THE MONTESSORI METHOD

By Beatrice Hessen
Part I

A quiet revolution (or Renaissance) is taking place in American educa-

tion. The battlefield is the nursery school, where the entrenched "Pro-
gressives" face a growing challenge from the widespread revival of the
Montessori method.
The Progressives - whose views are based primarily on the pragmatist
philosophy of John Dewey- hold that the nursery school should foster
conformity to group norms , fantasy play and freedom to act on one's
feelings. The advocates of the Montessori system hold that the nursery
school should foster independence and self-reliance, that a child's early
education should be reality-oriented and should aid the development of
the child's conceptual- i.e., rational- faculty.
To observe these opposing theories in action, I visited several nursery
schools in Princeton, N.J. The first described here was recommended to
me as one of the best of the Progressive schools; the second is the Prince-
ton Montessori School.
The Progressive n\}Jsery meets in airy, sunlit rooms, filled with attrac-
tive, child-sized furniture and low shelves loaded with toys. In the class-
room for three-to-four-year-olds, five little girls were engaged in group
finger painting; samples of their morning's work were drying on a clothes-
line. Two boys were flinging sand at each other in the sandbox ("develop-
ing their large muscles," the teacher explained) . Other children were
playing with blocks or climbing ladders and slides; they, too, were gaining
control of their large muscles "so that they will feel secure when partici-
pating in group activities."
In an adjoining room, several children were working with "concentration
materials": they:-were stringing beads. In one corner, there were many
dolls, doll carriages, cribs and costumes. One little girl was striking a doll's
head against the side of a crib ("ading out her hostility and resentment
against a new baby in the house"). The bookshelf carried a selection of
large picture books with titles such as Zeke the Zookeeper and Betty's Sad
Teddy Bear. As the children pulled books, blocks and toys off the shelves,
the teacher and her two assistants went around picking up the debris.
I asked the teacher what her goal is in regard to the children, what
attitudes and values she is most interested in helping them to acquire.
"They come to school so self-centered," she replied. "We want to socialize
12 i THE OBJECTIVIST

!
them, to teach them to be nice to each other and to accept the authority
of adults." I asked if discipline is ever used in the classroom. She an-
swered: "No, I use love."
At that moment, one child, Keith, who had been happily building a fort
by himself out of some large crates, was interrupted by another boy, Eric,
who also wanted to play with the crates. Attempting to protect his work,
Keith punched Eric to keep him away. Eric ran to the teacher, crying. The
teacher, hugging Eric, proceeded to scold Keith for his selfishness. "Now,
boys," she said, "we are going to have to share." Whereupon Eric punched
the teacher so that she would let him go.
After a group activity called "toileting," the children were seated for
refreshments at a long table. The assistants served the children, while the
teacher provided "an opportunity for conversation and good fellowship."
Rest period was next, accompanied by folk music on the phonograph.
Then the children were dressed by the adults and driven home.
According to this nursery's handbook, addressed to parents of prospec-
tive pupils, the goal of the school is "to maintain a balance between
spontaneous behavior [whim-worship] and conformity to society's stand-
ards [social metaphysics]." The school wants the child to leave with the
knowledge that he "can accept modifications of his behavior when the
group requires it."
Consider the three-year-old child starting his education at a Progressive
nursery school. If his curiosity has not been stifled at home, he eriters
school with an eager interest in the world around him, a hunger to learn,
an intense desire to do things for himself and by himself in order to gain
a sense of personal efficacy. He is in the process of forming his first im-
pressions of his own nature and ability, of other people, of life in general -
impressions that can last a lifetime. But in spite of his urgent need of
knowledge, of principles to guide his thought and action, his teachers
concentrate on the only lesson that seems urgent to them: the importance
of "belonging," of "relating" to one's three-year-old peers. These teachers
(and the children's parents) believe that to offer a child any assistance in
the process of lecrtning to think, to teach him any rules of moral conduct
or any principles of any kind, is to impose~estraints upon his "creativity"
and "emotional freedom." Consequently, the child grows up with no guide
to action except his whims, and no sense of right or wrong except the
approval or disapproval of the group. This range-of-the-moment, "gang"
mentality is typified by today's hippie - the perfect graduate of the Pro-
gressive nursery school.
The second nursery I visited, the Princeton Montessori School, meets
in cheerful rooms with furniture and equipment scaled to child size. The
children ranged from two-and-a-half to five years old. (Unlike the con-

