There is one result on the child’s character of this sort of exercise which Dr. Montessori does not specifically mention but which has struck me forcibly in practical experimentation with it. I have found that little hands and fingers trained by these fascinating “games” to light, attentive, discriminating, and unhurried handling of objects, lose very quickly that instinctive childish, violent but very uncertain clutch at things, which has been for so many generations the cause of so much devastation in the nursery. Little tots of four, trained in this way, can be trusted with glassware and other breakable objects, which would go down to certain destruction in the fitfully governed hands of the average undisciplined child of twelve. In other words the child of four has fitted himself by means of a highly enjoyable process to be, in one more respect, an independent, self-respecting, trustworthy citizen of his world.
Of course all these different exercises are much more entertaining when, like other fun-producing “games,” they are “played” with a crowd of other children. When one child of a group is blindfolded, and as our American children say “It,” while the others sit about, watching his identification of more and more difficult objects, ready, all of them, for a shout of applause at a success, or at a failure for an instant laughing pounce on the coveted blindfold and application of it to the child next in order, of course there is much more jolly laughter, the interest is keener, and the attention more concentrated by the contact with other wits, than can be the case with a single child, even with an audience of the most sympathetic mother or aunt. There is absolutely no adequate substitute for the beneficial action and reaction of children upon one another such as form such a considerable part of the Montessori training in a Casa dei Bambini. On the other hand, those of us who live, as we almost all do, far from any variety of a Montessori school, can, with the exercise of our ingenuity and mother-wit, arrange a great number of more or less adequate temporary expedients. A large number of the Montessori devices, if they were not called “sensory exercises,” would be recognized as merely fascinating new games for children. What is blind-man’s buff but a “sensory exercise for training the ear,” since what the person who is “It” does is to try to catch the slight movements made by the other players accurately enough to pursue and capture them? Children have another game called, for some mysterious reason of childhood, “Still pond, no more moving!” a variety of blind-man’s buff, which trains still more finely the sense of hearing, since the players are required to stand perfectly still, and the one who is “It” must detect their presence by such almost imperceptible sounds as their breathing, or the rustling caused by an involuntary movement. If Montessori herself had invented this game, it could not be more perfectly devised for bodily control. Children who wriggle about in ordinary circumstances without the slightest capacity to control their bodies, even in response to the sternest adult commands for quiet, will stand in some strained position without moving a finger, their concentration so intense that even their breathing is light and inaudible. We must all have seen children happily playing such games; many of us have spent hours and hours of our childhood over them; Froebel used them and others like them plentifully in his system; there are all sorts of more or less hit-or-miss imitations of them being constructed by modern child-tamers; but no one before this Italian woman-doctor ever analyzed them so that we plain unprofessional people could fully grasp their fascination for us; ever told us that children like them because they afford an opportunity to practise self-control, and that similar games based on the same idea that it is “fun” to exercise one’s different senses in company or in competition with one’s youthful contemporaries, would be just as entertaining as these self-invented games, handed down for untold generations from one set of children to another. All the varieties of blindfold sensory exercises are variations on the theme of blind-man’s buff, which is so perennially interesting to all children. Any small group of young children, two or three little neighbors come in to play, will with a little guidance at first readily “play” any of the “tactile exercises” described above (pages 60, 61) for hours on end, instead of wrangling about the rocking-horse--a toy invented for solitary or semi-solitary consumption.