Education: Montessori in Copenhagen

Above the green, copper roofs of Copenhagen in the grey-spired Christiansborg palace, home of the Danish Parliament, a dumpy old lady last week rapped a distinguished gathering to order. Before her sat 203 representatives from 21 nations, including France’s bouncing Edouard Herriot, Czechoslovakia’s venerable Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, England’s Leaguophile Viscount Cecil of Chelwood. The meeting was boycotted by totalitarian Russia, Germany and Italy, but when the old lady, peering sharply from behind high baskets of pink and red roses, began to speak, it was in full-throated Italian. At 67, Dottoressa Maria Montessori had called together a ten-day international Congress on Education & Peace.

A veteran of international congresses, which she has been attending to expound her theories of child education all over Europe since the turn of the Century, the Dottoressa was welcomed by Danish newspapers as “the greatest living Italian orator.” Using no notes, waiting patiently for her interpreters, last week the Dottoressa wanted to talk about children from a new point of view. ”The adult,” she declared, “must understand the meaning of the moral defence of humanity, not the armed defence of nations. He must realize that the child will be the creator of the new world peace. In a suitable environment the child reveals unsuspected social characteristics. The qualities he shows will be the salvation of the world, showing us all the road to peace. And the new child has been born! He will tell us what is needed!”

As this good Montessori doctrine was roundly applauded. Danish Foreign Minister Dr. Peter Munch got up to add: “We must help by seeing that history books are purged of all biased records which inculcate national hatreds. Brazil, Argentina and Scandinavia have already made great progress.” British Author Philip Noel Baker (The Private Manufacture of Armaments) spoke fervently for international government. An enthusiastic delegate offered a resolution to make the League of Nations an instrument of ”international political hygiene to prevent the growth of the diseases of Communism and Fascism.” From Barcelona, where Dottoressa Montessori had been conducting a training school for teachers until hostilities caused her to leave last summer, came an excited cable from the Catalonian Government promising that 150 Montessori schools would soon be open for 60,000 young Catalans.

That would be more Montessori schools than have ever operated at one time, but the self-confident old Dottoressa is not alone in believing that most modern schools have in some measure been marked by the work she began quietly in Rome 40 years ago. The first woman to be granted an M.D. by the University of Rome, Maria Montessori learned from cretins and morons in the city’s psychiatric clinic that if a child has something to touch or twist with his hands, his brain will function responsively. In 1900 she left the directorship of an institution for the feeble-minded to enroll once more in the University of Rome, as a student of philosophy and experimental psychology. Seven years later she was organizing for a tenement owner a playroom or Casa del Bambini for the obstreperous youngsters who were racing in the halls all day. Montessori kept them quiet by giving them objects to handle. Three-year-olds experimented with buttons, pieces of cloth, and knots until they learned to dress themselves. They learned the difference between sandpaper and velvet, and incidentally the meaning of texture, by running their fingers over both. Older children discovered what a violin was by taking one apart. Pupils were encouraged to express themselves, never hurried, punished, rewarded.

Since then the tripartite method (The Doctrine of Freedom, Auto-Education, Sense Training) which Dottoressa Montessori deduced from her experiences has been used all over the world in guiding children through their first educative steps. Australia and England support most Montessori kindergartens. Largely owing to the efforts of Chicago Teacher Anne E. George, who attended a Montessori training course in 1910-11, the method was early introduced in the U. S., boasts such products as Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and the grandchildren of Alexander Graham Bell. Today most U. S. progressive educators are apt to regard the Dottoressa, particularly in her minute specifications for equipment, as somewhat rigid and mechanical. But as a prophet she ranks beside Vermont Yankee John Dewey, who began working with auto-education at the University of Chicago in 1902.

Prophet Montessori was briefly honored by her own country when in 1930 Il Duce invited her back after 16 years’ absence (in England, France, Switzerland) to run a training course in Rome. But the Dottoressa became so impatient with government indoctrination that she soon left for anarchist Catalonia, where she heard there was no government at all. The unmarried Dottoressa and her 38-year-old adopted son Mario, who took earnest notes on her speech at the Congress last week, hope to be able to go back there soon.