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[211] 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[212] 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[213] 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.
[214]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[215] 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[216] 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[217] 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[218] 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[219] 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[220] 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[221] 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[222] 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[223] 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[224] 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[225] 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 na?ve 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.
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[226] 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[227] 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.
[228]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[229] 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[230] 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[231] 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.
