DR. MONTESSORI’S LIFE AND THE ORIGIN OF THE CASA DEI BAMBINI  
DR. MONTESSORI and the average American parent are as different in heredity, training, and environment as two civilized beings can very well be. Every condition surrounding the average American child is as materially different as possible from those about the children in the original Casa dei Bambini. Hence the usual sound rule that the individuality and personal history of the scientist do not concern the student of his work does not hold in this case. The conditions in Rome where Dr. Montessori has done her work, differ so entirely from those of ordinary American life, in the conduct of which we hope to profit by her experiments, that it is only fair to Americans interested in her work, to give them some notion of the varying influences which have shaped the career of this woman of genius.
This is so especially in her case, because, as a nation, we are more ignorant of modern Italian life than of that of any great European nation. Modern Italy, wrestling with all the problems of modern industrial and city life grafted upon an age-old civilization, endeavoring to enlighten itself, to take the[211] best from twentieth-century progress without losing its own individual virtues, this is a country as unknown to us as the regions of the moon. And yet to understand Dr. Montessori’s work and the vicissitudes of her undertakings, we must have at least a summary knowledge that the Italian world of to-day is in a curious ferment of antiquated prejudices and highly progressive thought.
To us, as a rule, Rome is “The Eternal City” of our school-Latin days, whereas, in reality, it is, for all practical purposes as a city, much more recent than New York—about as old, let us say, as Detroit. But Detroit planted its vigorously growing seedling in the open ground and not in a cracked pot of small dimensions. Hence the problems of the two modern cities are dissimilar. I heard it suggested by a man of authority in the Italian government that a great mistake had been made when the modern capital of Italy had been dumped down upon the heap of historic ruins which remained of ancient Rome. It had been bad for the ruins and very hard on the modern capital. If a site had been selected just outside the walls of old Rome, a nineteenth-century metropolis could have sprung up with the effortless haste with which our own Middle Western plains have produced cities. One thing is certain, Dr. Montessori’s Case dei Bambini would not have taken their present form under other conditions, and this is what concerns us here.
But before the origin of the Case dei Bambini is[212] taken up, a brief biography of their creator will help us to understand her development. Her early life, before her choice of a profession, need not interest us beyond the fact that she is the only child of devoted parents, not materially well-to-do. Now, as a result of a too-rapid social transformation among the Italians, the “middle class” population forms a much smaller proportion of the inhabitants of Italy than in other modern nations. One result of this condition is that the brilliant daughter of parents not well-to-do, finds it much harder to pass into a class of associates and to find an intellectual background which suits her nature, than a similarly intellectual and original American girl. Even now in Italy such a girl is forced to fight an unceasing battle against social prejudice and intellectual inertia. It can be imagined that when Dr. Montessori was the beautiful, gifted girl-student of whom older Romans speak with enthusiasm or horror, according to the centuries in which they morally live, her will-power and capacity for concentration must have been finely tempered in order not to break in the long struggle.
Judging by the talk one hears in Rome about the fine, youthful fervor of Dr. Montessori’s early struggle against conditions hampering her mental and spiritual progress, she is a surviving pioneer of social frontier prejudice, who has emerged from the battle with pioneer conditions endowed with the hickory-like toughness of intellectual fiber of will[213] and of character which is the reward of sturdy pioneers. Certain it is that her battles with prejudices of all sorts 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 aim and end 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 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. So rapidly have conditions surrounding women changed that there is no parallel possible to be made which could bring home to us fully the tremendous will-power necessary for an Italian woman of that time and class to stick to her resolution. The fangs of that particular prejudice have been so well-nigh universally drawn that 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.
[214]After graduation she became attached, as assistant doctor, to the Psychiatric Clinic at Rome. At that time, one of the temporary expedients of self-modernizing Italy was to treat the idiot and feeble-minded children in connection with the really insane, a rough-and-ready classification which will serve vividly to illustrate the desperate condition of Italy of that date. The young medical graduate had taken up children’s diseases as the “specialty” which no self-respecting modern doctor can be without, and naturally in her visits to the insane asylums (where the subjects of her Clinic lived), her attention was attracted to the deficient children so fortuitously lodged under the same roof.
I go into the details of the oblique manner in which she embarked upon the prodigious undertaking of education without any conscious knowledge of the port toward which she was directing her course, in order to bring out clearly the fact that she approached the field of pedagogy from an entirely new direction, with absolutely new aims and with a wholly different mental equipment from those of the technically pedagogical, philosophic, or social-reforming persons who have labored so conscientiously in that field for so many generations.
This young doctor, then, trained by hard knocks to do her own thinking and make her own decisions, found that her absorbed study of abnormal and deficient children led her straight along the path taken by the nerves from their unregulated external[215] activities to the brain-centers which rule them so fitfully. The question was evidently of getting at the brain-centers. Now the name of the process of getting at brain-centers is one not usually encountered in the life of the surgeon. It is education.
The doctor at work on these problems was all the time in active practice as a physician, an influence in her life which is not to be forgotten in summing up the elements which have formed her character. She was performing operations in the hospitals, taking charge of grave diseases in her private practice, exposing herself to infection of all sorts in the infectious wards of the hospitals, liable to be called up at any hour of the night to attend a case anywhere in the purlieus of Rome. It was a soldier tried and tested in actual warfare in another part of the battle for the betterment of humanity, who finally took up the question of the training of the young. She parted company with many of her fellow-students of deficient children, and faced squarely the results of her reasoning. Not for her the position aloof, the observation of phenomena from the detached standpoint of the distant specialist. If nervous diseases of children, leading to deficient intellectual powers, could be best attacked through education, the obvious step was to become an educator.
