Raffaelo’s Hunger — Color Teaching. Its Value
Raffaelo’s grandfather had been a shepherd in the Roman hills, not so much because he liked to tend the dull, white creatures, but on account of the blue roof beneath which he sat all day and the carpet of green splashed with poppy crimson and primrose gold and lupin blue that lay at his feet, and the sunset that he waited for every night. It was never the same, that sunset; like a beautiful Roman ribbon it spread itself before his eyes, and he would rather see it than go home to eat.
Tucked under his long, wool cloak, he carried a pigment-daubed palette and a patch of canvas. As the lambs and their mothers grazed, he watched, hungrily, for picture stuff: a bright yellow cart taking its slow way along the white dust of the Via Appia, the flower girl walking in to Rome with her arms full of roses, the gold edges of a distant wheat field—these fed his soul and satisfied his hunger.
Because the State was blind and thought that to fight is more vital than to paint beautiful pictures, the grandfather of Raffaelo was forced into the Italian army. The day that they substituted a gun for his crook and threw away his palette, they killed his soul. The grandfather of Raffaelo made a very poor soldier, indeed. The little boy that he left at home on the Campagna grew up, and was a poor soldier, too; and when he had finished military service he married and went to live in a tenement in Rome, and in due time little Raffaelo was born.
It was all quite commonplace, and like the story of many other families. But it had, too, its element of the unusual. With those long-ago, shepherding days on the Roman Campagna, a gnawing hunger had begun. It wasn’t a body hunger, but a hunger of the spirit. It killed the body of the grandfather of Raffaelo—spirit hunger is more destructive than a hunger for bread. Down through the years it took its gnawing way. It killed the youth in the father of Raffaelo and it took possession of him in the gray streets of the city and stifled his manhood.
Then the hunger pierced the spirit of little Raffaelo, and that was where it stopped—a cruel, unsatiated thing. With the gathered strength of all those years, it starved the baby.
He couldn’t have explained in words just what he was hungry for. In fact he couldn’t explain anything very well, being not quite three years old. Only, he was continually unsatisfied when he looked at the ugliness of the dull walls of his home, and when his mother took him along the hard, gray streets of the city he tugged and pulled at her hand whenever he passed a corner flower stand, or a cart piled high with a mass of colored vegetables.
Raffaelo was beauty hungry, as his father had been and his grandfather. And no one knew it; and no one would have cared if they had known.
No one?
Little Raffaelo trudged across the court one morning to the Children’s House in the Scuola Famagosta, near which he lived, and there found a kind welcome and a happy, busy community of children like himself. Neat, in his clean apron, and with big, questioning eyes, he sat apart from the others in one corner of the room, watching. Certain of the children were writing big, plain script on the blackboard; others sat quietly reading to themselves from big picture books. Raffaelo’s glance shifted from these to a child who stood near him, working at a low table. What had he brought from the white shelves in that big wooden box? Raffaelo wondered. Why was he turning the box over? But the table was suddenly covered with a mass of color, such as only the Romans know how to dye. From the box came reel upon reel of ravishingly colored silks, every color that tints sky and field and garden—crimson, orange, lemon, the deep green of the grass, and the gray green of the olive leaf; the blue that makes wild iris and children’s eyes, the purple of grapes when the sun shines on the vineyards. If Raffaelo could have counted, he would have known that there were sixty-four of these flat, white wooden spools, wound with eight colors and eight of each color, showing almost all the grading of color that makes this old earth of ours so lovely.
The colors trickled like a life-giving stream into Raffaelo’s starved senses. He reached for the color spools, snatching a great fistful away from the other child.
“Mio; mio! Me; me!” he cried.
They were his. Some of us steal bread when we are hungry. Some of us steal love when we are famished for it. Children steal because we or the world have starved them of something which they crave for their natural, best development of body, mind, or soul. The habitual public school teacher, the average mother of to-day, would have said:
“Give those colors back. It’s wicked to take something that is not yours!”
The directress of this Montessori school, in which teaching and mothering are practiced in new ways, watched Raffaelo for a moment, asking herself:
“Why does this child steal? Is he blind to law because his need is so great?”
Then she crossed to Raffaelo, bringing with her a handful of color spools—two red, two blue, two yellow.
“These are yours,” she said. “Will you give your little neighbor’s colors back to him, because it was not right to take them? When you have carried to him every one of the spools, return to me and I will tell you about your colors.”
Happily, Raffaelo did as he was told, receiving his first lesson in ethics before he had his first color lesson. Returning, he stood, wide-eyed and fascinated, beside the directress as she held out to him two of the color spools.
“This is red,” she explained, laying the red spool on the white table in front of him, and waiting a moment or two, that he might make the mental association between the name of the color and the color itself. Then she showed him a blue wound spool.
“This is blue,” she said, laying his spool at the opposite side of the table from the red one, and again waiting for Raffaelo to make the association of name and color. Taking the next step in this Montessori teaching, she pointed to the red wound spool, and asked:
“What is this, Raffaelo?”
“Red,” he laughed back.
“And this?” pointing to the other one.
“Blue!” Raffaelo almost shouted in his delight at acquiring knowledge.
Then came the last step in Raffaelo’s lesson. Holding out the remaining tablets in the palm of her hand, the directress said:
“Show me red, Raffaelo. And show me blue.”
With no mistake, the little color lover selected the red, the blue, and placed each on his table, matching them to the corresponding spools.
