7. The first schoolday

After three years Sam's little brother Peter was born and Sam went to a nursery school a few times a week, only in the mornings. Peter's birth and Sam's school did not really have anything to do with each other, but Maria's children had been born a little earlier than mine and she used to give me useful tips, and also passed on clothes. ‘Soon, Sam will have to go to primary school. That will be too much of an upset for him if you don't let him go to a nursery school first,' she said. I startled me. I hadn't thought about that at all. Although I was very much looking forward to the years to come. I saw them in my mind’s eye. Sam in the classroom listening to the teacher, playing in the schoolyard. What would he want to be? What will he look like when he is six? Or twelve? Or grown up? It was wonderful to dream about Sam's future while he played with the duplo and I was feeding Peter on the couch. But I had not envisioned the transition from the safety of home to a busy classroom where one has to sit quietly on a chair.

 

Maria's daughter had gone to a small private nursery school run by a retired teacher. She was called Juf Marretje. I told Jan about it when he phoned me from Hamburg. I remember how sorry he was that he would not be there when Sam went to a school for the first time. I promised to take many pictures.

 

Marretje and her pleasant little class were in a classroom in a big old building, next to a visual artist who made very colourful paintings. The whole building was full of small businesses. I remember the artist because Sam always wanted to go in there. Sam liked the artist's paintings almost as much as his own, which adorned our refrigerator. He was a nice man and Sam was always welcome, except when he was working with smelly solvents. ‘That's not good for your little lungs,' he used to say through a small crack in the door with a mask on his face.

 

Sam made two friends in Miss Marretje's class. That made the choice for the next school easy. The two friends had experienced parents and their choice of primary school was already made. During Jan's leave we went to have a look. It seemed like a nice school. They taught Montessori education and that was very trendy at the time. It teaches your child to work independently and that is a good thing if he wants to go to university later, they explained. The school was in demand. We lived in a medium-sized town and we thought it was important to choose a school that was a bit special, where other parents also made a conscious choice. We wanted the best for our child, our beautiful Sam. We had to enlist timely. We were actually about a year late, so we hadn't done that very well, but children from Miss Marretje's school enjoyed preference, the director explained. Thank goodness!

 

Now I read about Maria Montessori in a beautiful biography by an Italian journalist. And I read her own book, that she wrote at the end of the nineteenth century. She lived from 1870 to 1952. In her book The Method she relates how she came into contact with education. She was a strong enterprising lady, who never gave up. She studied medicine, which was quite exceptional for a woman in 1890. Moreover, she wrote her graduation thesis in a psychiatric clinic, in those days certainly no place for a lady from the well-to-do classes. As a medical assistant, coming into contact with the children who were admitted there, and especially the miserable conditions these children lived in, she got involved in their education. She immersed herself in the science of pedagogy, the psychology of the child and philosophy. This was new in her time. Idiot children were not educated, but locked up in institutions or left to their own devices to roam the streets. Montessori sought to educate the soul. She was ordered by the minister to start a school for the 'idiot children'. In preparation Montessori studied intensively the methods of Eduard Séguin, who a few decades earlier had developed a method for 'retarded children'. She even copied his book in its entirety, letter for letter, the better to drink in everything the scientist had to say. In the end, the 'idiotic' and 'retarded' children whom Montessori had taken under her wing made so much progress in just two years, that they could compete with the healthy and privileged children in the schools.

 

Since I had devoted myself to the education of retarded children (1898-1900), I felt more and more that Séguin's methods contained nothing which made them especially suitable for the education of retarded children, - but that they were based on more rational principles than had been applied up to that time, so that even inferior faculties could be strengthened and developed by them. Here the children not only learnt, but their personalities were awakened.

 

As I write this, I am reminded of the first time Sam's teacher called me into the school for a chat. She was worried, she said, because Sam did not yet know the colour yellow. She also thought his vocabulary was very small and wondered if we talked enough with Sam at home. Sam was also not good at sitting still. He was already five years old and would have to be able to do so in third grade, when he was going to learn to read and write. ‘By the way,' she added, 'I am a bit worried about that too. Most children are already busy with letters and Sam has not caught on at all. A very sweet boy though, our Sam.’ Mother should not worry too much.

 

Montessori, I know now, thought that the school desk was a bad invention. In her time a special school desk had been invented. It was thought that children got scoliosis from sitting still for so long in the classroom. So they invented a bench in which the child had to sit upright, to prevent their vertebrae from growing in a curve. Maria Montessori did not mince words and strongly criticised this policy:

 

And when, in this same period of social progress, we find that children at school are labourers, working under conditions so contrary to the normal development of life that skeletal deformity may result - then our only answer to such a terrifying revelation is an orthopaedic bench. It would be like fobbing off a coal miner with a truss and a malnourished labourer with an arsenic preparation.

