London Review of Books [15 December 2022] by calibre

Author:calibre [calibre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: calibre
Published: 2022-12-17T19:49:37.179000+00:00

Her great revelation at the Children’s House was that once children had the right materials, the teacher had very little to do. She provided clay, blocks and pencils; frames to practise doing and undoing buttons; cleaning cloths. There were child-sized mirrors and sinks in the bathroom and child-sized chairs – another innovation that is now universal in schools. She gave the children aprons and sandals that were easy for them to take on and off by themselves. If anyone wanted to lie on the floor or sit under the table, they could. They were also free to move the tables and chairs anywhere they chose. She once observed a child putting away chairs and carefully leaving one of them slightly crooked because it had been that way when he came into the room.

Her most famous educational tools were sandpaper letters. She had originally wanted to commission wooden alphabets like the one Séguin used but these were too expensive. Instead, she made her own letters from paper, glue and sandpaper and soon realised the ‘great superiority’ of this alphabet: the roughness of the sandpaper helped the children to feel the letters before they learned to write them. Two months after the children started exploring these letters, an ‘explosion of writing’ started. One day, Montessori handed a five-year-old boy a piece of chalk and he wrote the words ‘mano’, ‘camino’ and ‘tetto’ (‘hand’, ‘chimney’ and ‘roof’). ‘As he was writing, he kept on shouting “I can write! I know how to write!” … The other children heard him and came over to stand around him in a circle, looking at him in amazement.’ Some of the others asked Montessori for chalk and they, too, wrote a string of words, though they had never held a writing instrument before.

This conspicuous success helped the Montessori method spread around the world. Italian newspapers wrote of the ‘miracle’ of San Lorenzo. Montessori attracted new disciples and new schools were established: first in Milan; then in other locations in Rome; then in the US. In 1913, when she first visited America, a newspaper described her as the ‘most interesting woman of Europe’ and another wrote of ‘Montessori fever’. In Washington, she visited a Montessori school established by Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, Mabel. In New York, she gave a lecture at Carnegie Hall, which sold out; a thousand people stood outside in the street to see her. She was introduced by the philosopher John Dewey. ‘The development at which I aim includes the whole child,’ she said. ‘My larger aim is the eventual perfection of the human race.’

In America, Montessori’s authoritarian tendencies were even more evident than they had been in Italy. She formed rapid alliances and fell out with people just as quickly. When she first arrived in the States, her promoter was the journalist Samuel McClure (of McClure’s Magazine). He had a vision, she wrote, of a ‘Montessori-McClure company that will conquer the world and make lots of money’. Her aim was that her son, Mario, with whom she had been reunited, would inherit the company.

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