THAT there is little prospect of an immediate adoption in the United States of Montessori ideas of flexibility and unhampered individual growth is apparent to anyone who knows even slightly the hierarchic rigidity of our system of education with its inexorable advance along fixed fore-ordained lines, from the kindergarten through the primary school, on through the high school to the Chinese ordeal of the college entrance examination, an event which casts its shadow far down the line of school-grades, embittering the intellectual activities and darkening the life of teachers and pupils (even pupils who have not the faintest chance of going to college) for years before the awful moment arrives. All really good teachers have always been, as much as they were allowed to be, some variety of what is called in this book “Montessori teacher.” But as the State and private systems of education have swollen to more and more unmanageable proportions, and have settled into more and more exact and cog-like relations with each other, teachers have found themselves required to “turn out a more uniform[233] product,” a process which is in its very essence utterly abhorrent to anyone with the soul of an educator.
Our State system of education has come to such an exalted degree of uniformity that a child in a third grade in Southern California can be transported to a third grade in Maine, and find himself in company with children being ground out in precisely the same educational hopper he has left. His temperament, capacity, tastes, surroundings, probable future and aspirations may be what you will, he will find all the children about his age of all temperaments, tastes, capacities, probable futures and aspirations practically everywhere in the United States, being “educated” exactly as he was, in his original graded school, wherever it was. School superintendents hold conferences of self-congratulation over this “standardizing” of American education, and some teachers are so hypnotized by this mental attitude on the part of their official superiors, that they come to take pride in the Procrustean quality of their schoolroom where all statures are equalized, and to labor conscientiously to drive thirty or more children slowly and steadily, like a flock of little sheep, with no stragglers and no advance-guard allowed, along the straight road to the next division, where another shepherdess, with the same training, takes them in hand. There is a significant anecdote current in school-circles, of an educator rising to address an educational convention[234] which had been discussing special treatment for mentally slow and deficient children, and solemnly making only this pregnant exclamation, “We have special systems for the deficient child, and the slow child and the stupid child ... but God help the bright child!”
Now it is only fair to state that this mechanical exactitude of program and of organization has been in the past of incalculable service in bringing educational order out of the chaos which was the inevitable result of the astoundingly rapid growth in population of our country. Our educational system is a monument to the energy, perseverance, and organizing genius of the various educational authorities, city, county, and state superintendents and so on, who have created it. But like all other complicated machines it needs to be controlled by master-minds who do not forget its ultimate purpose in the fascination of its smoothly-running wheels. That there is plenty of the right spirit fermenting among educators is evident. For, even along with the mighty development of this educational machine, has gone a steadily increasing protest on the part of the best teachers and superintendents, against its quite possible misuse.
Few people become teachers for the sake of the money to be made in that business; it is a profession which rapidly becomes almost intolerable to anyone who has not a natural taste for it; and, as a consequence of these two factors, it is perhaps, of all the[235] professions, the one which has the largest proportion of members with a natural aptitude for their lifework. With the instinctive right-feeling of human beings engaged in the work for which they were born, a considerable proportion of teachers have protested against the tacit demand upon them by the machine organization of education, to make the children under their care, all alike. They have felt keenly the essential necessity of inculcating initiative and self-dependence in their pupils, and in many cases have been aided and abetted in these heterodox ideas by more or less sympathetic principals and superintendents; but the ugly, hard fact remains, not a whit diminished for all their efforts, that the teacher whose children are not able to “pass” given examinations on given subjects, at the end of a given time, is under suspicion; and the principal whose school is full of such teachers is very apt to give way to a successor, chosen by a board of business-men with a cul............