A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The doctor at work on these problems was all the time in active practice as a physician, an influence in her life which is not to be forgotten in summing up the elements which have formed her character. She was performing operations in the hospitals, taking charge of grave diseases in her private practice, exposing herself to infection of all sorts in the infectious wards of the hospitals, liable to be called up at any hour of the night to attend a case anywhere in the purlieus of Rome. It was a soldier tried and tested in actual warfare in another part of the battle for the betterment of humanity, who finally took up the question of the training of the young. She parted company with many of her fellow-students of deficient children, and faced squarely the results of her reasoning. Not for her the position aloof, the observation of phenomena from the detached standpoint of the distant specialist. If nervous diseases of children, leading to deficient intellectual powers, could be best attacked through education, the obvious step was to become an educator.

She gave up her active practice as a physician which had continued steadily throughout all her other activities, and accepted the post of Director of the State Orthophrenic School (what we would call an Institute for the Feeble-Minded), and, throwing herself into the work, heart and soul, with all the ardor of her race and her own temperament, she utilized her finely-tempered brain and indomitable will, in the hand-to-hand struggle for the actual amelioration of existing conditions. For years she taught the children in the Asylum under her care, devoting herself to them throughout every one of their waking hours, pouring into the poor, cracked vases of their minds the full, rich flood of her own powerful intellect. All day she worked with her children, loved to idolatry by them, exhausting herself over their problems like the simplest, most unthinking, most unworldly, and devout sister of charity; but at night she was the scientist again, arranging, classifying, clarifying the results of the day’s observation, examining with minute attention the work of all those who had studied her problems before her, applying and elaborating every hint of theirs, every clue discovered in her own experiments.

Those were good years, years before the world had heard of her, years of undisturbed absorption in her work.

Then, one day, as such things come, after long, uncertain efforts, a miracle happened. A supposedly deficient child, trained by her methods, passed the examinations of a public school with more ease, with higher marks than normal children prepared in the old way. The miracle happened again and again and then so often that it was no longer a miracle, but a fact to be foretold and counted on with certainty.

Then the woman with the eager heart and trained mind drew a long breath and, determining to make this first success only the cornerstone of a new temple, turned to a larger field of action, the field to which her every unconscious step had been leading her, the education, no longer only of the deficient, but of all the normal young of the human race.

It was in 1900 that Dr. Montessori left the Scuola Ortofrenica, and began to prepare herself consciously and definitely for the task before her. For seven years she followed a course of self-imposed study, meditation, observation, and intense thought. She began by registering as a student of philosophy in the University of Rome and turned her attention to experimental psychology with especial reference to child-psychology. The habit of her scientific training disposed her naturally as an accompaniment to her own research to examine thoroughly the existing and recognized authorities in her new field. She began to visit the primary schools and to look about her at the orthodox and old-established institutions of the educational world with the fresh vision only possible to a mind trained by scientific research to abhor preconceived ideas and to come to a conclusion only after weighing actual evidence.

No more diverting picture can be imagined than the one presented by this keen-eyed, clear-headed scientist surveying, with an astonishment which must have been almost dramatically apparent, the rows of immobile little children nailed to their stationary seats and forced to give over their natural birth-right of activity to a well-meaning, gesticulating, explaining, always fatigued, and always talking teacher. It was evident at a glance that she could not find there what she had hoped to find, that first prerequisite of the modern scientist, a prolonged scrutiny of the natural habits of the subject of investigation. The entomologist seeking to solve some of the farmer’s problems, spends years with a microscope, studying the habits of the potato and of the potato-bug before he tries to invent a way to help the one and circumvent the other. But Dr. Montessori found, so to speak, that all the potatoes she tried to investigate were being grown in a cellar. They grew, somehow, because the upward thrust of life is invincible, but their pale shoots gave no evidence of the possibility of the sturdy stems, which a chance specimen or two escaped by a stroke of luck from the cellar, proved to be possible for the whole species.

At the same time that she was making these amazed and disconcerted visits to the primary schools, she was devouring all the books which have been written on her subject. My own acquaintance with works on pedagogy is limited, but I observe that people who do know them do not seem surprised that this thoroughly trained modern doctor, with years of practical teaching back of her, should have found little aid in them. Two highly valuable authorities she did find, significantly enough doctors like herself, one who lived at the time of the French Revolution and one perhaps fifty years later. She tells us in her book what their ideas were and how strongly they modified her own; but as we are here chiefly concerned with the net result of her thought, it would not be profitable to go exhaustively into the investigation of her sources. It is enough to say that most of us would never in our lives have heard of those two doctors if she had not studied them.

We have now followed the course of Dr. Montessori’s life until it brings us back to that chaotic, ancient-modern Rome, mentioned a few paragraphs above, struggling with all sorts of modern problems of city life. The housing of the very poor is a question troublesome enough, even to Detroit or Indianapolis with their bright, new municipal machinery. In Rome the problem is complicated by the medieval standards of the poor themselves as to their own comfort; by the existence of many old rookeries where they may roost in unspeakable conditions of filth and promiscuity; and by the lack of a widespread popular enlightenment as to the progress of the best modern communities. But, though Italian public opinion as a whole seems to be in a somewhat dazed condition over the velocity of changes in the social structure, there is no country in the world which has more acute, powerful, or original intelligences and consciences trained on our modern problems. All the while that Dr. Montessori had been trying to understand the discrepancy between the rapid advance of idiot children under her system and the slow advance of normal children under old-fashioned methods, another Italian, an influential, intelligent, and patriotic Roman, Signor Edoardo Talamo, was studying the problem of bettering at once, practically, the housing of the very poor.

He had decided what to do and had done it, when the line of his activity and that of Dr. Montessori’s met in one of those apparently fortuitous combinations of elements destined to form a compound which is exactly the medicine needed for some unhealthy part of the social tissue. The plan of Signor Talamo’s model tenements was so wise and so admirably executed that, except for one factor, they really deserved their name. This factor was the existence of a large number of little children under the usual school age, who were left alone all day while their mothers, driven by the grinding necessity which is the rule in the Italian lower working classes, went out to help earn the family living. These little ones wandered about the clean halls and stairways, defacing everything they could reach and constantly getting into mischief, the desolating ingenuity of which can be imagined by any mother of small children. It was evident that the money taken to repair the damage done by them would be better employed in preventing them from doing it in the first place. Signor Talamo conceived the simple plan of setting apart a big room in every one of his tenement houses where the children could be kept together. This, of course, meant that some grown person must be there to look after them.