She gave up her active practice as a physician which had continued steadily throughout all her other activities, and accepted the post of Director of the State Orthophrenic School (what we would call an[216] Institute for the Feeble-Minded), and, throwing herself into the work, heart and soul, with all the ardor of her race and her own temperament, she utilized her finely-tempered brain and indomitable will, in the hand-to-hand struggle for the actual amelioration of existing conditions. For years she taught the children in the Asylum under her care, devoting herself to them throughout every one of their waking hours, pouring into the poor, cracked vases of their minds the full, rich flood of her own powerful intellect. All day she worked with her children, loved to idolatry by them, exhausting herself over their problems like the simplest, most unthinking, most unworldly, and devout sister of charity; but at night she was the scientist again, arranging, classifying, clarifying the results of the day’s observation, examining with minute attention the work of all those who had studied her problems before her, applying and elaborating every hint of theirs, every clue discovered in her own experiments.
Those were good years, years before the world had heard of her, years of undisturbed absorption in her work.
Then, one day, as such things come, after long, uncertain efforts, a miracle happened. A supposedly deficient child, trained by her methods, passed the examinations of a public school with more ease, with higher marks than normal children prepared in the old way. The miracle happened again and again and then so often that it was no longer a[217] miracle, but a fact to be foretold and counted on with certainty.
Then the woman with the eager heart and trained mind drew a long breath and, determining to make this first success only the cornerstone of a new temple, turned to a larger field of action, the field to which her every unconscious step had been leading her, the education, no longer only of the deficient, but of all the normal young of the human race.
It was in 1900 that Dr. Montessori left the Scuola Ortofrenica, and began to prepare herself consciously and definitely for the task before her. For seven years she followed a course of self-imposed study, meditation, observation, and intense thought. She began by registering as a student of philosophy in the University of Rome and turned her attention to experimental psychology with especial reference to child-psychology. The habit of her scientific training disposed her naturally as an accompaniment to her own research to examine thoroughly the existing and recognized authorities in her new field. She began to visit the primary schools and to look about her at the orthodox and old-established institutions of the educational world with the fresh vision only possible to a mind trained by scientific research to abhor preconceived ideas and to come to a conclusion only after weighing actual evidence.
No more diverting picture can be imagined than the one presented by this keen-eyed, clear-headed[218] scientist surveying, with an astonishment which must have been almost dramatically apparent, the rows of immobile little children nailed to their stationary seats and forced to give over their natural birth-right of activity to a well-meaning, gesticulating, explaining, always fatigued, and always talking teacher. It was evident at a glance that she could not find there what she had hoped to find, that first prerequisite of the modern scientist, a prolonged scrutiny of the natural habits of the subject of investigation. The entomologist seeking to solve some of the farmer’s problems, spends years with a microscope, studying the habits of the potato and of the potato-bug before he tries to invent a way to help the one and circumvent the other. But Dr. Montessori found, so to speak, that all the potatoes she tried to investigate were being grown in a cellar. They grew, somehow, because the upward thrust of life is invincible, but their pale shoots gave no evidence of the possibility of the sturdy stems, which a chance specimen or two escaped by a stroke of luck from the cellar, proved to be possible for the whole species.
At the same time that she was making these amazed and disconcerted visits to the primary schools, she was devouring all the books which have been written on her subject. My own acquaintance with works on pedagogy is limited, but I observe that people who do know them do not seem surprised that this thoroughly trained modern doctor, with[219] years of practical teaching back of her, should have found little aid in them. Two highly valuable authorities she did find, significantly enough doctors like herself, one who lived at the time of the French Revolution and one perhaps fifty years later. She tells us in her book what their ideas were and how strongly they modified her own; but as we are here chiefly concerned with the net result of her thought, it would not be profitable to go exhaustively into the investigation of her sources. It is enough to say that most of us would never in our lives have heard of those two doctors if she had not studied them.
We have now followed the course of Dr. Montessori’s life until it brings us back to that chaotic, ancient-modern Rome, mentioned a few paragraphs above, struggling with all sorts of modern problems of city life. The housing of the very poor is a question troublesome enough, even to Detroit or Indianapolis with their bright, new municipal machinery. In Rome the problem is complicated by the medieval standards of the poor themselves as to their own comfort; by the existence of many old rookeries where they may roost in unspeakable conditions of filth and promiscuity; and by the lack of a widespread popular enlightenment as to the progress of the best modern communities. But, though Italian public opinion as a whole seems to be in a somewhat dazed condition over the velocity of changes in the social structure, there is no country[220] in the world which has more acute, powerful, or original intelligences and consciences trained on our modern problems. All the while that Dr. Montessori had been trying to understand the discrepancy between the rapid advance of idiot children under her system and the slow advance of normal children under old-fashioned methods, another Italian, an influential, intelligent, and patriotic Roman, Signor Edoardo Talamo, was studying the problem of bettering at once, practically, the housing of the very poor.
He had decided what to do and had done it, when the line of his activity and that of Dr. Montessori’s met in one of those apparently fortuitous combinations of elements destined to form a compound which is exactly the medicine needed for some unhealthy part of the social tissue. The plan of Signor Talamo’s model tenements was so wise and so admirably executed that, except for one factor, they really deserved their name. This factor was the existence of a large number of little children under the usual school age, who were left alone all day while their mothers, driven by the grinding necessity which is the rule in the Italian lower working classes, went out to help earn the family living. These little ones wandered about the clean halls and stairways, defacing everything they could reach and constantly getting into mischief, the desolating ingenuity of which can be imagined by any mother of small children. It was evident that the money taken to repair[221] the damage done by them would be better employed in preventing them from doing it in the first place. Signor Talamo conceived the simple plan of setting apart a big room in every one of his tenement houses where the children could be kept together. This, of course, meant that some grown person must be there to look after them.
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