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.
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.
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.
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.
[Illustration: WORD BUILDING WITH CUT-OUT ALPHABET.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
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_.
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.