 

Over a hundred years later, in the year 2015, as I am writing this, it is true that children no longer sit at the kind of school desks Montessori wrote about. But children do have to sit still in their seats. If children can't do that, the teacher gets worried. Some children are even given a pill so that the teacher is less bothered by them, and a personal budget (‘backpack’ with money) for the child to buy one hour a week of personal attention, to learn about his problem.

 

Montessori wrote a hundred and twenty years ago:

 

'One cannot say that an individual is disciplined merely because he has been artificially brought to the taciturnity of a mute and the immobility of a lame. That is not a disciplined individual, but one from whom all personal qualities have been suppressed. We call someone disciplined when he is master of himself, that is, when he can deploy his personality, following a rule of life wherever necessary.

 

After the project I described, Montessori taught the teachers in her first school, Casa dei Bambini, to give children the freedom to explore for themselves. She prohibited the teachers  from helping with every task, and taught them not to forbid and punish so much. Don't be angry if a child knocks over a chair, she explained. Because the child will put the chair upright by itself and find out for itself how to prevent it from happening again. She considered this a valuable process. And that was an entirely new insight. Montessori had furniture made to the size of the children. She gave the children their own tailor-made household tools. And she had teaching materials made after Séguin's example.

Montessori's famous teaching materials can still be found in the classrooms of Montessori schools. But the individual freedom for the child has long since disappeared. 

 

I was not concerned with all this when I brought my little Sam to school. I had no idea. I was just a young inexperienced mother. I was not only a young mother, I belonged to the herd, wanted to belong to the herd, doing what everyone else does. All mothers of my generation had only one thing in mind. To give their children everything they needed to be happy. We did not observe like Montessori and let the child discover. We did not teach ourselves, at home, as Key would have liked, teaching our children to take up their own responsibility; no, we kept on marching in step. Children should be able to measure up to their peers. Be equal, be better, get good grades and succeed. What is succeeding? A mother of a severely autistic girl once said to me: 'When my daughter learned to swim, that was the best moment of my life. I find it almost pathetic that parents of healthy children don't experience such highlights at all.’ Once things are no longer taken for granted, a swimming diploma can be a highlight, incomparable to anything else. How is this percieved? In a condescending way, or very seriously, as it should be ? Do we appreciate the achievements of every human being? No, I do not think so. Not any more. I think we have come to know only the one value. The value of high education and big salaries. The rest of humanity may suffer the goodwill of those who have succeeded and therefore dictate the rules. The same goodwill that the poor received in 1900. I don't think conditions have changed that much.

 

We let Sam start in group 1 at the beginning of the new school year. He was almost four and a half then. Jan was at home.

 

It was a beautiful day, Sam's first day at school. Peter was a bit weepy, as I remember. He didn’t want to sit in his pram, but he did not want to walk either. Jan put him on his shoulders. I still have a photo of this, Jan among all those parents in the schoolyard with Peter towering over them all, his little hands on Jan's forehead. What were we thinking then? How did we feel? I remember looking at all those parents with older children in admiration, because they were so much more advanced than I was. There were groups of parents talking animatedly. We stood around a bit and I realised that I would be gaining a new circle of acquaintances. Soon I would also know parents. The parents of Sam's class.

I remember not knowing what to do with Peter's pram and I left it in the schoolyard as we pushed our way in. On the first day, all parents were allowed in, but as Jan put Peter on the floor in Sam’s classroom, Peter started screaming so terribly that I picked him up and hurriedly went back outside again. Parents nodded understandingly at me while I worked my way back out against the flow of incoming people, with red-faced Peter in my arms. ‘Ah yes, those little ones. It's too crowded for them, isn't it?’

 

For a while I sat all alone with Peter in the shadow of the beautiful chestnut tree in the schoolyard, as the first parents started to come out again. The parents of Sam's friends from the playgroup came up to me.  ‘Don’t you want to look inside?’ they asked. I explained that Peter was not feeling well. ‘Shall we babysit for a while?’ suggested Marijke, one of the mothers. I appreciated this so much that I didn't dare refuse, but somehow I knew that it wouldn't go well. Not knowing how to explain this to her, I said, 'Oh, thank you, how sweet. I'd love to.’

 

I handed Peter's hand over to Marijke and walked to the door. As I went in, I could just hear Peter starting to roar. I walked on, I remember this because the other mother came to get me as I was kneeling next to Sam, who was proudly showing me the space under the table where he would put his exercise books, as soon as he had them. Peter had become so terribly upset that they had started to worry. They asked me to come out. In the square, little Peter stood screaming at the fence while Marijke, stooping, was talking to the back of his head, her hand stretched out to him. I can still see the picture clearly before me. I couldn't calm Peter down either, I remember that too. And I see those two mothers walking away, talking to each other. I felt very insecure. My child was doing something I wasn't sure about, if it would be considered normal by the mothers I wanted to belong to.

 

Translation: B. Ton