caged animal is a creature deprived
of the stimulus of environment, and bereft therefore to a great extent
of the skill which we call instinct, by which it procures its food,
guarantees its safety from attack, constructs its home, cares for its
young, and procreates its species. If, metaphorically speaking, we
encircle the child with a cage, if we constantly intervene to
interpose something between him and the stimulus of his environment,
his characteristic powers are kept in abeyance or retarded, just as
the marvellous instinct of the wild animals becomes less efficient in
captivity.

The grasping phase is but a preliminary to more complex activities.
Just as in schooldays we were taught with much labour to make
pot-hooks and hangers efficiently before we were promoted to real
attempts at writing, so before the child can really perform tasks with
a definite meaning and purpose, he must learn to control the finer
movements of his hands. Once the grasping phase, the stage of
pot-hooks, is successfully past--and the end of the second year in a
well-managed child should see its close--the child sets himself with
enthusiasm to wider tasks. To him washing and dressing, fetching his
shoes and buttoning his gaiters, all the processes of his simple
little life, should be matters of the most enthralling interest, in
which he is eager to take his part and increasingly capable of doing
so. In the Montessori system there is provided an elaborate apparatus,
the didactic material, designed to cultivate tactile sensation and the
perception of sense stimuli. It will generally suffice to advise the
mother to make use of the ordinary apparatus of the nursery. The
imitativeness of the young child is so great that he will repeat in
almost every detail all the actions of his nurse as she carries out
the daily routine. At eighteen months of age, when the electric light
is turned on in his nursery, the child will at once go to the curtains
and make attempts to draw them. At the same age a little girl will
weigh her doll in her own weighing-machine, will take every precaution
that the nurse takes in her own case, and will even stoop down
anxiously to peer at the dial, just as she has seen her mother and
nurse do on the weekly weighing night. But at a very early age
children appreciate the difference between the real and the
make-believe. They desire above all things to do acts of real service.
At the age of two a child should know where every