Her work at the clinic led her to visit the general insane asylums, and she became deeply interested in the deficient children who were housed there, with no attempts being made to educate them. As she studied these helpless little ones, the idea came to her that it might be possible, by putting them into better surroundings, and giving them opportunity for free gymnastic activities and free use of the senses, to educate them. She gave up medicine for teaching and again startled Italy—and the world. Her deficient children learned to read and write, easily and naturally, and took their places beside normal children in the municipal schools.
Then Dr. Montessori carried her method of physical and sense education a lap farther. If this method stimulated to action the sleeping mind of a deficient child, might it not save time and energy in the teaching of normal children, she asked herself. At that time, the Good Building Association of Rome was tearing down the squalid, disease-filled houses of the poor of the San Lorenzo Quarter and putting up in their places hygienic model tenements. Dr. Montessori arranged to have the children of each tenement gathered in one room of the basement, where large, free spaces, didactic apparatus, hot meals, and gardens would make it a Children’s House. She applied her method in numerous of these Children’s Houses and in the beautiful convent of the Franciscan nuns on the Via Giusti.
Again the miracle happened. Children of four began to read and write, having taught themselves. There were other wonders, too. These Montessori-trained children were self-controlled, free, happy, good. To-day there are Montessori mothers all over the world.
To furnish the right environment for the expanding of the child soul, Dr. Montessori urges that every home be transformed into a House of Childhood. It will not consist alone of walls, she tells us, although these walls will be the bulwarks of the sacred intimacy of the family. The home will be more than this. It will have a soul, and will embrace its inmates with the consoling arms of love. The new mother will be liberated, like the butterfly bursting its winter cocoon of imprisonment and darkness, from those drudgeries that the home has demanded of her in the past, leaving her better able to bear strong children, study those children, teach them, and be a social force in the world.
The new father will cultivate his health, guard his virtue, that he may better the species and make his children better, more perfect, and stronger than any which have been created before.
The ideal home of to-morrow will be the home of those men and women who wish to improve the human species and send the race on its triumphant way into eternity.
So Dr. Montessori, physician, psychologist, teacher, lover of children, and womanly woman, speaks to us.
As one says addio and leaves her and goes down into the blue, star-filled evening of the Eternal City, the night seems to be charged with a new mystery. Rome, who holds in her beautiful hands such good gifts for us—art, sculpture, history, painting—now offers to us another. Stretching farther than the moss-grown stones that line the Appian Way, she shows us a new road—the way that leads to the soul of a little child.