MAY 1970 13

I
 .e::..:onal nursery, where children of the same age are grouped together,
~e . iontessori school lets each child work at his own pace and, therefore,
::o age divisions are necessary.) There were maps on the wall, a black-
- ard and a large cardboard clock with movable hands. A globe stood
in one corner of the room; in another, there was a library alcove. The
:acement of the bookcases made the library a private nook where a child
could read without distraction. The shelves carried large picture books:
Astronomy - Space - Building and Wrecking Machines . There were no
finger paintings on the wall; there was only a child's drawing of a house,
\\ith the windows serving as eyes and the door in the shape of a smiling
mouth.
When the children arrived, they took off their snowsuits and boots with-
out adult assistance, and put them away. (In the Montessori system, chil-
dren are taught to dress themselves and to take care of their possessions as
soon as they begin school. Even the youngest are expected to make an
effort toward self-reliance, and they usually do so with great delight.)
When they came into the classroom, the children explored the materials
on the shelves; each chose the activity that interested him most. One boy
selected a large map-puzzle of the United States; he placed a mat on the
floor, sat down on it with his puzzle and worked by himself with intense
concentration for about 45 minutes, until he had solved it. Then he
stretched out on his mat, his head on his arm, pleased and seemingly
exhausted. Two minutes later, however, he returned the puzzle to its place
on the shelf, rolled up his mat, put it away and went on to another activity.
He joined several boys at the cardboard clock who were practicing
telling time.
Another boy copied his name, ''Peter," from a model of it hanging on
the wall. He could not reproduce it exactly; the letter "e" gave him
trouble. On his own initiative, he took a fresh sheet of paper from the shelf
and wrote out a page of e's. Then he counted them aloud, and announced
with obvious pride: "I can write and I can count!" This boy was not yet
four.
A little girl m_2vec! from one task to another; she watered the plants;
she peeled a carrot, cut it into pieces, passed them out to her classmates
and then cleaned up the remains . (In the Montessori classroom, such
commonplace activities as peeling a carrot, mopping the floor and wiping
a table top are, as we shall see, a deliberate and valuable part of the cur-
riculum.) Then the girl watched a boy who was using a set of counting-
beads to make squares, seven beads to a side; she did not touch his work,
nor did she interrupt it; the boy had not invitt:d her to join him. Respect
for the right to work alone is taught to these children from the first day
they enter school.

14 THE OBJECTIVIST

!
 For about an hour and a half, the twenty children in the room worked
by themselves with a rich assortment of educational mat~rials. One child
worked with a set of color tablets that contained 64 gradations of color;
he was searching for the matching colors in a second set of 64. Another
boy worked with a series of ten wooden prisms, all of the same length but
varying in thickness; he was trying to arrange the prisms in sequence from
thinnest to thickest. A little girl worked with a set of ten pink wooden
cubes of regularly increasing size; she knew the purpose of the cubes: to
build a "pink tower" with the largest cube on the bottom and the smallest
on top.
The teacher moved quietly among the children, observing them at work,
guiding those who asked her for assistance and giving brief demonstra-
tions to those who were using certain materials for the first time.
The school session lasts three hours, the first half of which is devoted
to this type of individual work. When it was time for refreshments, one
child poured juice for his classmates from a large pitcher (it was his turn
that day); another child distributed the filled cups while a third passed a
tray of cookies. When everyone was seated, the lights were turned out
and the children began to play "the silence game." They suddenly became
quiet and motionless, closing their eyes, listening intently for whatever
sounds they could identify. After a few moments, the teacher asked what
they had heard. Hands shot up: "I heard someone laugh in the other
class." "I heard an airplane far away." "I heard a whistle in the radiator."
The purpose of this game is' to help the child develop the capacity to make
subtle discriminations of sound. Such exercises in sense-training are an
important feature of the Montessori method.
After the break for refreshments, the second, programmed half of the
session began. The program that morning included a French lesson, story-
reading and physi':al activities. No child was pressured to join any group
activity, nor was he left idle as an alternative. For example, if a child did
not want to participate in the French lesson, he could listen to a story
being read by an assistant teacher in the next room; or he could read by
himself, or wor:k;with any of the materials in the classroom. There were
many alternatives available, and he was free to choose among them.
While the child in the Progressive nursery is learning the lesson of
conformity to the group, the child in the Montessori school is learning
"to respect the results of his own efforts rather than to depend upon the
praise of others," as one Montessori pamphlet puts it. Montessori's goal
was to have the children "become as powerful in their concentration, as
independent of spirit, as strong of will and as clear of thought as the
world's greatest geniuses." (Maya Pines, Revolution in Learning, New
York, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 105.)

