A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

They find—if they are relentlessly persistent enough to pierce through the protection her friends try to throw about her—only Dr. Montessori herself, a private individual, phenomenally busy with very important work, who does not speak or understand a word of English, who has neither money, time, or strength enough single-handed to cope with the flood of inquiries and inquirers about her ideas. In order to devote herself entirely to the great undertaking of transmuting her divinations of the truth into a definite, logical, and scientific system, she has withdrawn herself more and more from public life. She has resigned from her chair of anthropology in the University of Rome, and last year sent a substitute to do her work in another academic position not connected with her present research—and this although she is far from being a woman of independent means. She has sacrificed everything in her private life in order to have, for the development of her educational ideas, that time and freedom so constantly infringed upon by the well-meaning urgency of our demands for instruction from her.

She lives now in the most intense retirement, never taking a vacation from her passionate absorption in her work, not even giving herself time for the exercise necessary for health, surrounded and aided by a little group of five devoted disciples, young Italian women who live with her, who call her “mother,” and who exist in and for her and her ideas, as ardently and whole-heartedly as nuns about an adored Mother Superior. Together they are giving up their lives to the development of a complete educational system based on the fundamental idea of self-education which gave such brilliant results in the Casa dei Bambini with children from three to six. For the past year, helped spiritually by these disciples and materially by influential Italian friends, Dr. Montessori has been experimenting with the application of her ideas to children from six to nine, and I think it is no violation of her confidence to report that these experiments have been as astonishingly successful as her work with younger children.

It is to this woman burning with eagerness to do her work, absorbed in the exhausting problems of intellectual creation, that students from all over the world are turning for instruction in a phase of her achievement which now lies behind her. The woman in the genius is touched and heartened by the sudden homage of the world, but it is the spirit of the investigating scientist which most often inhabits that powerful, bulky, yet lightly poised body and looks out from those dark, prophetic eyes; and from the point of view of the scientist, the world asks too much when it demands from her that she give herself up to normal teaching. For it must be apparent from the sketch of her present position that she would need to give up her very life were she to accede to all the requests for training teachers in her primary method, since she is simply a private individual, has no connection with the official educational system of her country, is at the head of no normal school, gives no courses of lectures, and has no model schools of her own to which to invite visitors. It is hard to believe her sad yet unembittered statement that there is now in Rome not one primary school which is entirely under her care, which she authorizes in all its detail, which is really a “Montessori School.” There are, it is true, some which she started and which are still conducted according to her ideas in the majority of details, but not one where she is the leading spirit.

There are a variety of reasons, natural enough when one has once taken in the situation, which account for this state of things, so bewildering and disconcerting to those who have come from so far to learn at headquarters about the new ideas. The Italian Government, straining to carry the heavy burdens of a modern State, feels itself unable to undertake a radical and necessarily very costly reorganization of its schools, the teachers very naturally fear revolutionary changes which would render useless their hard-won diplomas, and carry on against the new system a secret campaign which has been so far successful. Hence it happens that investigators coming from across seas have the not unfamiliar experience of finding the prophet by no means head of the official religion of his own country.

In the other camp, fighting just as bitterly, are the Montessori adherents, full of enthusiasm for her philosophy, devoting all the forces at their command (and they include many of the highest intellectual and social forces) to the success of the cause which they believe to be of the utmost importance to the future of the race. It can be seen that the situation is not orderly, calm, or in any way adapted to dispassionate investigation.

And yet people who have come from California and British Columbia and Buenos Ayres to seek for information, naturally do not wish to go back to their distant homes without making a violent effort to investigate. What they usually try to do is to force from someone in authority a card of admission either to the Montessori school held in the Franciscan Nunnery on the Via Giusti, or to another conducted by Signora Galli among the children of an extremely poor quarter of Rome, or, innocent and unaware, in all good faith go to visit the institutions in the model tenements, still called Case dei Bambini. But Dr. Montessori’s relations with those schools ceased in 1911 as a result of an unfortunate disagreement between Signor Talamo and herself in which, so far as an outsider can judge, she was not to blame; and those infant schools are now thought by impartial judges to be far from good expositions of her methods, and in many cases are actual travesties of it. Furthermore, Dr. Montessori has now no connection with Signora Galli’s schools. This leaves accessible to her care and guided by her counsels only the school held in the Franciscan nunnery, which is directed by Signorina Ballerini, one of Dr. Montessori’s own disciples, as the nearest approach to a school under her own control in Rome. This is, in many ways, an admirable example of the wonderful result of the Montessori ideas and is a revelation to all who visit it. But even here, though the good nuns make every effort to give a free hand to Signorina Ballerini, it can be imagined that the ecclesiastical atmosphere, which in its very essence is composed of unquestioning obedience to authority, is not the most congenial one for the growth of a system which uses every means possible to do away with dogma of any sort, and to foster self-dependence and first-hand ideas of things. More than this, if this school admitted freely all those who wish to visit it, there would be more visitors than children on many a day.

It is not hard to sympathize with the searchers for information who come from the ends of the earth, who stand aghast at this futile ending of their long journey. And yet it would be the height of folly for the world to call away from her all-important work an investigator from whom we hope so much in the future. How can we expect her, against all manner of material odds, to organize a normal school in a country with a government indifferent, if not hostile to her ideas, to gather funds, to rent rooms, to arrange hours, hire janitors, and lay out courses!

But the proselytizer who lives in every ardent believer makes her as unreconciled to the state of things as we are. She is regretfully aware of the opportunity to spread the new gospel which is being lost with every day of silence, distressed at the thought of sending the pilgrims away empty-handed, and above all naturally distracted with anxiety lest impure, misunderstanding caricatures of her system spread abroad in the world as the only answer to the demand for information about it. Busy as she is with the most absorbing investigations, Dr. Montessori is willing to meet the world halfway. If those who ask her to teach them will do the tangible, comparatively simple work of establishing an Institute of Experimental Pedagogy in Rome, the Dottoressa, for all her concentration on her further research, will be more than willing to give enough of her time for making the school as wonderful, beautiful, and inspiring as only a Montessori school can be.

Our part should be to endeavor to learn from her what we can without disturbing too much that freedom of life which is as essential to her as to the children in her schools, to give generously to an Institute of Experimental Pedagogy, and then freely allow her own inspiration to shape its course. Surely the terms are not hard ones, and it is to be hoped that the United States, with the genuine, if somewhat haphazard, willingness to further the cause of education, which is perhaps our most creditable national characteristic, will accept the offered opportunity and divert a little of the money now being spent in America on scientific investigation of every sort to this investigation so vital for the coming generation. The need is urgent, the sum required is not large, the opportunity is one in a century, and the end to be gained valuable beyond the possibility of exaggeration, for, as Dr. Montessori quotes at the end of the preface of her book, “Whoso strives for the regeneration of education strives for the regeneration of the human race.”

Note.—Since this chapter was printed, I have heard the good news that satisfactory arrangements have been made by the Montessori American Committee with Dr. Montessori for a training class to be held in Rome for American teachers.