A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Now Rome is, at least from the standpoint of a New Yorker or a Chicagoan, a small city, where “everyone who is anyone knows everyone else.” Although the sphere of Signor Talamo’s activity was as far as possible from that of the pioneer woman doctor specializing in children’s brain-centers, he knew of her existence and naturally enough asked her to undertake the organization and the management of the different groups of children in his tenement houses, collected, as far as he was concerned, for the purpose of keeping them from scratching the walls and fouling the stairways.

On her part Dr. Montessori took a rapid mental survey of these numerous groups of normal children at exactly the age when she thought them most susceptible to the right sort of education, and saw in them, as if sent by a merciful Providence, the experimental laboratories which she so much needed to carry on her work and which she had definitely found that primary schools could never become.

The fusion of two elements which are destined to combine is not a long process once they are brought together. How completely Dr. Montessori was prepared for the opportunity thus given her can be calculated by the fact that the first Casa dei Bambini was opened on the 6th of January, 1907, and that now, only five years after, there arrive in Rome, from every quarter of the globe, bewildered but imperious demands for enlightenment on the new idea.

For it was at once apparent that the fundamental principle of self-education, which had been growing larger and larger in Dr. Montessori’s mind, was as brilliantly successful in actual practice as it was plausible in abstract thought. Evidently entire freedom for the children was not only better for the purposes of the scientific investigator, but infinitely the best thing for the children. All those meditations about the real nature of childhood, over which she had been brooding in the long years of her study, proved themselves, once put to the test, as axiomatic in reality as they had seemed. Her theories held water. The children justified all her visions of their capacity for perfectibility and very soon went far beyond anything even she had conceived of their ability to teach and to govern themselves. For instance, she had not the least idea, when she began, of teaching children under six how to write. She held, as most other educators did, that on the whole it was too difficult an undertaking for such little ones. It was her own peculiar characteristic, or rather the characteristic of her scientific training, of extreme openness to conviction which induced her, after practical experience, to begin her famous experiments with the method for writing.

The story of this startling revelation of unsuspected forces in human youth and of the almost instant pounce upon it by the world, distracted by a helpless sense of the futility and clumsiness of present methods of education, is too well known to need a long recapitulation. The first Casa dei Bambini was established in January, 1907, without attracting the least attention from the public. About a year after another one was opened. This time, owing to the marked success of the first, the affair was more of a ceremony, and Dr. Montessori delivered there that eloquent inaugural address which is reprinted in the American translation of her book. By April of 1908, only a little over a year after the first small beginning, the institution of the Casa dei Bambini was discovered by the public, keen on the scent of anything that promised relief from the almost intolerable lack of harmony between modern education and modern needs. Pilgrims of all nationalities and classes found their way through the filthy streets of that wretched quarter, and the barely established institution, still incomplete in many ways, with many details untouched, with many others provided for only in a makeshift manner, was set under the microscopic scrutiny of innumerable sharp eyes.

The result, as far as we are concerned, we all know: the rumors, vague at first, which blew across our lives, then more definite talk of something really new, then the characteristically American promptness of response in our magazines and the almost equally prompt appearance of an English translation of Dr. Montessori’s book.

Word Building With Cut-Out Alphabet.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir

And, so far, that is all we have from her, and for the present it is all we can have, without taking some action ourselves to help her. It is a strange situation, intensely modern, which could only have occurred in this age of instantly tattling cables and telegrams. It is, of course, a great exaggeration to say that all educated parents and teachers in America are interested in the Montessori system, but the proportion who really seem to be, is astonishing in the extreme when one considers the very recent date of the beginning of the whole movement. Over there in Rome, in a tenement house, a woman doctor begins observations in an experimental laboratory of children, and in five years’ time, which is nothing to a real scientist, her laboratory doors are stormed by inquirers from Australia, from Norway, from Mexico, and, most of all, from the United States. Teachers of district schools in the Carolinas write their cousins touring in Europe to be sure to go to Rome to see the Montessori schools. Mothers from Oregon and Maine write, addressing their letters, “Montessori, Rome,” and make demands for enlightenment, urgent, pressing, peremptory, and shamelessly peremptory, since they conceive of a possibility that their children, their own children, the most important human beings in the world, may be missing something valuable. From innumerable towns and cities, teachers, ambitious to be in the front of their profession, are taking their hoarded savings from the bank and starting to Rome with the naïve conviction that their own thirst for information is sufficient guarantee that someone will instantly be forthcoming to provide it for them.

When they reach Rome, most of them quite unable to express themselves in Italian or even in French, what do they find, all these tourists and letters of inquiry, and adventuring school-mistresses? They find a dead wall. They have an unformulated idea that they are probably going to a highly organized institution of some sort, like our huge “model schools” attached to our normal colleges, through the classrooms of which an unending file of observers is allowed to pass. And they have no idea whatever of the inevitability with which Italians speak Italian.