MAY 1970 15

I
 The creator of this method, Maria Montessori (1870-1952), was the
first woman physician in her native Italy. Early in her career, as assistant
director of the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rome, she visited
mental hospitals, where she observed retarded children. It was the practice
at that time to keep the retarded and the insane in the same institutions.
Dr. Montessori was certain that the retarded could be helped by education
and, at 28, she was put in ch~rge of a new school established to bring to-
gether the retarded children from Rome's insane asylums, who were con-
sidered beyond help by the medical profession. For two years, she worked
with these children; she created special learning materials to help them
learn to read and write; she taught new methods to their teachers. At the
end of that time, the children took examinations for elementary school
certificates - and passed with scores comparable to those of the normal
children in the public schools. Dr. Montessori wrote about this early suc-
cess : "While everyone was admiring the progress of my idiots, I was
searching for the reasons which could keep the happy, healthy children of
the common schools on so low a plane that they could be equalled in tests
of intelligence by my unfortunate pupils!" (Maria Montessori, The
Montessori Method, New York, Schocken Books, 1964, p. 39.)
For the next seven years she searched for the reasons, studying experi-
mental psychology and educational theory, and conducting research in the
public schools. Then, one day, she was approached by an entrepreneur who
had built several housing projects in the slums of Rome. His buildings
were being vandalized by the tenants' children who roamed about idly
while their parents were at work. Since the damage was costly, the man
thought that a supervised playroom, which would keep the children oc-
cupied, would be a good investment. He asked Dr. Montessori to organize
and operate such a playroom.
In 1907, the first Cas a dei Bambini (Children's House) was opened at
the San Lorenzo Housing Project; within a few years, the success of Dr.
Montessori's efforts was internationally known. The children in her charge
(children who today would be considered "culturally deprived") were
reading aml=wrifing with ease at the age of four, they had mastered the
elements of arithmetic, they had leamed to care for themselves physically,
they were keenly observant of the th~gs around them, they were open and
unafraid with each other and with adults, and - most important of all to
Dr. Montessori - they displayed a passion for learning that was self-
generated and self-sustained.
How was Dr. Montessori able to achieve such results? What is her
theory of education?
(To be continued in our next issue .)

16 THE OBJECTIVIST

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THE MQ~TESSORI METHOD
By Beatrice Hessen
Part II

Dr. Montessori holds that a child's ability to function as an independent

being is acquired primarily by a process which she calls "auto-education."
The infant's first experiences, she writes, are a bewildering chaos of
sensory impressions which he must learn to organize and integrate. He
must learn to recognize and identify the things around him; he must

