CHAPTER XV
DR. MONTESSORI’S LIFE AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CASA DEI BAMBINI
DR. MONTESSORI and the average American parent are as different in heredity, training, and environment as two civilized beings can very well be. Every condition surrounding the average American child is as materially different as possible from those about the children in the original Casa dei Bambini. Hence the usual sound rule that the individuality and personal history of the scientist do not concern the student of his work does not hold in this case. The conditions in Rome where Dr. Montessori has done her work, differ so entirely from those of ordinary American life, in the conduct of which we hope to profit by her experiments, that it is only fair to Americans interested in her work, to give them some notion of the varying influences which have shaped the career of this woman of genius.
This is so especially in her case, because, as a nation, we are more ignorant of modern Italian life than of that of any great European nation. Modern Italy, wrestling with all the problems of modern industrial and city life grafted upon an age-old civilization, endeavoring to enlighten itself, to take the best from twentieth-century progress without losing its own individual virtues, this is a country as unknown to us as the regions of the moon. And yet to understand Dr. Montessori’s work and the vicissitudes of her undertakings, we must have at least a summary knowledge that the Italian world of to-day is in a curious ferment of antiquated prejudices and highly progressive thought.
To us, as a rule, Rome is “The Eternal City” of our school-Latin days, whereas, in reality, it is, for all practical purposes as a city, much more recent than New York—about as old, let us say, as Detroit. But Detroit planted its vigorously growing seedling in the open ground and not in a cracked pot of small dimensions. Hence the problems of the two modern cities are dissimilar. I heard it suggested by a man of authority in the Italian government that a great mistake had been made when the modern capital of Italy had been dumped down upon the heap of historic ruins which remained of ancient Rome. It had been bad for the ruins and very hard on the modern capital. If a site had been selected just outside the walls of old Rome, a nineteenth-century metropolis could have sprung up with the effortless haste with which our own Middle Western plains have produced cities. One thing is certain, Dr. Montessori’s Case dei Bambini would not have taken their present form under other conditions, and this is what concerns us here.
But before the origin of the Case dei Bambini is taken up, a brief biography of their creator will help us to understand her development. Her early life, before her choice of a profession, need not interest us beyond the fact that she is the only child of devoted parents, not materially well-to-do. Now, as a result of a too-rapid social transformation among the Italians, the “middle class” population forms a much smaller proportion of the inhabitants of Italy than in other modern nations. One result of this condition is that the brilliant daughter of parents not well-to-do, finds it much harder to pass into a class of associates and to find an intellectual background which suits her nature, than a similarly intellectual and original American girl. Even now in Italy such a girl is forced to fight an unceasing battle against social prejudice and intellectual inertia. It can be imagined that when Dr. Montessori was the beautiful, gifted girl-student of whom older Romans speak with enthusiasm or horror, according to the centuries in which they morally live, her will-power and capacity for concentration must have been finely tempered in order not to break in the long struggle.
Judging by the talk one hears in Rome about the fine, youthful fervor of Dr. Montessori’s early struggle against conditions hampering her mental and spiritual progress, she is a surviving pioneer of social frontier prejudice, who has emerged from the battle with pioneer conditions endowed with the hickory-like toughness of intellectual fiber of will and of character which is the reward of sturdy pioneers. Certain it is that her battles with prejudices of all sorts have hardened her intellectual muscles and trained her mental eye in the school of absolute moral self-dependence, that moral self-dependence which is the aim and end of her method of education and which will be, as rapidly as it can be realized, the solvent for many of our tragic and apparently insoluble modern problems.
It is hard for an American of this date to realize the bomb-shell it must have been to an Italian family a generation ago when its only daughter decided to study medicine. So rapidly have conditions surrounding women changed that there is no parallel possible to be made which could bring home to us fully the tremendous will-power necessary for an Italian woman of that time and class to stick to her resolution. The fangs of that particular prejudice have been so well-nigh universally drawn that it is safe to say that an American family would see its only daughter embark on the career of animal-tamer, steeple-jack, or worker in an iron foundry, with less trepidation than must have shadowed the early days of Dr. Montessori’s medical studies. One’s imagination can paint the picture from the fact that she was the first woman to obtain the degree of Doctor of Medicine, from the University of Rome, an achievement which was probably rendered none the easier by the fact that she was both singularly beautiful and singularly ardent.
After graduation she became attached, as assistant doctor, to the Psychiatric Clinic at Rome. At that time, one of the temporary expedients of self-modernizing Italy was to treat the idiot and feeble-minded children in connection with the really insane, a rough-and-ready classification which will serve vividly to illustrate the desperate condition of Italy of that date. The young medical graduate had taken up children’s diseases as the “specialty” which no self-respecting modern doctor can be without, and naturally in her visits to the insane asylums (where the subjects of her Clinic lived), her attention was attracted to the deficient children so fortuitously lodged under the same roof.
I go into the details of the oblique manner in which she embarked upon the prodigious undertaking of education without any conscious knowledge of the port toward which she was directing her course, in order to bring out clearly the fact that she approached the field of pedagogy from an entirely new direction, with absolutely new aims and with a wholly different mental equipment from those of the technically pedagogical, philosophic, or social-reforming persons who have labored so conscientiously in that field for so many generations.
This young doctor, then, trained by hard knocks to do her own thinking and make her own decisions, found that her absorbed study of abnormal and deficient children led her straight along the path taken by the nerves from their unregulated external activities to the brain-centers which rule them so fitfully. The question was evidently of getting at the brain-centers. Now the name of the process of getting at brain-centers is one not usually encountered in the life of the surgeon. It is education.