Word: montessori
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Then Nancy Rambusch quit the Whitby School, after a disagreement with the board of directors. At the same time, an ex-actor named Tom Laughlin founded a Montessori school in Santa Monica, quickly made it the biggest in the U.S., and brought in an authentically European Montessorian couple to run a teacher-training program. Orthodox Montessorian Laughlin scorns Nancy Rambusch, confidently expects that the A.M.S. will die within three years...
Despite such bickering, the movement thrives. Thousands of well-off U.S. couples, many of them Roman Catholics, accept the Montessori principle that a child's mind, far from being a clean slate, contains a blueprint of self-civilization; the school and teachers need only provide conditions for the child to follow the blueprint. Kids who are able to follow often learn to read, write and do binomial theorems at six-which is why Montessori schools rise faster than competent teachers can be found...
Hands Unlike Hands. Yet only now is the Montessori method being tried on the gravest problem facing big-city educators in the U.S. Recalling that Maria Montessori formed her educational concepts teaching 60 slum children in Rome almost 60 years ago, some Chicago experimenters are running a Montessori school that tackles the job of preparing preschool kids from racial ghettos for the strange world of middle-class public schools...
...Negroes and Puerto Ricans whose mothers work or are on relief. "Some of the older ones had hands that didn't even operate like hands," says the school's director, Marcella Morrison, who taught in Chicago public schools before she went to Greenwich for a year of Montessori training at Nancy Rambusch's Whitby School. "They had never been given anything to handle." At first they were a reserved, hostile bunch, and Director Morrison found that she could barely even talk with them. Now the Cabrini kids fondly call her "the tall lady," and follow her through...
...lies on a rubber mat, arranging a washbasin and cups; a five-year-old, blindfolded with a blue eyeshade, feels a sphere, a cube, a cylinder, following out some blueprint in his mind. Ordinary progressive schools have similar equipment, since U.S. toy manufacturers have stolen many of Maria Montessori's original designs and ideas. But where progressive schools use the tools as one of many activities in which the teacher plays a major role, Montessori schools put the teacher in the background while the didactic teaching materials do much of the work...