8 THE OBJECTIVIST

I
learn the distinction between himself and the external world, between
reality and dreams; he must learn spatial and temporal relationships (e.g.,
the difference between near and far, between past, present and future);
he must learn to make comparisons, to classify and to judge. In sum, he
must develop his conceptual faculty. This is what Dr. Montessori calls
"the child's work of growth."
"Man will always be able to avoid 'external work' by making use of the
labor of others, but there is no possibility of shirking that inner work.
Together with birth and death it has been imposed by nature itself, and
each man must accomplish it for himself." (Maria Montessori, Dr. Mon-
tessori's Own Handbook , New York, Schocken Books, 1965, pp. 33-34.)
When the child has learned to identify things, to walk and to talk, he
has acquired the prerequisites of the capacity to function in life: he has
achieved the crucial start in the development of the ability to fulfill his own
needs. He has learned these enormously complex skills by his own effort,
by "auto-education." The purpose of the school is to aid and accelerate this
process by providing an environment designed to encourage the child's
independent effort. What is required for the most effective "auto-educa-
tion," says Dr. Montessori, is "liberty in a prepared environment."
Liberty, in the Montessori system, does not mean aimless flitting about
as whim dictates, nor does it mean license for destructive behavior that
impairs the child's ability to learn and interferes with the rights of other
children. The alternative, however, is not blind obedience. What a child
needs is guidance - rational guidance in the form of principles he can
understand and apply to specific situations. The liberty enjoyed by the
child in the Montessori nursery is freedom within the context of objective
principles. This prepares him for adulthood, for the time when he will be
required to understand the facts of reality and be responsible for his own
choices and actions. The means of giving a purposeful direction to a
child's choices and actions is the "prepared environment."
In the Montessori "prepared environment," every object serves a
specific purpose - ei ther as "didactic material" or as material for "practi-
cal life exercises." -- -
The "didactic materials," designed by Dr.. Montessori, are among her
most important contributions to the field of education. For example, she
designed a set of wooden tablets of differing weights, and an identical
set for the purpose of matching; two sets of musical bells for matching
sounds; geometric puzzles for learning shapes. One ingenious device
consists of cases with holes in which wooden cylinders are to be inserted;
the child deals at first with only one variable, such as the differing height
of the cylinders, then with two variables, such as differing height and
diameter.

JUNE 1170 9

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 The purpose of the didactic material, according to Dr. Montessori, is
not to teach the child isolated concretes, such as how to place a cylinder
in the proper hole. "The didactic material in fact does not offer the child
the 'content' of the mind," she states, "but the order for that 'content.' It
causes him to distinguish identities from differences, extreme differences
from fine gradations, and to classify, under conceptions of quality and of
quantity, the most varying sensations appertaining to surfaces, colors,
dimensions, forms and sounds. The mind has formed itself by a special
exercise of attention, observing, comparing, and classifying." (Handbook,
p. 136.)
The didactic materials aid the child in the process of concept-formation
(of abstraction and integration) by means of eliminating nonessentials.
The materials are designed in such a way that all their characteristics are
the same except the one attribute on which the child is to concentrate.
This allows him to focus on one difference at a time and to form a clear
concept of a particular attribute, such as length, height, thickness, weight,
sound or color. "In every exercise," says Dr. Montessori, "when the child
has recognized the differences between the qualities of the objects, the
teacher fixes the idea of this quality with a word." (Handbook, p. 124.)
Dr. Montessori regards the use of precise language to name the attributes
of entities as crucial for the child's rational development.
The child is able to work by himself with the didactic materials, without
constant directions from an adult: if he makes a mistake, the correction is
suggested by the material itself. For example, if he places a cylinder in a
hole too large for it, he finds at the end that he has at least one cylinder left
which does not fit in the remaining hole; he has to backtrack and discover
his error and, in the process, he sharpens his capacity to observe and dis-
criminate, which would not occur if his mistake were merely pointed out
to him by the teacher.
Dr. Montessori observed that children exhibit great enjoyment and
sustained concentration when working with the didactic material because
it fulfills t~ir_need for something specific to do, something to manipulate
and arrange. She identified the fact that very young children pass through
a "sensitive period for sensory-moter activities," a time when they experi-
ence a keen interest in touching, tasting, handling and exploring everything
in sight. She found that when a child is provided with material that stim-
ulates his senses and engages him in purposeful activity, he progresses
easily and naturally to conceptual ("cultural") skiiis.
The process of learning to write is an example of this progression. Find-
ing that the texture of things is particularly fascinating to a young child,
Dr. Montessori devised a sandpaper alphabet. A child enjoys touching the
rough-textured surface of the letters; he is taught how to trace each letter
10 I; 1,-/ I THE OBJECTIVIST

