Teaching: Montessori in the Slums

Founding the first modern Montessori school in the U.S. turned red-haired Nancy McCormick Rambusch from a housewife into a stormy prophetess. Her success in setting up the Whitby School in Greenwich, Conn., led to so much demand for her advice that she went on to start the American Montessori Society. “I’m sort of the Mary Baker Eddy of this organization,” she remarks, a little ruefully. But Nancy Rambusch is proud that beginning with Whitby in 1958, the Montessori movement in the U.S. has grown to 100 private schools (38 of them belonging to her A.M.S.), and the method may be on the verge of filling a big new role in big-city slums.

Heresy. The Whitby School was chartered from Amsterdam, headquarters of the international Montessori movement.

There, Mario Montessori, natural son of the Italian woman who worked out the method, has carried on since her death in 1952 at 81. But when Head mistress Rambusch insisted on relaxing the strict discipline of the original Montessori dogma, Mario called her a heretic and withdrew the charter. “My task has been to create a society for the maintenance of the ‘pure’ Montessori,” he explains with a sigh.

Then Nancy Rambusch quit the Whitby School, after a disagreement with the board of directors. At the same time, an ex-actor named Tom Laughlin founded a Montessori school in Santa Monica, quickly made it the biggest in the U.S., and brought in an authentically European Montessorian couple to run a teacher-training program. Orthodox Montessorian Laughlin scorns Nancy Rambusch, confidently expects that the A.M.S. will die within three years.

Despite such bickering, the movement thrives. Thousands of well-off U.S. couples, many of them Roman Catholics, accept the Montessori principle that a child’s mind, far from being a clean slate, contains a blueprint of self-civilization; the school and teachers need only provide conditions for the child to follow the blueprint. Kids who are able to follow often learn to read, write and do binomial theorems at six—which is why Montessori schools rise faster than competent teachers can be found.

Hands Unlike Hands. Yet only now is the Montessori method being tried on the gravest problem facing big-city educators in the U.S. Recalling that Maria Montessori formed her educational concepts teaching 60 slum children in Rome almost 60 years ago, some Chicago experimenters are running a Montessori school that tackles the job of preparing preschool kids from racial ghettos for the strange world of middle-class public schools.

The children live in Chicago’s Cabrini slum-clearance project. They are mostly fatherless Negroes and Puerto Ricans whose mothers work or are on relief. “Some of the older ones had hands that didn’t even operate like hands,” says the school’s director, Marcella Morrison, who taught in Chicago public schools before she went to Greenwich for a year of Montessori training at Nancy Rambusch’s Whitby School. “They had never been given anything to handle.” At first they were a reserved, hostile bunch, and Director Morrison found that she could barely even talk with them. Now the Cabrini kids fondly call her “the tall lady,” and follow her through the grounds of the project as though she were the Pied Piper.

Learning one step at a time, at their own pace, they become more self-reliant and confident. A three-year-old lies on a rubber mat, arranging a washbasin and cups; a five-year-old, blindfolded with a blue eyeshade, feels a sphere, a cube, a cylinder, following out some blueprint in his mind. Ordinary progressive schools have similar equipment, since U.S. toy manufacturers have stolen many of Maria Montessori’s original designs and ideas. But where progressive schools use the tools as one of many activities in which the teacher plays a major role, Montessori schools put the teacher in the background while the didactic teaching materials do much of the work.

Profound Change? Some educators, such as Columbia Teachers College Professor Miriam Goldberg, think the Montessori boom will collapse, just as it did early in the century when John Dewey’s brand of progressive education won out. On the other hand, others are just as sure that the current Montessori revival, coinciding with national concern for preschool education in general and for slum kids in particular, will profoundly change U.S. education.

“The big” push at the moment,” predicts John Henry Martin, superintendent of schools in Freeport, L.I., “will eventually force the public school system into running nursery schools. And the only thing on the horizon with the theoretical base and the classroom hardware for a modern nursery is the Montessori system.” Adds Nancy Rambusch: “We’ve come full circle. We’re back with the slum kids Maria Montessori started with.”