The Child Is the Teacher by Cristina De Stefano

Author:Cristina De Stefano [De Stefano, Cristina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

Montessori Fever

On December 9, she is in Philadelphia, where she meets Helen Keller, a woman already famous in the United States, who will become even more famous, years later, thanks to the play and film The Miracle Worker. As a child, she lost her hearing and sight as the result of an illness. Her parents, at the suggestion of the Bells, had her assisted by an extraordinary teacher, Anne Sullivan, who found a way to communicate with Helen and helped her study all the way to her college degree. Helen Keller’s story is confirmation of what Maria has been saying all along about children’s natural instinct for learning. Even in the deepest darkness and the most absolute sensorial deprivation, the potent mind of the child has endless resources.

The meeting takes place before an audience of journalists. Helen is a socialist activist and, during the press conference, she speaks about the struggle for social justice. Maria prefers to steer clear of politics but without denying her past. “ ‘I began as a sympathizer of political revolutionists of all kinds. Then I came to realize that it is the liberation of this,’ putting her hands to her bosom, ‘of what we have in our hearts, that is the beginning and end of revolution.’ ”[6] The two women communicate by way of a complicated procedure. Maria Montessori speaks in Italian, Anne George translates into English, then Anne Sullivan transforms the words into signs traced on Helen Keller’s hands, and vice versa. At the meeting’s end, dispensing with the complicated channel of communication, Maria embraces Helen and whispers in the ear of Anne George: “Say to her that I am too much moved to express what I feel.”[7]

After stops to deliver lectures in Boston and Providence, she visits the laboratory of the inventor Thomas A. Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey. On December 5, she is back in New York to speak a second time at a Carnegie Hall jammed with people. America, the land of liberty, seems to be enthused by the message of this Italian doctor who, in all her speeches, returns to the concept of the free development of the child. “Instead of imposing on children the results of someone else’s experience from without, children should be stimulated and allowed to explore for themselves, so that their experience makes their knowledge real and a part of themselves, rather than a matter of memorized formulae.”[8]

She visits Pittsburgh and Chicago, again welcomed by large audiences, thanks to McClure’s excellent promotion. The newspapers talk of “Montessori fever.” Despite her busy schedule, she finds time to send her students in Rome a telegram to remind them to take some flowers to her mother’s grave for the first anniversary of her death. McClure is always by her side, to make sure that nothing irritates her, because by now he knows her difficult character well. “We have got safely through & once more I am able to breathe freely,” he writes to Mabel Bell…The Dottoressa has been successful everywhere & excepting her neurasthenia and resulting fatigues, she has been a very good traveling associate.

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