In 1900 she left the Scuola Ortofrenica, and turned her atten- tion definitely away from the question of the feeble-minded to that of the normal child mind and its development. She returned to the university of Rome as a student of philosophy, and de- voted herself to experimental psychology, then in its infancy at the Italian universities, at the same time making a prolonged and careful study of the actual practice of teaching at the primary schools. The result of several years of child study and practical pedagogy was to establish her conviction that the master prin- ciple in any proper system is " self-education " that the work of mental growth must be done by the child itself, according to its own initiative and inclination, not in mechanical obedience to dogmatic dictation from a teacher; and she set herself to devise new methods for making the child-mind shape its own channels instead of the teacher telling the pupil what to do.
After six or seven years of inquiry and study a unique oppor- tunity arose in Rome for putting her theories into practice. During the building " boom " at the end of the i88o's, a whole new quarter of apartment houses had been run up by speculators outside the Porta San Lorenzo. It was from the first a complete fiasco, the houses failing altogether to attract the superior class of tenants for which they were intended; and the district gradual- ly developed into the worst of slums, the flats being farmed out room by room to the poorest families, so that at last a serious condition of insanitary overcrowding had resulted, which seriously engaged the attention of social reformers. In order to remedy this evil, an association was started on philanthropic lines, the Institute Romano di Bene Stabili, with Signer Edoardo Talamo as director-general. It bought up a large part of the San Lorenzo quarter, and reorganized it in 1906 in separate and convenient working-class tenements, with proper air-space, prizes being in- stituted for the best-kept dwellings. A novel point of the scheme was the provision of infant schools (Case dei Bambini) for the children of each block, the supervision of which was entrusted to Dr. Montessori, the first of these being opened in Jan. 1907. These " houses of childhood " for children between three and seven were themselves a very interesting social experiment apart from the new methods of teaching which Dr. Montessori in- troduced. They provided a creche and something more, taking the children off their mothers' hands during working hours. Each school had a directress living in the block which it served and in touch with the parents, who could at any time come and see how the children were getting on; it was thus part of the home life.
The Montessori system of education was first put in practice in these tenement schools, under teachers following Dr. Mon- tessori's methods. Its fundamental aim and object is self-educa- tion by the pupils themselves. There are no time-tables, no set lessons, no classes. There are no rewards or punishments of the ordinary kind. The pleasure of succeeding and getting things right is the only incentive. " Each child is doing what, for the time being, pleases him best. When he is admitted to the school he sees small groups of children playing at various 'games,' and he joins the group which happens to take his fancy. Then and there his education begins. All kinds of interesting ' occupa- tions ' are going on, and wherever he goes he will get help and guidance from the teachers. If he gets tired of playing at this thing he goes off and plays at that. But he is never idle, for whatever he does interests him. The children are provided with light and comfortable chairs, which are easily moved about. There are also rugs laid on the floor for them to sit, kneel or recline upon, should they prefer those attitudes. Low and light tables are provided in abundance, but there is also plenty of open floor-space, and many of the ' occupations ' are carried on on the floor " (Holmes). An extensive variety of apparatus, elabor- ately devised by Dr. Montessori, is provided for the educational games by which the children are stimulated to acquire knowledge; and this " didactic material " constitutes a distinctive part of the originality of the system.
The first stage is to develop the senses of touch, sight and hearing; this is done both by games of various sorts and by guid- ing the attention systematically to the association of things, names and ideas. When a child washes his hands, for instance,
he is given first cold and then hot water, and led to observe and understand the difference; the distinction of rough and smooth is emphasized by the provision of different qualities of cards for fingering and sorting. In each case the teacher gets the child to know the word, "hot," "cold," "rough," "smooth," and thus the knowledge of language is extended in all directions (" high," " low," " thick," " thin," " round," " oval," etc.) be- fore any question of writing or reading arises. Ideas of form and colour are given precision by games with blocks, cylinders, etc., of varying sizes, to be fitted into frames, or with shades of silk to be arranged to match; touch is practised by playing the games blindfold ; the sense of hearing is developed by the ' ' silence " lesson, and by the use of small cylindrical boxes containing stones, sands and different substances to be rattled by the children, who arrange them in order of intensity of sound and so forth. Skill and neatness in the use of the fingers and movement of limbs are stimulated partly by the mobility of the light furniture, which the children learn to rearrange for their own comfort, and partly by games at tying and untying, hooks and eyes, dressing and undressing, waiting on one another at table, wash- ing up, and so on. Many of these occupations are preliminary to writing and reading, and lead naturally up to both.
Writing comes essentially before reading, on the Montessori system, in any proper sense of " reading." Emery-paper letters gummed on cards are provided, with which the child is familiar- ized by games of hide and seek, etc., so that, without any active teaching of the alphabet, he not only knows them by sight and by name, but also by feeling. He learns how to imitate them, partly by a touch game of passing the fingers over the paper letter, thus making the actual motion of writing, and partly by playing at pencilling and colouring with specially devised cards on which an outline is given. The child thus learns to write be- fore he knows that " writing " is what he is learning; the sounds and shapes of the letter being known it is a natural transition to build up the letters and their sounds into words.
The next thing is for the child to " read " not merely to re-translate into sound a word he has translated into symbol, which goes with the acquisition of " writing," but to extract a previously unknown idea from written or printed symbols of the same sort not put together by himself. It is found, however, that, at any rate in so easy and phonetically spelt a language as Italian, this is very quickly learnt. Numbers of words, already well known to the children, are written on cards, and various games are played in identifying them with their objects; and from single words the children pass to phrases and sentences, the teacher writing on the blackboard, for instance, questions or orders which form part of a game. Arithmetic is similarly introduced to the children's minds by the employment of count- ing games, in which an apparatus of striped poles, counters, etc., is used. The whole curriculum is devised for the content and happy employment of the natural energies of the child, who is left free to respond to his own impulses, under the influence of " didactic material," rather than under the discipline of a teacher.
After 1912 the diffusion of Dr. Montessori's educational in- fluence was rapid and widespread. Following close upon the interest which had already been aroused in Italy and America, Dr. Montessori, in response to urgent requests from educational enthusiasts all over the world, began a series of international training courses for teachers. These courses were held in Rome in 1913 and 1914. In subsequent years Dr. Montessori held training courses in Barcelona and in several cities of the United States, two international courses having been held in London in 1919 and 1921. To these training courses came not only class teachers of the particular country, but persons eminent in the educational field from all over the world. During this later period two of the most notable features in connexion with the Montessori movement were the appearance of Dr. Montessori's new books, The Advanced Montessori Method and The Didactic Material for the Education of Children from 7 to n years. The first volume gives a clear and complete exposition of the scientific researches which led to the establishment of the fundamental psychological and physiological principles upon which Dr.
