Word: montessori
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...intern, she began working with cretins and morons. Then she decided to study how normal kids were brought up. She visited schools, was horrified to see rows of children kept immobile behind their desks "like butterflies transfixed with a pin." This, Maria Montessori declared, did not discipline the children; it "annihilated" them...
...Queen Mother Margherita visited Maria Montessori's Casa del Bambini. Italian schoolmasters began to try out her methods. Montessori schools mushroomed throughout Europe and the U.S. As she grew older, the Dottoressa's stout figure, in its academic robes, became a familiar sight in lecture halls all over the world. Students crowded to hear her speak at the University of Rome. Mussolini made her an honorary Fascist, but she objected to the way Fascists tried to "warp youth in their own brutal pattern." In 1933, her schools were closed...
...exile, she wandered to Spain, to England, to Holland. In 1939, she settled in India. There, with her adopted son Mario, she set up a new world headquarters for the Montessori System and started all over again...
Algebra at Five. Today, in a faded yellow-brick-and-plaster house in Adyar, Maria Montessori is hard at work. She lectures in Italian two or three times a week; Mario translates into English for her. She is surer than ever of one thing: "The child is capable of achieving culture at an age hitherto unsuspected." She now teaches arithmetic at 3½, algebra at five, and finds that eight-year-olds learn algebra quicker than 14-year-olds, for they consider it a game, instead of something to dread. An 18-month-old child, she says, is "perhaps happiest...
...Maria Montessori seems happy enough to be away from the rest of the world and its politics ("that harlequin mixture of rags and silk") and wars ("If men can respect cows during famine, as in India, men can stop killing each other"). She is not even thinking of retiring. Said she: "Work is necessary. It can be nothing less than a passion. A person is happy in accomplishment...