Discipline means, of course, “the capacity for self-control.” I had no sooner formulated this definition than I saw that I had been, in my practical use of the word, omitting half of it, and that the vital half. It was not discipline I had been vainly seeking at the Casa dei Bambini, it was compulsion.
Now, compulsion is a force very much handier to use in education than self-control, since it depends on the adult and not on the child, and practically any adult with a club (physical or moral) can compass it, if the child in his power is small enough. But the most elementary experience of life proves that the effects of compulsion last exactly as long as the physical or moral club can be applied. Evidently its use can scarcely prepare the child for the searching tests of independent adult life when no one has any longer even a pseudo-right to club him into moral action.
And yet self-control, like all other vital processes of individual life, is tantalizingly elusive and subtle. My untrained mind, face to face at last with the real problem, despaired of securing this real self-control and not the valueless compulsory obedience to external force or persuasion with which I had been confusing it. I saw that it is secured in the Children’s Home and betook myself once more to an examination of their methods.
Their method for solving this problem is like the one they use in all other problems of child-life. They use the adult brain to analyze minutely all the complex processes involved, and then they begin at the beginning to teach the children all the different actions, one after another.
For instance, the capacity for close, consecutive attention to any undertaking is a very valuable form of self-control and self-discipline (one which a good many adults have never mastered). The natural tendency of childhood, as of all untrained humanity, is for flightiness, for mental vagrancy, for picking up and fitfully dropping an enterprise. It is obvious that the sternest of external so-called discipline cannot lay a finger on this particular mental fault, because all it can command is physical obedience, which ceases when the compulsion is no longer active. In the Children’s Home, the child is provided with a task so exactly suited to the instinctive needs of his growing organism, that his own spontaneous interest in it overcomes his own equally spontaneous aversion to mental concentration. Later on in life he must learn to concentrate mentally, whether he feels a strong spontaneous interest in the subject or not; but it is evident that he cannot do that, if he has not learned first to control his wandering wits when the subject does interest him. And that this last is not the perfectly easy undertaking it seems, is apparent when one considers all the hopelessly flighty women there are in the world, who could not, to save their lives, mentally concentrate on anything. The Montessori apparatus sets a valuable vital force in the child’s own intellectual make-up to master an undesirable instinct, and naturally the valuable force grows stronger with every exercise of its power, just as a muscle does. The little boy who was so much interested in his buttoning-frame that he stuck to his enterprise from beginning to end without so much as glancing up at the activities of the other children, showed real self-control, even though it was not associated with the element of pain which my grim ancestors led me to think was essential.