seems to have been that the child should, in two or three hours at a given time every day, do his social living and have it over with. And although this statement is both unsympathetic and incomplete, there is in it the germ of a well-founded criticism of the method which many of us have vaguely felt, although we have not been able to formulate it before studying the principles of a system which seems to avoid this fault.
A conversation I had in Rome with an Italian friend, not in sympathy with the Montessori ideas, illustrates another phase of the difference between the average kindergarten and the Casa dei Bambini. My friend is a quick, energetic, positive woman who “manages” her two children with a competent ease which seems the most conclusive proof to her that her methods need no improvement. “Oh, no, the Case dei Bambini are quite failures,” she told me. “The children themselves don’t like them.” I recalled the room full of blissful babies which I had come to know so well, and looked, I daresay, some of the amused incredulity I felt, for she went on hastily, “Well, _some_ children may. Mine never did. I had to put both the boy and the girl back into a kindergarten. My little Ida summed up the whole matter. She said, ‘Isn’t it queer how they treat you at a Casa dei Bambini! They ask me, “Now which would you like to do, Ida, this, or this?” It makes me feel so queer. I want somebody to _tell_ me what to do!’”