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Edoardo Talamo, Roman engineer, had gotten some model tenements built. Families living in them were better housed than most of the city's poor families, but during the day, while the adults were at work, urchins reveled in the courtyards, ran riot in the long halls. Signor Talamo set aside playrooms for the children, urged Dottoressa Montessori to take them in hand. Thus was founded the first Casa del Bambini. Such establishments, subsequently organized in the U. S. and England, came to be known as "Children's Houses."
When the Queen Mother Margherita saw fit to favor the enterprise, influential Italians poured gold and good advice upon the Casa del Bambini. It was here, after 13 years of germination, that the Montessori Plan first came to full fruition. The results of Dottoressa's clinical experience with dull children were to be objectively applied to normal ones.
Upon three tenets Dottoressa Montessori rests her scheme of education: 1) "The Doctrine of Freedom," 2) Auto-education, 3) Sense-training.
"The Doctrine of Freedom" is calculated to encourage spontaneity of development in the child. Given the proper environment, the happy child can do no wrong. In no way must the individuality of a Montessori-trained youngster be arrested, nor is the pupil stimulated to any unnatural effort. The system of "rewards & punishment" is un-Montessorian because it encourages the child to do something it would not want to do otherwise. A child who is not mentally or physically sick must become "master of himself" when at liberty. Platonically, he has then become disciplined. Parents are assured that Montessori-trained children are not told, ballad-wise: "If you feel like yelling, yell like hell!" Anti-social behavior is anticipated by the second precept, an appeal to the individual "mysterious life-force," curiosity.
Auto-Education is the name of the method by which the pupil's attention is awakened. The child is given access to a room full of "didactic material''—scores of ingenious, practical devices which he handles and learns to use. There are pieces of cloth on racks for three-year-olds to button and unbutton, bow-knots to be tied and untied, shoe-buttoners to be handled. Infants, when let alone, learn to identify similar buttons and knots on their own clothing, are thus taught to dress themselves.
Older children handle blocks, beads, rods, rope. A sense of factual values begins to dawn. They have grasped some of the significance of length, breadth, thickness. Color and texture of objects is next identified through running fingertips over sandpaper and velvet, by sorting colored tablets of enameled wood.
Sense-training is gained through auto-education. Similar methods are applied to the development of the more delicate senses. A child is given two crude, one-string fiddles, one with frets, one without. By comparing noises made on both, he can soon fit in the missing frets, play the second fiddle. Children who can read are encouraged to act each sentence out in dumb show. The system tries to make all of a pupil's acts coordinate with all his senses. Through ideological gymnastics, an intellect is developed by the exercise of attention, comparison, judgment.