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Updated: June 15, 2025
It is hardly necessary to launch into descriptions of the crèches, country homes or palaces for children, where Montessori methods prevail, where the pupils cultivate their little gardens, model in plasticine, draw and sing and act, and dance their Eurythmic dances barefoot on floors once sacred to the tread of the nobility.
If anyone wants to inspect the pit whence the Montessori system of education was digged, let him read Rousseau, who declared that the only habit a child should have is the habit of not having a habit, or his contemporary disciple, George Moore, who says that one should be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed. There are admirable features in the schooling-made-easy system.
Under her married name, Dorothea Canfield Fisher, she has written some valuable educational works, as The Montessori Mother and Mothers and Children. During the World War, Mrs. Fisher spent her time in France working for the relief of those made blind by the war. Home Fires in France and The Day of Glory are truthful records of Mrs. Fisher's impressions of life in that tragic, mutilated land.
The ideas which have arisen from the advocacy of the Montessori system have induced methods of greater freedom in connection with many aspects of elementary school life. The Caldecott Community, dealing with working-class children in the neighbourhood of St. Pancras, has tried many interesting experiments.
Beulah tried earnestly to get some perspective on the child's point of view, but she could not. The fact that she was torturing the child would have been outside of the limits of her comprehension. She searched her mind for some immediate application of the methods of Madame Montessori, and produced a lump of modeling clay. "You don't really have to do anything, Eleanor," she said kindly.
This is clearly the time to show a glass prism and to let these children make rainbows for themselves, to tell the story of Iris, and to use any colour material, Milton Bradley spectrum papers, Montessori silks, colour top, and anything else so long as the children keep up their interest.
Montessori has had the audacity to sacrifice the sacred bench to the interests of the pupil! The traditional school seems to be vanishing that place in which an ill-assorted band of youngsters was for a certain number of hours each day placed in the vicinity of a text-book and a maiden lady. I mention these experiments at random.
James's Park station, whither I went in search of patriotic employment. Here, in a fixed number of rooms, sat an uncertain number of chubby young gentlemen, all of whom seemed to be of military age, or possibly below it; the Emergency Bureau was then plainly for it may have changed later on a hastily improvised shelter for privileged sucklings, a kind of nursery on advanced Montessori methods.
The United States Government supplies a branch of its Children's Bureau, with daily conferences for parents. Among the many instructors who have been engaged to conduct classes in the palace is Dr. Maria Montessori, who is to give a course of lessons based on her famous system.
So, too, an unfortunate publicity given to child prodigies brought with it for a short time an epidemic of forced intellectual feeding of children, that produced only a precocious neurasthenia as its great result. Similarly the Montessori method of child training which made every woman into a kindergarten teacher did a hundred times more harm than good, despite the merits of the system.
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