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I
 with his finger; he is told the sound of the letter while he is tracing it; thus,
he acquires a knowledge of the alphabet through touch, sight and sound.
Then he can use an alphabet set, which requires no writing, to compose
words and sentences; he acquires the ability to manipulate a pencil, by
means of a variety of other exercises; then, one day, he integrates his
knowledge of how each letter is formed, how to handle a pencil and how
to compose sentences. The result is what Dr. Montessori calls "the ex-
plosion into writing."
The "practical life exercises," in the Montessori curriculum, include
such activities as polishing shoes, washing dishes, pouring water, sweeping
the floor, caring for pets, polishing silver and learning to manipulate but-
tons, bows and zippers. These exercises are of great importance because
the young child's muscular system is not yet fully coordinated. As Dr.
Montessori observed, the body is an instrument for carrying out the pur-
poses of the mind, but a young child's body is not fully in his control. He
needs practice in purposeful, complex actions ::1 order to gain that control
and the resulting sense of efficacy.
Each of the practical life exercises was broken down by Dr. Montessori
into a series of separate steps; by performing one step at a time, the child
is able to master complex muscular coordinations. He finds great pleasure
in this work not only because he is eager to acquire new skills, but because
each new skill gives him further evidence of his growing self-sufficiency and
competence.
The practical life exercises serve another purpose as well. The young
child is passing through what Dr. Montessori describes as "the sensitive
period for order," a time when he has an urgent need to know that every-
thing is in its proper place, that the world around him is predictable and
intelligible. If things vanish unaccountably, the child's universe becomes
incomprehensible, he feels helpless and lost. The practical life exercises
give the child a chance to create order in his world, and with order comes
the sense that reality is knowable and that he is capable of dealing with it.
When critics condemn the Montessori system, complaining that it
places too much_gress on order, what they are condemning is the view of
reality that her system inculcates - the view that the universe is stable
and intelligible, that it is a realm where a>three-year-old need not turn in
.fear to "the authority of adults."
The dramatic results demonstrated in Dr. Montessori's Children's House
brought great numbers of European and American educators to Rome to
visit her school. They returned home with enthusiastic reports. By 1915,
when Dr. Montessori came to America and lectured to overflow audiences,
more than 100 schools based on her theories had been established here.
That, however, was the peak of the Montessori method's popularity in

JUNE 1970 i 11

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this country. By 1920, the movement was almost totally eclipsed: it was a
victim of the pragmatist and Freudian onslaught.
The pragmatists, advocating John Dewey's educational theories, at-
tacked Montessori because of her emphasis on the child's conceptual
development. Their own approach was the exact opposite: they were -
and are - explicitly anti-conceptual and anti-intellectual. According to
Dr. Leonard Peikoff, there are at least four major tenets of Dewey's
philosophy that give rise to the pragmatist theory of education.
1. Dewey holds that thinking is an abnormal process, appropriate only
when one's habitual .pattern of response proves inadequate to cope with a
given situation; people will - and should- think only when faced with a
specific practical problem; the conclusions they reach should be tested and
validated not by intellectual methods, but by "practical action." The edu-
cational result is an activist emphasis in the classroom, an emphasis on
range-of-the-moment experimentation and on the "practical" solution of
a string of random, disconnected problems ("learning by doing").
2. Dewey holds that the 'concept of "external reality" is invalid, and that
truth must be defined not as correspondence to reality, but as that which
"works," not for a particular individual, but for society as a whole. Thus,
the satisfaction of society, not adherence to reality, is the fundamental
epistemological standard; the issue of truth or falsehood becomes the
issue of social approval or disapproval. Hence the constant emphasis in
Progressive schools on group conformity and "social adjustment."
(By contrast, there is no place in the Montessori system for such a
thing as "social adjustment." Montessori holds that a child must become
an independent being, i.e., an entity, before he can establish relationships
with others. First, he must develop self-respect ; then he can , and should,
learn to respect the rights of others. In the pragmatist philosophy, how-
ever, there is no place for a concept such as "rights.")
3. Dewey holds that concepts represent merely a set of arbitrary social
conventions, divorced from reality. The educational result is a deeply
anti-conceptual approach to all subjects. Random , unorganized data are
thrown at tE:e student, without context or meaning; the curriculum is
organized not around theoretical subjects or general principles , but
around concrete-bound class projects. ("We don't teach history; we teach
Johnny." Question: Why not teach Johnny history? No answer is given.)
One of the most evil examples of this approach is the "Look-See"
method of teaching a child to read , which consists of forcing him blindly
to memorize the sounds of words without knowing the sounds of indi-
vidual letters. The phonetic method - used by Montessori and denounced
by the Progressives - teaches the child the sound of the letters, a set of
abstractions that equips him to read any new word he encounters. The

