CHAPTER II
A DAY IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI
I HAD not seen a Montessori school when I first read through Dr. Montessori’s book. I laid it down with the mental comments, “All very well to write about! But, of course, it can’t work anything like that in actual practice. Everyone knows that a child’s party of only five or six children of that age (from two and a half to six) is seldom carried through without some sort of quarrel, even though an equal number of mothers are present, devoting themselves to giving the tots exactly whatever they want. It stands to reason that twenty or thirty children of that tender age, shut up together all day long and day after day, must, if they are normal children, have a great many healthy normal battles with each other!”
After putting myself in a dispassionate and judicial frame of mind by laying down these fixed preconceptions, I went to visit the Casa dei Bambini in the Franciscan Nunnery on the Via Giusti.
I half turn away in anticipatory discouragement from the task of attempting, for the benefit of American readers, any description of what I saw there. They will not believe it. I know they will not, because I myself, before I saw it with my own eyes, would have discounted largely the most moderate statements on the subject. But even though stay-at-home people in other centuries may have salted liberally the tall stories of old-time travelers, they certainly had a taste for hearing them; and so possibly my plain account of what I saw that day may be read, even though it be to the accompaniment of incredulous exclamations.
My first glimpse was of a gathering of about twenty-five children, so young that several of them looked like real babies to me. I found afterwards that the youngest was just under three, and the oldest just over six. They were scattered about over a large, high-ceilinged, airy room, furnished with tiny, lightly-framed tables and chairs which, however, by no means filled the floor. There were big tracts of open space, where some of the children knelt or sat on light rugs. One was lying down on his back, kicking his feet in the air. A low, cheerful hum of conversation filled the air.
As my companion and I came into the room I noticed first that there was not that stiffening into self-consciousness which is the inevitable concomitant of “visitors” in our own schoolrooms. Most of the children, absorbed in various queer-looking tasks, did not even glance up as we entered. Others, apparently resting in the intervals between games, looked over across the room at us, smiled welcomingly as I would at a visitor entering my house, and a little group near us ran up with outstretched hands, saying with a pleasant accent of good-breeding, “Good-morning! Good-morning!” They then instantly went off about their own affairs, which were evidently of absorbing interest, for after that, except for an occasional friendly look or smile, or a momentary halt by my side to show me something, none of the little scholars paid the least attention to me.
The School Room in the Convent of the Franciscan Nuns in the Via Giusti.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir