SOME REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYSTEM  
WHEN I first began to understand to some extent the thoroughgoing radicalism of the philosophy of liberty which underlies all the intricate detail of Dr. Montessori’s system, I used to wonder why it went home to me with such a sudden inward conviction of its truth, and why it moved me so strangely, almost as the conversion to a new religion. This Italian woman is not the first, by any means, to speak eloquently of the righteousness of personal liberty. As far back as Rabelais’ “Fay ce que vouldras” someone was feeling and expressing that. Even the righteousness of such liberty for the child is no invention of hers. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “émile,” in spite of all its disingenuous evading of the principle in practice, was founded on it in theory; and Froebel had as clear a vision as any seer, as Montessori herself, of just the liberty his followers admit in theory and find it so hard to allow in practice.
Why, then, should those who come to Rome to study the Montessori work, stammerers though they might be, wish, all of them, to go away and prophesy? For almost without exception this was the common[118] result among the widely diverse national types I saw in Rome; always granting, of course, that they had seen one of the good schools and not those which present a farcical caricature of the method.
In thinking the matter over since, I have come to the conclusion that the vividness of inward conviction arises from the fact that the founder of this “new” philosophy bases it on the theory of democracy; and there is no denying that the world to-day is democratic, that we honestly in our heart of hearts believe, as we believe in the law of gravity, that, on the whole, democracy, for all its shortcomings, has in it the germ of the ideal society of the future.
Now, our own democracy was based, a hundred or so years ago, on the idea that men reach their highest development only when they have, for the growth of their individuality, the utmost possible freedom which can be granted them without interfering with the rights and freedom of others. Little by little during the last half-century the idea has grown that, inasmuch as women form half the race, the betterment of the whole social group might be hastened if this beneficial principle were applied to them.
If you will imagine yourself living sixty or so years ago, when, to conservative minds, this idea of personal liberty for women was like the sight of dynamite under the foundations of society, and to radical minds shone like the dawn of a brighter day, you can imagine how startling and thrilling is the first glimpse of its application to children. I felt,[119] during the beginning of my consideration of the question, all the sharp pangs of intellectual growing-pains which must have racked my grandfather when it first occurred to him that my grandmother was a human being like himself, who would very likely thrive under the same conditions which were good for him. For, just as my grandfather, in spite of the sincerest affection for his wife, had never conceived that he might be doing her an injury by insisting on doing her thinking for her, so I, for all my love for my children, had never once thought that, by my competent, loving “management” of them, I might be starving and stunting some of their most valuable moral and intellectual qualities.
In theory I instantly granted this principle of as much personal liberty as possible for children. I could not help granting it, pushed irresistibly forward as I was by the generations of my voting, self-governing ancestors; but the resultant splintering upheaval of all my preconceived ideas about children was portentous.
The first thing that Dr. Montessori’s penetrating and daring eye had seen in her survey of the problem of education, and the fact to which she devotes throughout her most forceful, direct, and pungent explanation, had simply never occurred to me, in spite of Froebel’s mild divination of it; namely, that children are nothing more or less than human beings. I was as astonished by this fact as I was amazed that I had not thought of it myself; and I instantly perceived[120] a long train of consequences leading off from it to a wholly unexplored country. True, children are not exactly like adults; but then, neither are women exactly like men, nor are slow, phlegmatic men exactly like the red-headed, quick-tempered type; but they all belong to the genus of human beings, and those principles which slow centuries of progress have proved true about the genus as a whole hold true about subdivisions of it. Children are much weaker physically than most adults, their judgment is not so seasoned by experience, and their attention is more fitful. Hence, on the whole, they need more guidance than grown-ups. But, on the other hand, the motives, the instincts, the needs, the potential capacities of children are all human and nothing but human. Their resemblances to adults are a thousand times more numerous and vital than their differences. What is good for the one must, in a not excessively modified form, be good for the other.
With this obvious fact firmly in mind, Dr. Montessori simply looked back over history and drew upon the stores of the world’s painfully acquired wisdom as to the best way to extract the greatest possibilities from the world’s inhabitants. If it is true, she reasoned, that men and women have reached their highest development only when they have had the utmost possible liberty for the growth of their individualities, if it is true that slavery has been the most ruinously unsatisfactory of all social expedients, both for masters and slaves, if society has found it necessary for[121] its own good to abolish not only slavery but caste laws and even guild rules; if, with all its faults, we are agreed that democracy works better than the wisest of paternal despotisms, then it ought to be true that in the schoolroom’s miniature copy of society there should be less paternal despotism, more democracy, less uniformity of regulation and more,—very much more,—individuality.
Therefore, although we cannot allow children as much practical freedom as that suitable for men of ripe experience, it is apparent that it is our first duty as parents to make every effort to give them as full a measure of liberty as possible, exercising our utmost ingenuity to make the family life an enlightened democracy. But this is not an easy matter. A democracy, being a much more complicated machine than an autocracy, is always harder to organize and conduct. Moreover the family is so old a human institution that, like everything else very old, it has acquired barnacle-like accretions of irrelevant tradition. Elements of Russian tyranny have existed in the institution of the family so long that our very familiarity with them prevents us from recognizing them without an effort, and prevents our conceiving family life without them; quite as though in this age of dentistry, we should find it difficult to conceive of old age withou............