12 i THE OBJECTIVIST

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I
Look-See method leaves most children unable to read words they have
not previously memorized; it has resulted in a widespread "reading neu-
rosis" - a strictly post-Dewey phenomenon.
4. Dewey holds that everything is changing constantly, that man can be
certain of nothing, that there are no absolutes. The result: the teacher's
role is not to teach, not to communicate facts or truths, but to venture
tentative, "flexible" suggestions to the class, while eliciting the varying
opinions and feelings of the students. (In some schools, teacher and
students together vote to determine which opinion is best; every student
gets one vote; so does the teacher. This, it is claimed, is "educational
democracy.")
The Freudians' opposition to Montessori was based primarily on their
view of man as a being whose fate is determined by innate, physiologically
inherited urges and instincts (which are hidden in his unconscious mind,
his "id," and are of a viciously destructive nature) - a being whose devel-
opment follows inexorably a predetermined psychosexual pattern. Even
though no scientific proof has ever been offered by Freud in support of his
theory, even though the "logic" of his argumentation has been repeatedly
denounced by philosophers, as a series of non sequiturs and arbitrary
pronouncements - the educators accepted it as dogma and proceeded, on
such a base, to maim generations of children.
The nursery years, they claim, are not the time for cognitive training;
early education should be play-centered to give a child the opportunity
to express his unconscious needs, urges and fears. The best way to express
these, they claim, is in "fantasy play" - which is featured in most Pro-
gressive nursery schools and is largely the "contribution" of the Freudians.
Despite its eclipse in America, the Montessori movement flourished
throughout Europe until the 1930s. When the Fascists came to power in
Italy, Dr. Montessori realized, according to her biographer, that "an
education which had as its aim the development of a: strong and free
personality could not thrive in a totalitarian atmosphere. Indeed, the
Fascists ordered all her schools to be closed down. In Germany and
Austria- then uooer Nazi rule- things were even more drastic. An
effigy of Montessori was burned over a pyr~ of her own books in a public
square both in Berlin and Vienna." (E. M. Standing, Maria Montessori:
Her Life and Work, New York, New AmericanLibrary, 1962, p. 85.)
In the early 1960s, a remarkable phenomenon took place in the United
States: a widespread resurgence of interest in the Montessori method.
Over 400 Montessori schools have been established throughout the coun-
try; a new stream of books and articles on Montessori is reaching people
everywhere. This revival was sparked, in part, by new research in the field
of education, which is revealing the crucial importance of early learning.

JUNE 1970 13

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Scientists are finding out that a child may never catch up if the start of his
cognitive training is neglected. (See Joan Beck's excellent work, How to
Raise a Brighter Child, New York, Trident Press, 1967; reviewed in
The Objectivist, September 1968.)
T he Montessori Renaissance is primarily a grass-roots movement spear-
headed by young, college-educated parents who were themselves victims
of Progressive education. They, and I, can recall the endless tedium and
the inexcusable waste of years spent weaving potholders on little looms,
making plaster models of the territory involved in the Louisiana Purchase,
and filling countless scrapbooks with pictures of the produce of Latin
America - and they desperately want something better for their children.
They have discovered that the Montessori system is the best, most
consistent, most rational method available on the nursery school level.
They have realized that, in regard to the teaching of academic disciplines,
there is more than a difference in timetables between the Montessori and
the Progressive schools: the Progressives do not merely defer conceptual
training, they do not offer it at all. Consequently, parents have joined
together to start Montessori schools in their own communities. Most of
these schools have long waiting lists, and new schools are being established
as fast as properly trained teachers can be found.
(To be concluded in our next issue.)