“These are yellow,” the directress explained to him, giving him the two remaining spools. Then she left him, having given him the food for clear, colorful thought for which two generations of thwarted painters had made him long.
All the morning Raffaelo played with his six color spools, gathering them together into a pile, handling them, holding them up to the light, that he might watch the play of sunshine and shade upon their beauty, pairing them upon his table, repeating to himself: “Red, blue, yellow!” Sometimes he watched his small neighbor, who had grown very expert in color lore and could name all the colors and lay the spools in chromatic order on his table, eight rows headed, severally, by black, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, and brown, and each row containing eight gradations of its color.
When this child completed his series of orderly color scales he went to the window and looked out at the Roman hill rising back of the school. To the child who had not received Montessori color teaching, the hill would have been a shapeless, colorless bit of earth. To this child, who could see color in its finest gradation, it was a landscape where one could trace the gold outline of orange and lemon, the red tiling of a vine-tender’s house near the top and back of it a sky that was violet—not blue. He looked at the hill for a long time. Then he selected an outlined picture of a tree, and looking intently at a box of colored pencils, selected one that was just the color of a cedar and proceeded to fill in the outline.
To Raffaelo, the child was a spellworker. Watching this fascination, the directress gave Raffaelo a box of color spools, emptying them out and allowing him to try and differentiate the colors, putting each back in its right compartment in the box. She did not burden his mind with names. He was feeding his senses by just handling and feeling the colors, and he was unspeakably happy. When the noon hour came, he did not want to go home. When his bedtime came, that night, he escaped from his mother and ran to the window, looking out. The night before, he had looked down at the soiled, unbeautiful street; to-night he looked up. The sun was just setting, a ruby ball in a sea of amber.
“See!” Raffaelo shouted, pointing to the sunset. “Red; yellow!”
As his mother picked him up and carried him away from the window, he looked deep down into her eyes. “Blue,” he said, seeing them for the first time in all their beauty. The hunger of Raffaelo was fed.
Every child is color hungry. Your child may be a painter in the making, heir to a century-old talent that somebody had to bury, but which would not die and rose and haunted. Or he may be an average child who will be happier and better all his life if he can see each fine gradation of color that tints the sunset and can feed his soul on a beautiful Titian or a Fra Angelico.
We have thought that we were teaching our children color when we called their attention to a colored object. A child is much more apt to associate taste with the apple which we show him when we try to give him a color lesson, and quite possibly we make a false statement when we say that the apple is red. Very few apples are red; they are dark red, light red, orange, or yellow in tint. Why not begin the other way round, as Dr. Montessori does, and teach pure color, giving the child the joy that comes from discovering for himself just what pigment nature used in painting the apple.
In teaching children color, we will use, if possible, Dr. Montessori’s own box of sixty-four color spools that include almost all the tints and shades of the prismatic colors, black to gray, and the scale of browns. If we are not so fortunate as to be able to use this apparatus, which is a most careful and scientific analysis of color, we can try to study color ourselves, and point it out to children as it is found in the home in textiles, silk and worsted, papers, flowers, and colored crayons and paints.
In teaching color at home we may all follow Dr. Montessori’s own simple method. The Montessori directress might have tried to teach Raffaelo color as we, in America, teach our children, saying:
“See the ball; it is red. The forget-me-not is blue. See the pretty robin redbreast,” and in making these statements confusing in the child’s mind the concepts of toy, flowers, birds, and colors when all he needs is color. Every child wants to make his own application of knowledge. Instead, the girl who had been trained under Dr. Montessori had followed the only true method of teaching any fact, the method that lies at the basis of Montessori education miracles. Dr. Montessori says that teaching must be simple and objective. There hasn’t been enough of “calling a spade a spade” in our American schools and homes.
Show your child red, or the letter A, or a moral fact—it doesn’t matter much which—and name it red, or A, or right.
Ask him to tell you just what you told him about it.
Ask him to pick out red from other colors, or A from other letters, or a moral act from immoral acts. This is Montessori teaching reduced to A B C, but it is teaching that is successful.
Our homes may be made as full of color and beauty for little children as are the Children’s Houses. The use of the prism, the Montessori color spools, the color top, our beautifully graded colored crayons and water colors for filling in outlined pictures, a study of the colored papers to be had for paper dolls’ clothes, the daily watching of the color changes in sunrise and sunset—all these open the spirit eyes of the child. Then we will lead children to notice and appreciate harmonious blending of tints and shades in our walls, our rugs, our gardens, our picture galleries.
Of what value is it that the child’s chromatic sense be trained by learning to know and discriminate between red, blue, and yellow, and from this to acquire a facility in knowing the scale of grays and browns? It means more for the child than just the soul-satisfaction that comes from learning how to use the eyes. It means starting the brain machine and then looking out for the switch.
The first morning that I met little Mario, one of my child Montessori friends in Rome, he looked me over from head to foot, ran to a color box, selected a color spool of the exact shade of gray blue of my suit and showed it to me joyfully. In almost the same second that he made this mental decision, he saw that the quick movements of little Valia were threatening the safety of a glass vase that stood, holding flowers, on a table at the opposite end of the room. Like a flash, Mario ran, held the vase, and prevented the catastrophe.
To be able to think down the color scale from blue to a blue that is mixed with gray; to be able to think in another kind of mental scale from cause to effect—these are both chromatic mind operations.
To know color means satisfying your child’s beauty hunger. It means, also, starting him on the road to logical thinking.