A Montessori Mother
- REVIEWS AND CRITICISM 25
- Author:
Dorothy Canfield Fisher. New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1912. Pp. xiv + 24U.
To an interpretation of what the Montessori idea promises to American mothers, Mrs. Fisher has brought the keen insight and vividly graceful style that have made her magazine stories so enjoyable. Returning from a prolonged stay in Rome she was immediately set upon and besought by friends, acquaintances, by strangers even, for an account of what she had seen. “How many evenings,” 6ays Mrs. Fisher, “have I talked from the appearance of the coffeecups till a very late bedtime, in answer to the demand, ‘Now, you’ve been to Rome, you’ve seen the Montessori schools. You saw a great deal of Dr Montessori herself and were in close personal relations with her. Tell us all about it. Is it really so wonderful? Or is it just a fad? Is it true that the children are allowed to do exactly as they please? I should think it would spoil them beyond endurance. Do they really learn to read and write so young? And isn’t it very bad for them to stimulate them so unnaturally? And’? this was a never-failing cry?’what is there in it for our children, situated as we are? “A Montessori Mother” is the answer to all these questions and many more that have occurred to our minds. Not the least interesting chapter is concerned with the life history of the Countess Montessori. Her battles with prejudices of all sorts,” the author observes, 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 end and aim 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,” continues Mrs. Fisher, “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. . ? ? 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 telling of Dr Montessori’s remarkable success in the training of feebleminded children and the beginning of her experiment with normal children in the first Casa dei Bambini, opened in January, 1907, Mrs. Fisher goes on to sketch the rapid growth of the movement, showing how educators m Rome are divided into partisan and hostile camps and how it has come about that there is now “not one primary school which is entirely under her care, which she authorizes in all its detail, which is really a ‘ Montessori schoolThe nearest approach to a school under Dr Montessori’s control in Rome is the one in the Franciscan nunnery in the Via Giusti. “But even here,” adds Mrs. Fisher, “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.” And finally, in answer to that most touchingly eager cry,?What is there in all this for our children, situated as we are??Mrs. Fisher bids her readers take heart. “We can collaborate in our small way,” she says, “with the scientific founder of the Montessori Method, and can help her to go on with her system (discovered before its completion) by assimilating profoundly her master-idea, and applying it in directions which she has not yet had time finally and carefully to explore, such as its application to the dramatic and aesthetic instincts of children. Above all we can apply it to ourselves, to our own tense and troubled lives. We can absorb some of Dr Montessori’s reverence for vital processes. Indeed, possibly nothing could more benefit our children than a whole-hearted conversion on our part to her great and calm trust in life itself.” A. T.
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