/
THE MONTESSORI METHOD
-
By Beatrice Hessen
Part III (Conclusion)

As interest in Montessori grows, so does criticism of her methods by

the educational Establishment. Two charges are most frequently voiced.
1. The Montessori materials, it is claimed, are too rigid, too structured.
They can be used only in a specific way, which does not allow the child
to be "creative"; they permit "only one right answer"- which, it is as-
serted, stifles the child's "creative imagination." I discussed this point with
Ayn Rand, who said:
I jj j J;
6 THE OBJECTIVIST

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 "Since the purpose of the Montessori materials is to help the child in
his cognitive development, i.e., to help him grasp the nature of reality and
learn to deal with it, the 'rigidity' of the problems he has to solve provides
him with the most important lesson he will ever learn: it teaches him the
Law of Identity. It teaches him that reality is an absolute not to be altered
by his whims, and if he wants to deal with it successfully, he must find the
one right answer. He learns that a problem does have a solution and that
he does have the ability to solve it, but he must look for the answer in the
nature of the things he deals with, not in his feelings. This prepares him,
from his first cognitive steps, for the time when he is old enough to grasp
the principle that 'nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed'- by which
time that principle has become a thoroughly automatized rule of his mental
functioning. The products of an opposite type of training are the wretched
neurotics who cry about 'the tyranny of reality.'
"Far from inhibiting imagination, the Montessori method fosters it by
feeding its source: understanding. Imagination is not a faculty for escap-
ing reality, but a faculty for rearranging the elements of reality to achieve
human values; it requires and presupposes some knowledge of the ele-
ments one chooses to rearrange. An imagination divorced from knowledge
has only one product: a nightmare. Fear of the unknown (more specifi-
cally, fear that it is unknowable) is a grave psychological danger to
children, which can have profound and disastrous consequences. An imag-
ination that replaces cognition is one of the surest ways to create neurosis.
"It is not imagination that a child seeks, but knowledge. As evidence:
the endless questions with which a growing child bombards the adults,
until and unless he is discouraged by them and frustrated in his eager
quest. Normally, the development of his imagination (which proceeds
from the development of his knowledge) is his private, personal concern-
and it is precisely its personal character that gives him a sense of his own
individuality, of his creative self-assertion.
"It is hard to say which is worse for a child's future: the indifference
of adults toward his creative efforts, including even their antagonism- or
the phony, gu~ing- demands for creativeness-to-order, creativeness as
duty, as part of a public, social, daily curriculum. I am inclined to think
that this last is worse: it is a recipe for manufacturing hacks."
Montessori holds that creative achievement is the result of careful and
thorough preparation. Children must first be trained to observe, to com-
pare, to judge- and this training will build up the rich content of con-
sciousness, the mental resources which creativeness requires. The didactic
materials are designed to help the young child acquire such resources with
the greatest speed and efficiency- and thus to train his mind to deal with
the facts confronting him, to make new identifications and discoveries,
to become an innovator.

JULY 1970 i; 1/ I I 7

/
 2. The Montessori method, it is charged, does not allow children to be
children; the necessity to learn cognitive skills in nursery school "dehu-
manizes" the child and represents a callous parental "pushiness."
This is a view held by many educators. Its essence is most eloquently
i
}
expressed by child psychologist Eda J. LeShan. In her book The Con-
spiracy Against Childhood (New York, Atheneum, 1967), Mrs. LeShan
describes her visit to a Montessori school. (Observe what she suggests as
a "healthy" alternative.)
"It seemed to me that much of what I saw was meaningless busy-work.
A number of children spent most of the morning just sitting at tables idly
leafing through books . . .. While the children I was now observing had
minor contacts with each other-sitting at the same table doing individual ''
puzzles, or three or four sitting with a teacher learning about numbers-
... there was no really healthy, robust collision of child with child in anger ,.
' i'
or affection or selfishness or compassion. This was not a laboratory in
which one could learn about oneself in relation to others. There was no
traffic, no animated conversations- no yelling at each other! How do any l;
of us know that we are truly alive until we begin to bump into other
,
i ,
people?" F
,o\
"I became so restless and uncomfortable that I could hardly wait to
leave. Where was the glorious nursery school that I learned about in
college in the 1940's? Where was the experimenting with relationships, the
rich profusion of imaginative play that helped a child understand his
world? Where was the working out in play of ambivalent feelings? Where
was the emotional working through of fears and confusions by the use of
make-believe? Where was the lovely individuality of each child finding his
own music, his own beat, his own world of dreams and hopes? The next
day I raced eagerly up to Westchester, back home to my own nursery
school; and when a teacher came up to me and said, 'Gee, I'm glad you're
.,
here today- I've got to talk to you about what to do about Peter- he ,,,
urinated on Betsy again today!' I could have hugged her! Here was the \.

