Maria Montessori by Rita Kramer

Author:Rita Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0201092271
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2017-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

The newspapers let out all the stops reporting on her lecture the next day. A typical article was headed, “Smash Your Toys if You Want To. Dr. Montessori Gives Children Leeway to Wreck Christmas Presents. Mothers Alone to Blame, She Says. They Don’t Pick Gifts that Appeal to Infantile Mind, Woman Teacher Asserts.”25

Despite the inevitable exaggerations and distortions, Montessori went on receiving reporters and trying to explain her ideas as well as answering their questions about her impressions of America. It is hardly possible to know exactly what she said in these interviews and how much was lost in the process of translation from Italian to English to newspaperese, but she was reported to have described Americans as “the most intelligent people in the world,” responding more quickly to “fineness of thought” (an understandable view in the light of the enthusiasm with which they were responding to her own thought at the time) than the people of any other country in the world and without having to travel the long road necessary for those under less enlightened governments.26

The interest Americans took in their children was, she felt, the token of a great race and bespoke a great future for them. The intelligence of any country was in direct proportion to its interest in the welfare of its children. Historians, she was quoted as having said, had traced the downfall of the civilization of Egypt directly to its neglect of the child.

There began to creep into her public pronouncements the kind of modesty which is assumed only by those who have become used to hearing themselves repeatedly described as great men or women. “All the homage which the American people have lavished on me,” she said, “I accept not as tribute to me personally, but as homage to the child.”

She was asked questions about American customs as well as American institutions, and she gave her views on everything, the trivial as well as the serious.

Asked what she thought of the slit skirt then fashionable in America, she looked puzzled and shook her head. Anne George, interpreting for her, illustrated in pantomime just what a slit skirt was and Montessori, after a moment’s thought, pronounced demurely, “Anything is good which adds to comfort. If the skirt as you describe it gives freedom, and permits the wearer to receive more pleasure from walking, it is to be commended. I often think that it is the men who have all the comfortable things to wear, while women have to sacrifice every comfort to beauty.” Then, apparently deciding that if she were to be asked such questions she might as well enjoy herself answering them, she added playfully, “Look how easy it is for a man with his short hair to take off his hat. Is this not unfair, that the man should have all the comfort of short hair himself and the pleasure of looking at the beautiful long hair of women?”

She was delighted by the American custom of shaking hands. “We never do that in Europe.

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