reality of children being children, letting their feelings and problems show,
so that we coyld help them learn to handle them." (Pages 77-79.)
So when Peter urinates on Betsy, he has found his own music, his own
beat! No thought is given to what this experience will do to Betsy, what
virtually ineradicable impression it will leave in her unformed mind of the
nature of life, of other people and of what she can expect from them. It ,..,.
is this atmosphere of "self-expression" in the Progressive nursery that
~
keeps a child's self on that level of expression and breeds the herd-oriented,
whim-worshiping, hostile little activists who substitute for Betsy the
i
wastebaskets of college presidents.
The pragmatist-Freudian view of man and of a child's development has
dominated the educational system of the United States for half a century.

8 JJ ;, ) ;

I
THE OBJECTIVIST

'\
 Observe the results.
Instead of "social adjustment," which was the primary concern of
Progressive schools, this country has reached a state of social disintegra-
tion and group warfare; and the loudest complaint one hears from the
young is the cry of "alienation." (If it is said that the cause lies in today's
politico-economic system, one must remember that the leaders of that
system- in politics, in business, in the intellectual professions- are the
products of the same educational theories.)
Instead of good will toward men, today's younger generation is exhib-
iting bitterness, scorn, suspicion, a cynical mistrust and, among the activ-
ists, a violent hostility to all men, a virulent hatred that does not stop at
public bombings.
The promised respect for "the authority of adults" has taken the form
of helplessly concrete-bound, permanent adolescents who scream to the
universe at large, demanding that their wishes be satisfied now, with no
knowledge of what is required to satisfy them or of any other way to seek
satisfaction.
The promised "creativeness" has resulted in modern art - a field where
bearded, illiterate adults are still producing nursery-school finger paintings
'
'I
and are wondering bitterly why they are not appreciated.
The promised "flowering of individuality" has led to the dazed, terror-
ij ridden conformity of hippie herds and communes.
And as to the promised happiness- the "enjoyment of life" which was
_, not to be disturbed by cognition- the spread of drug addiction among the
young is the final evidence of a ghastly failure.
For those who hold a different view of man's nature, a radical change
in educational methods is an urgent necessity-a change in theory, in prac-
tice and from the roots on up. "Just as the child is father to the man, so the
nursery school is father to the university." (Ayn Rand.) The Montessori
method is the best alternative to today's bankrupt orthodoxies. It is an
alternative that stresses the fundamental "3 Rs": reason, reality and the
rights of the individual.

Anote to parents: -...

The Montessori schools that 1 visited ,were very uneven in quality. If
you are interested in finding a Montessori school for your child, you
should observe the class in session more than once and decide for your-
self whether the school does in fact practice Montessori principles. To
prepare for such visits, it is advisable to do some further reading. There
are many books available today on the Montessori method, but by far the
clearest account is Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook. One of the most valu-
able features of this book is its wealth of illustrations showing many of the
didactic. materials and practical life exercises.

JULY 1970 9

I
 At present. there is an acute shortage of Montessori teachers. Although
they are being trained as rapidly as possible, it is very difficult for some of
the young teachers to eliminate the effects of their previous pragmatist
raining. Therefore, when visiting a Montessori class, observe particularly
whether the teacher allows each child to work by himself, at his own pace,
gi\ing him the individual instruction necessary to use the materials prop-
erly- or whether a major part of the class time is devoted to group activities
or instructions in which the child is required to participate. Above all,
ob erYe whether the atmosphere of the classroom is predominantly a per-
rnis iYe play environment, with periods for "creativity" scheduled into the
curriculum, or whether the emphasis is on the child's self-generated cog-
niti \e development.

DR. M ONTESSORI'S OWN HANDBOOK by Maria Montessori, Schocken Books,

Inc., is now available from THE OBJECTIVIST BOOK SERVICE; price: $1.75
(paperback), plus $.20 postage. (New York State residents add sales tax; Canadian
residents add 8 % foreign exchange.)